Sony has been making some nice looking Xperia devices over the past 2 years or so. This design style and this type of quality started at the high-end, but it's been trickling down to the low-end, to devices like the Xperia SP, Xperia L, and now Xperia M, too.

The Xperia M comes with a dual core 1 Ghz Snapdragon (Krait) processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 854×480 resolution displays, which at 4" ends up having 245 PPI density. That doesn't sound too bad for a "low-end" smartphone. It's only slighter lower than the Galaxy S4 Mini's 256 PPI density (4.3", 960×540 resolution).


There is only 4 GB of storage on board, but it has a microSD slot that supports cards up to 64 GB. It also comes with a 5 MP rear camera with an Exmor RS sensor, and a VGA front-camera for video chats/Hangouts. The phone comes with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, so even with its lower clocked dual core chip, it should be pretty fast for a low-end phone.

It seems we are finally moving away from Gingerbread-based low-end smartphones, as the new ones are embracing Jelly Bean, which offers very smooth performance granted there is a good enough GPU inside the phone to enable all OS and app UI's to run at 60 FPS. So the days of laggy low-end phone may finally be behind us.

If we're lucky Jelly Bean won't stay with us for years more at the low-end, just like Gingerbread did, and next year we'll start seeing Android 5.0 based low-end phones, too. Even if Google has made it easier for developers to deal with the fragmentation of OS versions, by backporting a lot of new API's through the Google Play services, there's still the fact that old versions won't be receiving the features, unless the phones get upgraded to the new versions of Android.


The Xperia M will be globally available in Q3 this year, with a range of beautiful color options, which is something I like a lot in some new Android phones, and a pretty big 1,750 mAh battery for a low-end phone, that will be powering both the single SIM and the dual-SIM versions of the Xperia M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5x3aOwfYCs&feature=player_embedded

Via Engadget