News - Sony refreshes Xperia brand with four new smartphones

[HEXUS]

1.5 GHz-powered Xperia S the pick of the bunch for the UK market.

Read more.

[crossy]

No uSD support and a fixed battery = failure in my book. I'm also less than impressed with the iPhone4-similar visuals. If I want to buy a slabphone then I'll go and be patronised in the Apple Store (again). That said, I do like the LED band, and supposedly the screen is very high resolution. Oh, and according to their blog, Three have already announced that they'll be stocking it!

The "SmartWatch" is nice - and then you remember that SE already did that - although in that case it was called "Live View". I've got one, and it's okay if a bit limited. NFC tags could be useful...

Current rumour mill has the Samsung Galaxy S3 having a 3D screen, which might push me back in the direction of Sony.

[keithwalton]

eMMC ? Who on earth uses that.
From there site it doesn't have much internal storage and the 32gb eMMC is an expansion type and that is the max it supports. Yet I cant find any ...

Would of been tempted otherwise, then again the delay to ics would put me off as well

[cheesemp]

Hmm. Interesting. After a poor start my X10 has been great since it got 2.3. However if it does have fixed storage and battery then that is a big turn off. Upgrading the SD card and replacing the battery gave my x10 the extra life it needs to get to the end of my contract...

[crossy]

eMMC ? Who on earth uses that.
From there site it doesn't have much internal storage and the 32gb eMMC is an expansion type and that is the max it supports. Yet I cant find any ... Would of been tempted otherwise, then again the delay to ics would put me off as well

Sony's reasoning for delaying ICS rollout is supposedly the usual one - that they want to ensure that all their "added value" (e.g. Timescape - which imho adds bulk and reduces value but I'm a grumpy old geezer) is stable and properly integrated. In which case I'm not going to object too loudly.

eMMC question - like me you obviously assumed that it was some new form of memory card. Short answer is that it isn't, instead it's a way of packaging memory plus controller. You could look up the Wikipedia entry for it, but personally I found the page at http://www.samsung.com/global/busine..._MoviNAND.html gave more information than I'm ever likely to need (or even understand!).

Short answer is that if you see someone (in this case Sony) quoting "eMMC" as the memory type on a phone, then that means "non-expandable" unless an expansion slot is explicitly mentioned also. It's pretty well used (apparently) for internal memory for a range of phones (e.g. Nexus One, iPhone, etc) and tablets (e.g. Transformer Prime spec quotes "32GB / 64GB (2) EMMC" and I've seen similar for the iPad).

HTH

[keithwalton]

The sony website does amuse me when it quotes a feature of the phone as

"Powered by Android

Make sure you always have the latest Android version installed."

When it's shipping with a version 1 major and 2 minor editions old (2.3.5 when there is .6 and .7)

Also when they list the following

"Memory Internal phone storage: 1 to 1.5 GB
Memory card slot: 32 GB eMMC
RAM: 1 GB"

You would think eMMC was a new smaller version of MMC's (the rival to SD that lost)

If it's setup similar to my galaxy s 8GB which has 2GB mounted for the os and 6GB mounted as an 'internal sd' i'd be happy if it was 2GB for os and 30GB for internal eMMC

[crossy]

When it's shipping with a version 1 major and 2 minor editions old (2.3.5 when there is .6 and .7)

My current phone (SE X10) has only got 2.3.3 on it.

You would think eMMC was a new smaller version of MMC's (the rival to SD that lost)

That's exactly what I thought. Kind of confused me because I thought MultiMedia Cards were dropped in favour of SD because the former was capacity limited. You'd think that they'd be able to come up with a different - and therefore less confusing - acronym.

If it's setup similar to my galaxy s 8GB which has 2GB mounted for the os and 6GB mounted as an 'internal sd' i'd be happy if it was 2GB for os and 30GB for internal eMMC

Interesting to know. And yes, I'd agree with you that this'd be a sensible and useful arrangement, (so you can guarantee that Sony will do something different!). One question though - by default do apps go into that 2GB "OS" area or "internal sd"? Unless I'm mistaken my Asus Transformer also has "internal sd" and that's the default for app installation, and the uSD slot is regarded as "external". I'll have to do a test sometime and see what the normal SD slot on the Transformer is though - "other external SD" perhaps...