Sony Xperia L2

Sony Xperia L2 tries to bring some changes to its predecessor and pierce the smartphone market. Priced at ₹14,990, Xperia L2 has to deal with the cutthroat competition by many competent brands which combines both features and looks to hold the user base in favour of them.

Sony Xperia L2 does not work much on its design or its flat display. It looks similar to the predecessor but underperforms when compared to flagship rivals. However, it has a decent battery and an excellent selfie-camera for selfie aficionados.

Sony Xperia L2 is a hefty phone at a staggering 178g weight and has a thickness of 9.8mm. While these numbers would be reasonable if the phone was sturdy, but like L1, it is a plastic build. Xperia L2 is quite a basic model, which comes with thick bezels and looks quite dull. It has sharp right-angled corners, and flat top, making it an uncomfortable phone to handle. Fortunately, L2 finally brings in the fingerprint reader cushioned comfortably at the back below the camera, which had been missing from L1, but it is not as snappy as other flagship models. On the positive side, Xperia L2 retains the headphone jack which is slowly getting discontinued in the smartphone market, and it comes with a USB-C standard, a rare find in the affordable smartphone market.

Sony Xperia L2 has a 5.5-inch LCD screen which comes with the dated resolution of 720p and the mediocre pixel density of 267ppi. The display is quite average, with suitable brightness and colour accuracy though it does not have excellent sunlight legibility. Individual pixels can be seen if the screen is inspected carefully. Another unusual feature is that on applying medium pressure on the screen, ripples are formed around the finger indicating it has the same lack of rigidity as L1. As the rest of the flagships moves towards sturdier models and 1080p resolution, Xperia L2 lags and remains in the sidelines.

Sony Xperia L2 is powered by the same MediaTek MT6737T quad-core chipset as Xperia L1, making it a phone that is quite underpowered. It is sluggish even though there has been an increase of RAM, getting up to 3GB. The RAM fails to increase the fluidity of the phone, and it lags during UI animations or multitasking. However, gaming performance is quite satisfactory in Sony Xperia L2, probably because it has lesser pixels to push around. Benchmark scores put the multi-core performance of L2 at 1,881 which is way behind G5’s 2,377 and the Swift 2 Plus’ 2,073.

Sony Xperia L2 has a 13MP primary camera with an aperture of f/2.0. If the shooting conditions are ideal, it can get some nice shots with reasonable details and natural-looking depth. The colours are also kept accurate. The camera UI would also be able to lock and detect subject quick and reliably for faster snaps. However, ideal conditions are rare. In low-light situations, objects in motion carry a blur and shutter speed lowers. The autofocus loses its accuracy as well. A steady hand would be required to deal with this problem. While images appear washed-out, enabling HDR mode manually can help to deal with it – however, it has an extremely slow and frustrating processing speed. The 8MP selfie camera on Xperia L2 is a true beauty. It has a 120-degree wide angle and can fit many more people in the frame or the scenery around you. Selfies are generally decent and accurate. However, there is a slight fish-eye effect. Also, the Soft Skin Effect is turned on by default that makes you look like mannequins, so, turning it off would be the first thing you’d like to do.

The Xperia L2 amps up the battery as well bringing it up to 3,300mAh. It is quite a sizable battery and matches the budget market standard. A battery test of running a 90-minute 720p video in full brightness found it lose 17% of its battery which an accomplishment against flagship rivals Moto G5 and Nokia 6, both losing 22%. Light and moderate use can easily get it through more than one day. Plus, Sony provides a number of battery saving options like Stamina Mode and Ultra Stamina Mode that cuts back many phone functions to preserve the battery juice. Battery Care is also present which calculates if you leave the phone for prolonged or overnight charging spells, and slows down the charging to preserve the battery’s full capacity.

While Xperia L2 has finally brought the fingerprint scanner on board, modified the selfie camera and worked on some special effects for music, yet it fails to stand out in the competitive market. It has a hefty build, poor performance and a dated display that holds it back from being a good recommendation for an average user. It is a worthy consideration if you are an audiophile or someone who like to click group selfies a lot – otherwise, Moto G5 and Nokia 6 are much better options to go for.