Why go for the T over the TX, if I may ask?

Thanks for the answers.

Any idea if any root methods etc. willl be cross compatible between the T and TX?

Each region of the world receives either the T or the TX, based on whatever logic Sony uses to decide these things. The recent reviews are from European and maybe US sites, both of which only receive the T variant.

PS. For reference, Malaysia is slated to receive the TX.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Sep 25 2012, 05:08 PM

@Shezzar: So, has your T arrived yet?

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Oct 4 2012, 05:49 PM

CLOVE got more stock in last Thursday and it all finished within the day. They now have the model on order, so you can put in your order and they should keep it in the system and ship it when they get stock.

Unlocked Mobiles and Expansys.com are alternatives that is slightly more expensive, but they also have the phone on an "Order now and we will charge you when it's available for shipping" status.

TX is already out in Hong Kong. Some international seller sites with links to the area are already expecting stock to come in next week.

In the, what, 4 months since the S3 was released in Malaysia, the price has dropped from RM 2,199 to RM 1,699 now.

That's about 25% of the phone's original recommended retail price.

And it's still dropping.

Still not enough ah?

First impressions of the Xperia TX, based on about two and a half days of use.

What's in the box
- The phone;
- A battery;
- In-ear earphones with spare earbuds;
- compact 3-pin charger (The earth pin can be pushed downwards to make the charger easier to bring around);
- Micro-USB cable;
- Four quickstart manuals. Four of them.

Initial setup

Pretty easy.

Put battery, microSD card and your micro-SIM in phone. How to open the battery door is not very intuitive, but the door comes off with little force once you figure it out the right place to hold the phone and pull. It won't come off unless you really want it to.

Physical design

The 13 MP camera in the back protrudes out of the body a little bit. Not as much as the HTC One series, but a bit more than the S III. So if you put the TX on its back on a table, the phone will rest on the camera lens. There is a small chrome ring around the glass, so there's some protection from scratching, but I would recommend a case or similar just to be sure.

The front of the phone looks completely blank when the screen is off. There are no hardware face buttons for the Home, Back and Recent Apps keys. because the TX uses software keys that are rendered on screen. To people who are not used to them, it needs some getting used to, but it works quite well.

Unlike the Xperia T (according to people who have got it on XDA), the TX doesn't come with any screen protectnig film, and there is no raised bezel to protect the glass. It is a bad idea to put the phone face down because the screen would touch the table, and it's highly recommended that you make sure any case you have has a raised bezel to prevent this.

Around the sides of the phone are the hardware keys, the microUSB port and the earphones socket. As you all already know, the TX has its power key on the left side of the phone near the top, while the volume key is on the right near the top. The TX also has a hardware camera button on the right near the bottom. The arrangement needs a bit of getting used to, but it works. The microUSB port is on the right near the volume keys, so plugging in the phone is somewhat awkward, especially if you have the phone on a car holder or if you're watching video while charging.

Overall, the phone's build quality is good. It fits fairly easily into my hand despite the size. Coming from a HTC Desire Z and having held both my wife's gigantomongous Galaxy Note as well as Galaxy S IIIs, I was worried that I would find it uncomfortable and difficult to use. To my pleasant surprise, it was perfectly possible for me to reach the top right corner with my left thumb.

The phone feels quite light, but not as super-light as the S III. It makes it feel like I actually have something substantial in my hand, but then I'm used to my heavy Desire Z so people coming from the light and thin phones of the past year or so may disagree that the TX weighs just right.

Software

The TX runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4 right out of the box. Sony's Timescape skin is very close to how ICS is supposed to look like and for the first time I really don't mind using non-Vanilla Android (I used CM9 on my old phone).

Out of the box, the phone is set up with Simplified Chinese as its default language. Non-Chinese speakers, don't panic, because the first screen you find when you start up will allow you to change a different language. However, the default keyboard will still be a Chinese QWERTY keyboard which is, unfortunately, idiotically designed. It kept swapping basic punctuation for smiley keys and was just confusing to use.

Fortunately, you can also change keyboards to a more standard by going into the Android settings. The English language keyboard is pretty close to the stock Android keyboard and supports Swype-style gestures. It can also be customized a little so that you add things like dedicated smiley buttons or Google Search keys if you like them.

Out of the box, the TX has a lot of redundant software installed. For example, apart from the standard Google Play, Sony has decided that you would also like a dedicated Sony marketplace app called Sony Select, and something called PlayNow which is a marketplace that sells games and media approved by Sony. Seriously, Sony, why?

Camera is good and works well under sunlight and in normal lighting conditions. It's a bit noisy at 13MP in low-light or dark conditions. Also, teh 16:9 aspect ratio 13MP pics are big, but you only have the options of 13 MP, 10 MP (4:3 aspect ratio), or 2MP (both 16:9 and 4:3). I really wish Sony had given an option for 5MP and 8MP, or maybe use the same trick the Nokia 808's 42+ MP camera uses for high-quality zoomed pics.

Performance

I don't play much games on my phone and the ones that I do play are relatively low-requirement, so I can't reasonably comment on how smooth it would play Gears of Halo: Medal of Combat. However, the phone does run smoothly for all intents and purposes, and I really don't feel like I've missed anything going for a dual-core Krait instead of a quad-core Exynos.

The screen itself is a little reflective so there is a bit of glare under the sun, but it's very very readable even under direct sunlight. However, if you tilt the screen a lot, colours become a little washed out. In contrast, the SLCD on my Desire Z was still colour-accurate and readable even if you're looking at the screen from like 70 degrees away from perpendicular.

Still, it's not a major problem: the screen is still pretty legible if you try to look up a calendar while the phone is on your table, except that everything will look as if someone put a strip of translucent white plastic over everything.

I haven't pushed the phone to its limit when playing videos and I'm not sure that the built-in player supports subtitled MKV. However, the 480p AVIs I've played look pretty good with sound that is very clear, even in loud areas like food courts.

GPS is ridiculously fast. I turned it on and got a lockon within 5 seconds, and this is in my car that has a tint that's known to affect GPS signals.

Battery life is... semi-problematic. I can get 16 hours out of it with about 2 hours of 480p video, intermittent e-book reading, an hour of web surfing, about 20 minutes of calls and several SMSes. This is all with mobile data and WiFi on, switching in between as necessary.

The phone also suffers from a known issue with stock Sony Android ICS ROMs: ever since the Xperia S, people have been complaining of standard Sony processes that seem to keep the phone awake a lot. People with power issues will want to look up information regarding a process called com.sonyericsson.android.wakeup and maybe disable it.

That's all I have for now. I'm still fiddling with the phone and trying to make it last longer. I might reset it to factory settings over the weekend and redo my setup properly, now that I know where everything is supposed to be. In general, I'm happy with the phone (apart from the pains of getting used to a software keyboard) and I think that it's a good buy.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Oct 25 2012, 01:26 PM

Development will tend to come for T first, but now that people have successfully made a working CM10 kernel for the TX, the TX will not be far behind.

From the Internets. Specifically, Expansys.my. Better wait for the local set to come out because I don't think it will cost more than RM 1,800.

But I could be wrong.

Rooting the TX

This is based on Bina4ry's Xperia unrooting script in this post on XDA Developers, but there were a few steps missing that took me some time to figure out.

Note: This method works with firmware 7.0.A.1.307, which is what my TX came with. There is a newer firmware out (.3.195) and at the time of writing Bin4ry's script does not work with it. If your TX came with .3.195, you will need to unlock your TX's bootloader and use one of the other methods. Note, however, that unlocking your bootloader means you will lose the Sony DRM keys on your TX forever, and that may break functionality with some Sony apps/products/services.

Steps:

1) Buy a Sony Xperia TX.

2) Download Bin4ry's Xperia unrooting script here. Always download the latest one. Unzip it to a convenient folder of your choice.

3) Make sure your TX is not plugged in to your computer.

4) Download Sony's PC Companion from here and install it. Wait until the installation is complete and don't forget to reboot if the program tells you to.

5) Make sure PC Companion is on, and then plug in your TX. If you haven't plugged your TX in before, Windows will prompt you to search/install drivers for your phone; cancel it, because we want PC Companion to install those drivers for you. If you have, just let PC Companion do its thing.

6) Go to the folder where you unzipped Bin4ry's script to and click RunMe.bat

7) Choose option 1) Normal. The script should detect your TX automatically and just do its thing. Your phone will reboot once or twice during this process. Don't bother it.

8) Enjoy your rooted TX.

Troubleshooting

*The script is stuck waiting for my phone!*

The drivers for your TX have not been installed correctly. Make sure you've installed PC Companion. Failing that, uninstall PC Companion and try to uninstall the drivers for your TX, and then follow my guide from step 3.

*Something else is wrong*

Refer to ]Bin4ry's XDA thread. Chances are the answer to your problems is somewhere in the comments. Sometimes it's not; Bin4ry assumes you've installed PC Companion, for example, and it took me a while to figure out that this is my problem. In such cases, register on XDA and ask.

I'm not a shutterbug, but the camera quality is quite good. Like I said in my review, there are some mistakes that Sony made (forcing you to choose between high-res and huge 13MP/10MP pics or med/low res 2MP shots only) and the image quality when zoomed in is not as good as, say, the Nokia with the 40+ MP camera, but it's fairly good for a phone camera.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Oct 31 2012, 05:48 PM

I don't know. If it helps, on my TX, if you turn the screen off and look at it just right, you can see a semi-clear grid of hexagons. I think these are the capacitative sensor wires, so maybe Sony is using a thin screen with less gap between the top of the screen and the wires than usual?

Also, don't worry: the pattern I'm talking about is invisible if the screen is on, so it doesn't interfere with usage.

It's not distracting. It's just bright enough to be visible, but it doesn't attract your attention when you're watching something or doing something on the screen.

It's noticeable but not strong, and it happens more or less when you press the on-screen buttons. The kind of scenario you talk about with you Mini Pro hasn't happened to me.

In terms of design, the T has all the hardware buttons (power, volume/zoom, camera) on the right side of the phone, and the microUSB port on the left side somewhere. It also has that sloping chin at the bottom and has a built-in battery. Otherwise, it's basically the same physically.

Yes, it is the same dual-core Krait.