Sony’s dormancy has borne fruit with the company releasing some spectacular devices as of late. The Xperia L1 is another one of its premium mid-rangers with the smartphone commanding an expected launch price in the vicinity of 30,000 rupees while striking the shelves in late April 2017.

Vintage Sony design

The Xperia L1’s design speaks Sony through and through. Although with some of the latest Sony devices such as the Xperia XZ we’ve seen a small change in Sony's design language, the Xperia L1 still looks more like the older Xperia Z series smartphones. With premium build quality but engulfed in somewhat obese dimensions that include an 8.7mm width and 180g weight, we’re overall happy with how the smartphone looks and feels.

Slightly toned down display

In an era where 1080p displays have become the norm, we wouldn’t be surprised to see people looking at the Xperia L1’s 5.5 inches 720p display with a slight feeling of disgust. However, it’s not that bad as it seems but in all fairness, we would’ve loved to see an HD display here.

Cameras: plain but powerful

As far as the Xperia L1’s primary camera is concerned, we don’t have much to talk about apart from its large 13 megapixel sensor. Customary camera features such as geo-tagging, touch focus, HDR and face detection are in attendance as well.

The selfie sensor stands at 5 megapixels which is the least we could’ve expected from the smartphone. So, we’ll leave the cameras department with a 6.5/10 score for the Xperia L1. OIS, phase detection or an 8 megapixel selfie sensor would’ve easily helped the smartphone score a 9.

Underneath the hood

The smartphone is powered by a quad-core processor with 2GB RAM. Definitely not a beast of a smartphone and we do expect the Android Nougat to run out of steam sometimes. Its internal storage stands at a frowned-upon 16 gigs but thankfully you have the option of an external card slot. USB type-C is present but no fingerprint scanner or fast charging plus an everage sized 2620 mAh battery round-off a rather shabby release from Sony.