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In familiar fashion the front of the handset is dominated by the unit’s display 5.7 inch screen delivering a 75.6% screen-to-body ratio.  The Sony Xperia L3 is fitted with an IPs LCD capacitive touch screen that is capable of displaying 16M colours.  With a resolution of 720 x 1440 pixels at 18:9 ratio, the screen has a ppi density of ~282.  Providing protection for the screen, in the case of accidents, is a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 5.

Arranged around the outside edge of the Xperia L3 handset are various options available to the user.  Located at the top of the handset is a 3.5mm jack socket for attaching a set of earphones or headset.  This connection supports active noise canceling facilities when used with a dedicated mic.  Situated on the left side of the handset is a pop-out tray which can house a Nano Sim and a microSD card increasing storage capacity up to 512GB.

Switching to the right side of this Sony handset reveals three separate options.  Rather than opting for a front or rear mounted fingerprint reader, Sony has positioned this facility in the centre of the handset’s right side.  I found it took some adjustment, both regarding its accidental use and when I needed to activate the feature, to get use to Sony’s decision to relocate this feature. 

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Mounted just above the fingerprint reader is the handset’s power on/off button.  The Xperia L3’s volume rocker sits below the fingerprint reader to complete this rather non-standard arrangement of features.  Located on the base of the unit is a Type C USB 2.0 port for charging the handset’s internal battery and other purposes such as attaching a USB-to-Go device.

As is now considered the standard arrangement, the Xperia L3 combines a partnership of a rear mounted main camera with a Selfie unit operating from the front.  The main camera is a dual 13MP camera.  This camera features a f/2.2, 16mm wide angle lens with a depth sensor and 2MP PDAF.  Among the camera’s features are HDR and panorama capture with a LED flash plus a video capture rated at 1080p@30fps.  The Selfie camera is a single 8MP model with a 24mm wide angle f/2.0 lens.  As with the main camera, Selfie addicts can capture video at 1080p@30fps..  The quality of the still images captured by both camera units is of a reasonable standard.

The Sony Xperia L3 is build around a MT6762 Helio P22 chipset.  This Mediatek 12mm chipset consists of an octa-core 2.0 GHz Cortex A53 CPU and PowerVR GE8320 GPU.  As standard you get 32GB of internal memory which is expandable, using the microSD option, and 3GB of RAM.

My review sample arrived with Android 8.0 (Oreo) pre-installed and ready for the entry of personal data.  As well as the previously mentioned side-mounted fingerprint sensor, the Xperia L3 features sensors for accelerometer, proximity and compass features.  Other features of this handset include support for WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual band, WiFi Direct and hotspot plus Bluetooth 4.0, A2DP, Le, NFC and GPS.  There is also support for USB-to-Go.

I used this latter support when testing the handset’s battery capacity.  Playing a constant stream of movies stored on a flash drive, and accessed via a USB-to-Go link. I was able to get 7 hours 52 minutes of full screen viewing with the audio output set at the medium level before the handset shut itself down. I was disappointed with the length of playing time.

Firing up the handset from a complete shut down was not particularly quick with a four second depress of the power button being followed by a 26 seconds set-up procedure before arriving at the Home screen.  In other respects the Xperia L3 performed reasonably including a download of a Sony system update that was made available as soon as I received the unit.  I must admit that the set-up part of this update took longer than the actual download.  As this update was carried out immediately, I can not really comment on how it might have affected the performance of the handset.  The Sony Xperia L3 performed its tasks without problems and at a  reasonable rate of speed.

As mentioned my review sample was supplied by Vodafone who offer this handset on various plans.

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile/brands/sony