Sony Xperia U review

Contacts

The Sony Xperia U's contacts section is pretty similar to that offered by most other Android smartphones these days, pulling in data from your SIM, your Google account, Facebook, Twitter and doing everything apart from scanning in your local phone book.

Fortunately, there are options to sort out this avalanche of people you half know.

The phone enables you to filter contacts, with options to show only those who have phone numbers attached to their accounts or only people who are specifically online and signed into some sort of messaging service or Facebook.

Or you can toggle entire swathes of automatically imported people out of existence and have them hidden from view altogether. And calm is restored.

But if you live the always-connected, social networking dream, Sony's Facebook integration is very impressive indeed.

Each Facebook contact is given their own tab within your phone's contacts section, which pulls in their photos for you to leaf through, comment upon and like, without having to trouble the Facebook app at all.

You also find Facebook integration within the Sony Xperia U's photo gallery, where your photos are synced and displayed in additional folders.

It's very clever and is one of the ways Sony's user interface really stands out from the rest. If you're a Facebook user.

Calling

The dialler's a simple, useful tool, which supports Sony's own form of smart dialling.

Start to type a number and it'll pop up similar numbers in the space above the keypad, plus this also works with predictive text input - so start typing someone's name and it'll also attempt to match it with someone from your contacts.

Call volume on the whole was good, voices came across quite loud and clear and sounding relatively natural, while signal coverage was similar to what we've observed from using other handsets. It's definitely also a telephone.