Sony Xperia J review: Junior league

Synthetic benchmarks

The Sony Xperia J is powered by a Qualcomm MSM7227A chipset, which packs a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A5 processor, 512MB of RAM and Adreno 200 GPU. That's one of the lowest-powered still available Qualcomm chipset on the market, but it's quite common within the low-end class.

The CPU performance is quite poor. That also results in a rather choppy UI navigation, which is probably the worst thing about the Xperia J. The Xperia J CPU does better than lower-clocked Cortex-A5 designs, if that's any consolation.

BenchmarkPi

Lower is better

• Sony Xperia go
  543
• Sony Xperia sola
  551
• HTC Desire X
  639
• LG Optimus L7
  773
• Sony Xperia J
  790
• Sony Xperia tipo
  987
• Sony Xperia miro
  1037
• Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus
  1037

Linpack

Higher is better

• HTC Desire X
  74.79
• Sony Xperia sola
  68.1
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  64.74
• Sony Xperia J
  38.37
• HTC Desire V
  34.4
• HTC One V
  34.4

AnTuTu and Quadrant gives the smartphone an all-round grade for processing (calculative and graphic, memory speed, SD card writing, etc).

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  12288
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  11633
• Motorola RARZ i XT890
  6150
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  5823
• HTC Desire X
  5177
• Sony Xperia J
  3546
• Sony Xperia miro
  2916

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5450
• Sony Xperia T
  4774
• Motorola RAZR i
  4125
• Sony Xperia SL
  3396
• Sony Xperia J
  1859

The Adreno 200 GPU is an old design and FWVGA resolution seems to push it a bit too hard. Still, with a NenaMark 2 result of about 20fps, the Xperia J should do okay in casual 3D games, but don't expect the top-shelf titles to work. We actually tried the free game Dead Trigger and it ran well, so the Xperia J will still do the job in most of the games currently available.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• HTC Sensation XE
  23.0
• Sony Xperia J
  19.6
• LG Optimus L7
  19.3
• Sony Xperia miro
  15.9
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  15.4
• HTC Explorer
  15.1
• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  13.2
• Samsung Galaxy Pocket
  12.9
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  12.0

Web browsing performance seems to be the problem in the Xperia J though, you can improve it if you use Chrome instead of the stock Android browser (which crashes occasionally when the RAM goes full).

SunSpider

Lower is better

• HTC Desire X
  2259
• Sony Xperia J
  2853
• HTC Desire V
  3299
• Sony Xperia tipo
  3531
• Sony Xperia miro
  3532
• LG Optimus L7
  3661
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  5911
• HTC Explorer
  10784

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• Samsung Galaxy S III (JB)
  1247
• Sony Xperia J
  587

As expected, the Xperia J is hardly a benchmark champion. Its chipset is not even enough to provide a smooth ride through the interface and results in the occasional hiccup. It does okay for non-demanding tasks and things might get better when Jelly Bean comes, however.