Sony Xperia T2 Ultra review: The bigger, the better

Eye-candy Albums gallery

The Sony Xperia T2 Ultra comes with the custom Sony gallery, called Album. Images are organized into groups of thumbnails and sorted by date. You can change the thumbnails size by pinching.

The gallery can connect to online albums (PlayMemories, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr) along to other devices on the local network. Maps and Globe albums are also available, which use the geotagging info to sort photos by the location at which they were taken, and faces, which groups photos by the faces of the people in them.

Albums app

Images can be cropped or rotated directly in the gallery. Quick sharing via Picasa, Email apps, Facebook, Bluetooth or MMS is also enabled.

Viewing an image

There's a slide show using the SensMe brand and much like the music player feature, this one scans files and groups similar photos together.

Beautiful but not so powerful video player

The video playing app is dubbed Movies and it too has a great custom UI. It's connected to Gracenote, which helps you find additional information about the movies and TVs you have on the phone. It will even download posters for them and for movies, it will download metadata like genre, synopsis, director and cast.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well for TV shows - it doesn't recognize the S01E02 format and won't pull info about individual episodes. It gets worse, Gracenote seems to be lacking info on TV shows in general, we couldn't find even popular shows like The Big Bang Theory.

The Movies app

Unfortunately there is more bad news - the video player does plays 1080p files hassle-free but the supported codecs are limited to Xvid, MP4 and MKV files. DTS, DD and AC3 audios are not supported, which makes the MKV compatibility pretty much obsolete. We know you can always get a proper app from the Play Store but it's a shame you can't just use the eye-candy default player for everything.

Subtitle settings

On the positive side the video player supports subtitles, and you can customize their looks. Unfortunately, you cannot manually pick the subtitle file, it has to reside in the video folder to load up.

Walkman plays your music

The Walkman music player is part of the equipment of all recent Xperia smartphones. It features Music Unlimited integration and is not above trying to sell you songs, but you can hide the Music Unlimited stuff.

The Walkman interface is based on tiles that sort your music collection by Artist, Albums, Playlists, all songs and even the songs your friends are listening to (but you need to connect the player with your Facebook account).

The Music Unlimited stuff includes ways to discover new music - Charts, New releases and Channels. Those can be hidden individually (same goes for the artist/album/playlist tiles) or you can disable the service altogether.

The music player

The Infinite button is available in the Now Playing screen (just tap the album art) - it will help you find the track's video on YouTube, look up info about the artist on Wikipedia and search for lyrics on Google. Gracenote is used here too and it can automatically download information about your tracks and album art.

The Now Playing interface

The Walkman player offers a variety of audio settings - ClearAudio+ option is here, which determines the best audio quality settings depending on the song you're listening to. We liked how it changed the music and carefully accentuated various details. Dynamic normalizer evens out the differences in volume between tracks, which is great if you've mixed multiple albums from multiple sources.

The Sound enhancements contain yet more settings. There's an equalizer with presets and manual settings (including tweaking Clear Bass). Then there's Surround sound mode, which imitates the Studio, Club or Concert Hall experience. The Clear stereo mode enhances the perceivable stereo channel separation. Dynamic normalizer minimizes the difference in volume between songs (great if you're playing a shuffled mix).

Speaker settings include Clear Phase, which adjusts the quality, while xLOUD boosts up the internal speaker.

Sound enhancements and EQ

FM radio with RDS and social networking

The Sony Xperia T2 Ultra also features an FM Radio aboard complete with RDS support. The app features multiple visualizations and integrates with TrackID to recognize the currently playing song. You can even directly send an "I'm listening to..." post to Facebook.

The FM Radio

Audio output is clean but quiet

The Sony Xperia T2 Ultra's audio output is decent for its mid-range standing. It's not the best portable player around, but its output will do just fine for the majority of users.

The phablet produced very clean output in the first part of our test, but it was let down by its volume levels, which were below average. Excluding that, its output has good frequency response, low noise levels, and there is no distortion whatsoever.

Plugging in a pair of headphones causes an average spike in the stereo crosstalk and adds some intermodulation distortion, but that's hard to detect outside lab conditions. The frequency response is slightly affected too, but again, it’s nothing major. The volume levels are once again the real disappointment here and while the dynamic range and noise level scores are still great, we can only give the Xperia T2 Ultra a satisfactory mark here.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Sony Xperia T2 Ultra frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.