The forgotten smartphone: Sony Xperia Tipo

November 29, 2020 Luisa Rey

Every week we look back on a smartphone or telephone. This week we go back in time 8.5 years. The company then came up with the Sony Xperia Tipo, a very handy compact smartphone, with Android!

Sony Xperia Tipo

Sony is one of the few manufacturers that has released really compact smartphones for a long time. In the meantime, that time, as it now seems, is somewhat over. Yet it managed to reach a large group of consumers at the time. In this edition of ‘The forgotten smartphone’ we look back at the Sony Xperia Tipo.

The Sony Xperia Tipo was very compact; with dimensions of 103 x 57 x 13 millimeters. The weight was just under 100 grams. Nowadays, devices quickly weigh double. Furthermore, the Xperia Tipo had a 3.2 inch screen with a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels. At the time, a front camera was not yet available on many devices in this segment. The Tipo didn’t have one on board either.

What the Tipo did have was a 3.2 megapixel camera with 480p film quality. An LED flash was missing. There was an 800 MHz single-core processor from Qualcomm; the Snapdragon S1. This was assisted by 512MB of working memory. You could use the 3GB storage space or a memory card to store files. The smartphone was launched with Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Tipo blue

If we look at the further specifications of the Xperia Tipo, we see a 1500 mAh battery, WiFi, Micro-USB port and an FM radio with RDS. TrackID was also present for recognizing music. That FM radio has been a rare find on the devices that appear this time for a while. On Android was Sony’s own Xperia UI skin. It also had Timescape and Mediascape on board, for example. This gave you access to social media update tiles and your media player.

The Sony Xperia Tipo was released in 2012. The price of the device came to about 150 euros. Nice detail; the device was available on the market in different colors.