You won’t, however, be able to use the phone very well in the water. Despite the handset being able to survive a liquid encounter, you won’t get the screen working very well until it’s up on dry land, with the capacitive touchscreen lacking any solid resistance.
Seriously, you can’t use the touchscreen when it’s immersed, with no actions made by your fingers swiping on the screen registering here. Sometimes, the screen will respond on its own, as if the water were fingers touching it, so it’s easier to stick the phone on standby if you’re taking to the sea, pool, or walking without an umbrella or raincoat.
Surviving water is one thing, but using it is in water is another altogether, and is just something to be aware of.
Out of the water, the resistant gimmick is still nifty, though it’s pretty obvious in designing this handset that Sony hasn’t exactly thrown in the best quality components, keeping the specs down in exchange for being able to survive the elements.
The screen, for instance, uses a very low resolution 320×480 screen, the sort of display you still see on budget handsets that normally grab $99 price tags, and although it’s a reasonably responsive touchscreen when dry, the version of Android that it comes with is old enough and handicapped enough to bug us.
Now considered an old and outdated version of Android, Sony has opted to include Android 2.3 on this handset, also known as “Gingerbread”. While an update to Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is planned, a release date isn’t yet known.
Like all other Sony mobile handsets, the Android overlay and reminds us of the design the company has been using on its TV CrossBar menu and PlayStation 3 video game console, which is clear, modern, and easy to read. Not all of it is easy to navigate, however, and if you have more than three menu screens – which you will – you literally need to swipe to get through all of them.
With a small screen, expect a small keyboard to type on, the low resolution not helping much here, either.
Thankfully, Sony has included a dual-core processor, though we’re definitely not talking about a high-end processor, with the benchmarks showing performance similar to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus from late last year.
That said, it should be fast enough for most things, and while we didn’t wait very long for the phone to do anything, if you’re planning to use this for new games and lots of apps, it may chug along.
On the other side of performance, battery life is pretty average, with a day of life expected from our tests, so you will need to charge it regularly, unless you get by with doing absolutely nothing with your phone.
And despite the Go being a modern handset, we didn’t have the best of luck with 3G on our Xperia Go, with the signal dropping out frequently and switching back to the lesser 2G speeds.
Conclusion
Sony’s Xperia Go isn’t the best handset out there, but if you’re after a smartphone that isn’t afraid of water, it’s definitely the one to buy.
