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The year is 2013. Smartphones have become popular among the general public. Yasashii still has a regular phone. Time for change arrives. The Sony Xperia E appears on the market and quickly becomes a popular choice among those with a tight budget who just want a simple entry-level smartphone. Yasashii buys one. Yeah, I still can't live down how much of a bad decision that was. But then, why should it matter? After all, that was years ago. Those probably aren't even sold anymore, right? Wrong. A few days ago I noticed a big billboard with that phone being advertised as a great deal at my local tech store. You might be tempted if you want a cheap smartphone. Especially considering that for some crazy reason there are many positive reviews on the internet. People need to be warned. For the love of everything that is dear to you, don't buy this pota... ahem... phone. First Impressions It actually looks nice. It's not going to last long, though. That nice brushed aluminum accent around the camera is actually only glued on and will eventually fall out. What looks like a metal accent around the phone is actually sprayed plastic and will get scraped. The speaker hole on the back will almost instantly get filled with dust and lint. That matte finish on the back plate will get scratched. The Xperia logo will scrape off as it is just printed on. As for the home screen and interface, it may not feel as modern as it did in 2013 but still looks fairly presentable. The (Few) Advantages At first, it's a pleasing piece of tech to hold in one's hand. The curved back plate allows for a decent grip (but limits your choice of phone covers/protectors). Its small size makes it kinda cute and easy to fit into your pocket. It's also quite light. Most importantly, at around $100 (new), it's fairly cheap. You can also get the dual sim variant at a slightly higher price if you need that feature. There are also plenty of those on the used market available at lower prices depending on the condition. It may or may not be important to you but it's one of few phones that you can buy new that have a removable battery and support for full-sized sim cards (you can use micro sim with an adapter, of course) The battery life is quite decent. If you just use it as a phone to make calls and write messages, the battery should last you up to 1.5 weeks. The built in Sony music player offers decent playback quality and a user-friendly interface for free without any ads (which cannot be said about most of the "free" third-party music players available for Android) The Terrible Realization When you power on your phone for the first time, all may seem good and dandy. You go through the initial configuration and apps start updating. Suddenly, you get a huge slap on the face. "Low phone memory" appears in your notification tray. Better get used to that, buddy. You see, Sony somehow got a "great" idea on how to set up the partitions. You get a 748MB phone partition and a 2GB internal storage partition. All the system apps are installed on the phone partition and they grow in size considerably when updated. No, you can't move them. Other apps get installed on the phone partition by default. You can move some of them (not all, though) to internal memory but you can only do it post-installation so you have to make sure you have enough space on your phone partition just to install it. And no, you cannot move any apps to an external SD card. This is the result: you have to pick which system apps you actually need to use and only update those as updates for all of them won't fit even right after a factory reset. After that you will always have to worry about the size of the third-party apps and whether or not they can be moved to internal memory. The "low phone memory" will be a recurring problem which will put a serious damper on your overall experience. Performance Issues Alright, so you've been through a lengthy trial and error process and got all the stuff you need to fit. Congratulations, you can now use it one at a time only! This thing only has 512MB of RAM. Those nice, useful widgets also eat away quite a bit of it. OK, so I just get rid of them and then I can multi-task? Ha! No! It has a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and an Adreno 200 GPU. In theory, it should be enough to run some apps smoothly, especially at the (pathetic) 320x480 resolution. Unfortunately, the Sony-modified Android 4.1.1 is so poorly optimized that everything is laggy and painfully slow. Forget multitasking, you won't even be able to type a message comfortably! On top of that, the display has got to be the single worst display ever slapped onto a touchscreen device. The resolution, as mentioned above, is really tiny, and it shows. You can pretty much count all the pixels with a naked eye. Everything has ragged edges. Text looks terrible and unclear. The touchscreen is also derpy as all hell. Because it ends right on the very edge of the phone you will often accidentally click stuff just by holding it in your hand. Often, when you want to answer a call, the slider will be difficult to operate and it will take you several attempts to do the most basic thing you should be able to do with ease on a PHONE. While attempting to type a message a lot of frustration will inevitably ensue. You can be the world's fastest typist and still be very slow with this device, because if you don't want to send a garbled mess of a message to your recipient, you will have to click every letter carefully and slowly. Typing anything in a web browser or other hardware-intensive apps is even more of a pain. You have to wait several seconds for the keyboard to even appear and then another several seconds for the input to register. Cursing does ensue, especially if you're in a hurry. So yeah, any browser you use will be sluggish as hell. Your preferred GPS navigation app will sometimes take MINUTES to figure out the location and your route. Forget about playing games smoothly, especially 3D titles. Snake, Checkers and Solitaire are the only things you will be able to play with any level of success. Any games that require immediate and rapid input from you are near-impossible to play because of the lag. Poor Usability Ok, you could make the argument that you don't need any fancy features and just want to use it on a basic level as a phone. To that I will reply: Why do you want to buy a smartphone if you just need a basic phone? You could save a lot of money and frustration if you buy a simple standard phone. The battery life will probably be a lot better, too. But fine, what if you still want this thing for some reason? Well, it's a pain in the neck even when doing the most basic things. Answering the phone will be frustrating because the touchscreen is crappy and unresponsive. Typing messages will be frustrating because the keyboard is sluggish. Even when you just want to use it as a music player there are problems. You hook up the headphones, go to the music player and adjust the volume to your liking. You get interrupted by a hearing damage warning. Every time. Then you go downtown while listening to music and you realize it's too quiet even at maximum volume, so you install the SoundBoost app to get around the issue. You're now listening to music at volume high enough to hear it over the noise of your surroundings when suddenly you get a message. You read the message and resume the listening, but now you have to restart the soundbooster because it had stopped working. Every... Time... It offers no hands-free features that would allow you to use it safely in your car. You can't answer a call with a gesture. You can't answer with a single button, slider only. You can't set it to auto-answer without third-party apps that often don't work well (or at all) with it. You can't answer (or make) a call with voice control. Even if you answer a call while driving you then have to manually engage the speakerphone. It's so quiet that you won't hear it well over the engine noise and the microphone is so bad that you will have to shout for your recipient to be able to hear you. Oh yeah, and the camera is dudu so you won't be taking nice pictures with it either. Especially considering that if your hand isn't perfectly stable they will come out smudged. Conclusion The Sony Xperia E is the single most infuriating smartphone I've ever had a chance to use. It can't do the fancy stuff you're supposed to be able to do with a smartphone (and for which you're paying good money) at any level of comfort. It can't do the stuff that even the cheapest standard phones can do without infuriating the user. It's useless for everything. Even if you're willing to make some compromises, the horrible performance is bound to eventually bring your blood to a boil. You shouldn't buy it, Sony never should have manufactured it and retailers never should have sold it. In fact, it's such a piece of crap that I almost can't believe Sony had the audacity to release it and put their brand name on it. They should recall it and send everyone who bought one a hand-written apology and a teared-off fragment of what used to be the employment contract of the person who approved it. Personally, I'm in the process of figuring out what to do with my Xperia E now that I bought a different phone. I'm thinking steamroller or a semi. Maybe airgun. Firecrackers, perhaps? Whatever I decide to do, I definitely won't be selling it. I couldn't live with myself if I gave this thing to anyone and took money for it.