The next flagship smartphone from Sony, the Sony LT30p Mint, may have been leaked in a new lengthy hands-on report.

Mobile Review had the scoop where it went on in-depth about the Sony LT30p Mint.

Detailing the specifications of the phone with the site’s opinions, the expected Sony flagship may, however, become a disappointment for Sony, the site ventures.

According to the site, the Sony LT30p Mint “aims at the high end market to be placed as Sony’s flagship for the third quarter of the year. While practically replacing Xperia S in that place, it has very few similarities both in terms of design and features.”

Design

The Sony LT30p Mint has a design language that is consistent with the new Sony lineup of phones.

It looks reminiscent of the design direction the recently-launch Xperia phones – the Sony Xperia Ion, the Sony Xperia P, the Sony Xperia miro and the Sony Xperia tipo – exhibit.

This is expected to be the next flagship device from Sony. As such, it will replace the Sony Ericsson Xperia S.

Compared to the previous flagship device, the Sony LT30p Mint is said to have a slimmer waist and lighter weight.

Having handled a prototype of the device, Mobile Review says that the Sony LT30p Mint “fits in your hand more easily and can be used with just one hand. The phone’s weight is acceptable for its size and features and can be carried around almost without noticing that you have a phone in your pocket.”

The new device will forgo having physical buttons in favor of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on-screen buttons as the phone has ICS installed from the factory.

Hardware

Although not mentioned in the article by Mobile review, the body of the Sony LT30p mint appears to be made out of polycarbonate (read: tough plastic) with what appears to a rubbery matte finish.

The processor of the flagship device is a dual-core Qualcomm S4. The device uses the Qualcomm MSM8960 system on a chip which is used in the HTC One X. It’s a Krait-based core which is in turn based on the A-15 processor architecture from ARM. It also has an Adreno 225 graphics processing unit.

The display of the device is said to be a WhiteMagic 4.3-inch unit with a resolution of 720 HD (1,280 x 720 pixels). The site wasn’t too much impressed with the screen saying the Sony Xperia P screen is way better.

“Unfortunately LT30p’s screen follows the tradition of Xperia S and fails not only to impress, but even to stay on the same level with other phones from other manufacturers,” Mobile Review said.

“Color reproduction is where everything goes really bad even compared to Xperia S in some cases. Black color is always presented with a white hue created by the illumination of the screen and although this effect is always present in LCD screens HTC implementation in One X and even Sony in Xperia P are better,” the site’s Martin Elm explained further.

Furthermore, he said that “However, it’s in white color and most other colors when the brightness is set to a level above and including the middle from maximum. White color becomes annoyingly bright without any significant quality and all other colors simply appear washed out reminding screens from the past decade.”

As for the camera, the expected next Sony flagship smartphone has a 13 megapixel unit at the back along with its LED flash. Memory for the unit tested by the site was at 1GB and there was no mention of how big the internal memory of the pre-production device was.

The site did say, however, that the Sony LT30p Mint preproduction unit they tested had a slot for a MicroSD card which will fit in a slot at the side of the device which is covered by a rubber flap. Other slots reported include a Micro USB connector for charging and for data transfer.

Software and Performance

As we have mentioned before, the Sony LT30p Mint comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich right out of the box. It’s ICS is customized, however, but only a bit, according to the site.

“Sony seems to be following Samsung and HTC policy this time, where older phone do get updates to the newer Android version, but some new features are only added to new devices,” it says.

One of these features reviewed by the publication is “Small Apps” which is a list of company-developed apps but none of them are now available for the phone in the Google Play store.

That’s understandable though as the phone tested by the site is still a pre-production one. These small apps, according to screenshots made by the publication include notes, calendars, calculators, and the like.

With the advent of ICS coming stock with the phone, the LT30p does not have physical keys on its front anymore and now only has onscreen keys.

Other changes to the software is that it now has Mass Storage mode aside from MTP mode. “The Mass Storage mode is finally supported on a Sony device running ICS and I personally find it a lot more useful than the MTP mode,” Mobile Review said.

From the screenshots taken by Mobile Review, we see that on the lock screen, there’s a shortcut directly to the camera app. There’s also what appears to be an app to edit videos taken with the phone.

Other features that are shown are: Power Saver, FM Radio, News, Mobile BRAVIA Engine, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Facebook Inside Xperia, LiveWare Manager, Data Usage, Tethering & Portable Hotspot, Bluetooth Tethering, Android Beam, Location-based Wi-Fi, xLoud, TimeScape, Update Center, Voice Search and Walkman with Equalizer.

Overall, the phone is “very fast in operation,” the site says, although typical of preproduction phones, it still has some bugs that needs to go.

As for performance, the site subjected the Sony LT30p Mint to a battery of benchmarks.

Here are the results of the tests:

Sony LT30P MINT

AnTuTu Benchmark v2.8.3

Score: 5992
RAM: 1102
CPU integer: 1754
CPU float-point: 814
2D graphics: 297
3D graphics: 1255
Database IO: 430
SD card write: (19.1 Mb/s) 150
SD card read: (21.7 Mb/s) 190
CPU frequency: 1134 MHz
Date: 2012-07-24 23:40

.

Linpack for Android

MFLOPS:115.922
Time: 1.46 Seconds
Norm Res: 3.24
Precision: 2.2200446049250313E-16

.

Basemark ES 2.0 Taiji Free

Benchmark Score: 31.03 Frames Per Second

.

NenaMark2 v2.3

Last: 60.1 frames per second
Best: 60.1 frames per second

.

Vellamo

Score: 2157

.

Quadrant

Total: 4044
CPU: 5098
Mem: 7451
I/O: 4477
2D: 1000
3D: 2195

Let’s compare these numbers to the results of the same battery of benchmarks for some of today’s top Android superphones, the Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One S:

SAMSUNG GALAXY S III

AnTuTu Benchmark v2.8.3
Score: 9661
RAM: 2469
CPU integer: 4041
CPU float-point: 3151
2D graphics: 0
3D graphics: 0
Database IO: 0
SD card write: 0
SD card read: 0
CPU frequency: 1400 MHz,
Date: 2012-07-14 02:21

.

Linpack for Android

MFLOPS:176.985
Time: 0.98 Seconds
Norm Res: 3.24
Precision: 2.2200446049250313E-16

.

Basemark ES 2.0 Taiji Free

Benchmark Score: 37.20 Frames Per Second

.

NenaMark2 v2.3

Last: 58.7 frames per second
Best: 58.7 frames per second

.

Vellamo

Score: 2041

.

Quadrant

Total: 5336
CPU: 12840
Mem: 4640
I/O: 6370
2D: 1000
3D: 1832

HTC One S

AnTuTu Benchmark v2.8.3

Score: 7094
RAM: 1295
CPU integer: 2276
CPU float-point: 1080
2D graphics: 298
3D graphics: 1265
Database IO: 535
SD card write: (24.8 Mb/s) 150
SD card read: (37.0 Mb/s) 190
CPU frequency: 1512MHz,
Date: 2012-07-25 00:36

.

Linpack for Android

MFLOPS:192.124
Time: 0.86 Seconds
Norm Res: 3.24
Precision: 2.2200446049250313E-16

.

Basemark ES 2.0 Taiji Free

Benchmark Score: 46.13 Frames Per Second

.

NenaMark2 v2.3

Last: 60.2 frames per second
Best: 60.2 frames per second

.

Vellamo

Score: 2458

.

Quadrant

Total: 4923
CPU: 8331
Mem: 7645
I/O: 5369
2D: 1000
3D: 2269

From the looks of it, the Sony LT30p Mint can run with the big boys in the Android market although its performance is undeniably lower than that of the Galaxy S III and the HTC One S. It’s a competitive phone though that promises performance worthy of flagship status from Sony.

However, Mobile Review ventures that the Sony LT30p Mint will not be a success because Sony “never learns from their mistakes like Sony Ericsson did before them and it will price the LT30p as a flagship device asking for a price range, which is not justified.”

We’ll have to wait before the Sony LT30p Mint – which could be called the Sony Xperia Mint upon release – to hit the stores before we definitely see whether Sony commits this mistake.

Image 1 from xsix on Flickr (CC). All other images from Mobile Review

About Solon Harmony Dolor

A passion for technology and journalism makes this upcoming writer very interested in social media and technology news. Fresh from finishing an English and Journalism degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, he aims to bring interesting news to our readers .