Sony Z

The Xperia™ Z

Introducing the precision engineered full HD smartphone which packs 443pixels per inch on its wide 5 (12.7cms) screen. Its slim 7.9 mm body, with its reflective glass surface, looks and feels slick. Here are more innovations that Xperia Z brings in its slim & stylish package. 

The Sony Xperia Z is Sony’s flagship smartphone for the new year, and I think it is unabashedly Sony Mobile’s best effort yet. Save for inductive charging, the Xperia Z has pretty much everything you could possibly want in a top-end smartphone: a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro SOC, 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch 1080p LCD display, 16GB of internal storage with a microSD card slot, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, LTE, NFC, a 2330mAh battery and a 13-megapixel autofocus camera encased in an IP57-rated waterproof and dustproof body constructed from 2 sheets of glass and a matte plastic frame. On paper, the Xperia Z offers a tremendous amount of power – right up there with the latest Android flagship devices like the HTC Butterfly – in an extremely beautiful and well-built package. Should you buy this phone? Read on to find out.

Hardware and Design

In terms of physical design, the Xperia Z is unmistakably Sony in terms of its aesthetics. Just like the Acro S, the Xperia Z is a rectangular slab that actually looks distinctive; the detailing around the power button is lovely, as is the lanyard eyelet built into the bottom right corner of the device. The back of the device is completely flush with the exception of the camera lens which is sunken ever so slightly; the inserts on the sides of the Xperia Z are apparently shock-absorbing and are colour-matched with the back; the flaps over the ports and card slots (necessary to prevent water from seeping in) have rubber plugs on the inside – they fit tightly but are easy to detach. The only physical controls on the Xperia Z, apart from the aforementioned power button, is a volume rocker; both the volume control and power button are really solid and offer excellent 

I’ve always been a huge fan of waterproof smartphones because they unlock a whole new range of possibilities regarding what you can do with your phone and where you can take it. You can shoot photos and video in the rain, for instance. You can capture video underwater, at the beach or at the pool. Walking in a light drizzle? There’s no need to stop using your phone. Spill something on your phone? Wash it off under a tap. Drop your phone in the toilet? Fret not, not only will it continue to work, you can get it clean and sanitized again. You can keep your phone clean, all the time, by physically washing it. However, the loudspeaker strangely becomes unusable the moment water gets in it (seriously, you can hardly hear it) and only works properly when the water has dried out. The Xperia Z lacks a physical camera button, which means that it’s not really possible to capture photos underwater. I also wish that the Xperia Z supported inductive charging; given that the microUSB port is hidden under a flap, inductive charging would have made charging much more convenient on this device.

On the other hand, the Xperia Z is large, angular and slippery, which means that it’s difficult to get a good grip on it. I’ve spent a few days with it, and I still feel like I’m about to drop it. In addition, you definitely feel it in your pocket all the time. A 5-inch phone is just too large to use one-handed in my humble opinion – I thought my 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus was huge until I picked up the Xperia Z, and I can just about use the Galaxy Nexus one-handed in a pinch. With the Xperia Z, I have to slide it up and down my palm in order to use it one-handed. Because the glass back is so slippery, it genuinely feels like a precarious way to use this phone. The Xperia Z feels like a super-sized, slimmed-down iPhone 4S in the hand.

The landmark feature of the Xperia Z, just like the HTC Butterfly, is that 5-inch 1080p display with a pixel density of 440ppi. It’s a TFT LCD wrapped up in Sony’s marketing-speak, which makes it a Full HD Reality Display with OptiContrast Panel and Mobile Bravia Engine 2. As far as LCD displays go, it is a beautiful panel with pixels so tiny that you just can’t spot them no matter how closely you peer at the display. Now, it isn’t as bright or as vibrant as an AMOLED display, but that is a fact of the display technology used here. Unfortunately, viewing angles are mediocre – the display looks washed out to various degrees unless you’re looking at it dead-centre and visibility in sunlight is relatively poor because the display darkens significantly when viewed outdoors. The Xperia Z does not have a bad display – it has a very, very good display, but it misses the mark of perfection by a few points. Make what you will of that; personally, I can’t really tell the difference in pixel density and overall fidelity between a 720p display and the Xperia Z’s 1080p display in everyday use. In fact, because the user interface elements remain around the same size on the Xperia Z as they are on a 720p display, you can’t even fit more on one screen, making it even harder to see the real utility of a 1080p display.

The Xperia Z, as expected, is an absolute screamer in terms of benchmark performance as well as perceived speed. There’s just about no lag or stuttering to be seen, scrolling is buttery smooth and the Xperia Z handles almost everything without any evidence of slowdown. For once, Sony has delivered a flagship smartphone that can compete head-on with its biggest rivals without walking away completely embarrassed. While I’ve actually seen my Galaxy Nexus consistently launch apps a touch quicker than the Xperia Z, it’s really hard to have any real complaints about the Xperia Z in this department.

 

I’ve been using the Xperia Z rather heavily over the past few days I’ve had it, and I’ve seen its 2330mAh battery last between 7 to 9 hours before the first low battery warning appears, with around 3 hours of screen on time. I think these are very respectable figures considering the fact that I was pretty much hammering it, but you might still want to have an external battery pack handy if you’ve got a long day ahead with this device. Of course, Sony has included some power management features with the Xperia Z, including a Stamina mode that disables cellular data when the screen is off. I haven’t used them because I haven’t felt like I needed them; the Xperia Z is perfectly capable of staying alive through an entire day at school and the 1-hour journey back home and I’ve been pretty satisfied with it in this regard.

Camera:

The 13-megapixel camera on the Xperia Z is rather impressive as far as Android phones go; it produces images that are very decent in terms of captured detail, colour reproduction and noise levels in both daytime and low-light conditions. It’s definitely a much-improved camera from last year’s flagship, the Xperia S, and I’ve been very satisfied with it. Check out the photo samples for yourselves:

The camera app on the Xperia Z has loads of options, including an interesting HDR video mode that I haven’t had the opportunity to try just yet, an intelligent auto mode like what you would get on any decent point-and-shoot camera, a sweep panorama mode and a range of scene modes in addition to the usual touch focus, exposure compensation, ISO and white balance features. One quirk of Sony’s camera app is that you cannot use the camera on the Xperia Z while listening to music or any kind of audio; I really wish this would have been fixed long ago.