Sony Xperia Z1 Review

SONY XPERIA Z1 REVIEW

   After the split of Sony Ericsson, Sony has entered the market with some bold stereotypic phones. All the phones released by them have some similarities in the design.  Sony Xperia Z1 is one such phone, being Sony's flagship model at present.

1. Brand Talk-

   This handset is manufactured by Sony, the Japanese electronics giant. This particular phone is the successor to the Xperia Z launched by Sony last year and currently holds flagship baton for Sony in the mobile market.

2. Avatars in the Market-

 There are three colours available in the market for this model which is black, white and purple. The model reviewed in this review is the black model.

3. Out of the box-

   The box looks small and simple from the outside.

 On opening the box you find the phone.

Upon lifting the separation on which the phone is kept we can see the headphones, charger pin, USB data cable, eartips and documentation.

The earphones are of good quality with good bass response.

 The USB data cable could have been a slight longer as I felt it was a bit short, but on the other side it may not cause any problems.

 

 

 

4. Design and Build Quality-

   This phone has a wonderful design and a good build quality. It is one of the strongest  features of this phone. The body is made of two pieces of high tempered glass bound by an aluminium frame. The phone looks like a stylishly clad glass bar. It looks premium all the way. It has a dimension of 144 x 74 x 8.5 mm and weighs 170g. It looks big for a 5 inch phone. But the premium feel cancels that effect. It feels very comfortable to hold in the hands. It has a 5 inch screen which is protected by shatter proof and scratch resistant glass.

 There is a front cam above the screen to the right side. Sony logo is seen sporting on the centre top. There is also a led light at the extreme top centre, which blinks when receiving a call, message or when charging the phone. 

 

 

At the back it has a Sony Logo in the centre. The 20 MP Camera on the top left and the LED light below it. There is also an NFC logo for identifying the NFC Region of the phone.

 

At the right hand side we have the micro sim slot at the top with metallic covers due to its waterproof capability. At the bottom there is a power off/on switch which has a good feel to it. Below that is the volume rocker and down below it is the camera shutter button ("thank you Sony").

At the bottom of the phone we have the speaker.

 

 To the left hand side of the phone there is a microSD slot at the top, below there is a micro USB slot.

 

 

 Both these slots are covered by a metallic flap for the waterproofing. Below these two slots there are pogo pins for dock connection. To the top there is a 3.5mm headphones jack. Overall the design and placement of buttons according to me is excellent. All the materials used make the handset look premium all the way, and considering its price tag Sony has done a wonderful job.

5. Features-

    Sony's flagship model, 5'' screen, 20 MP Camera, Good build is all that you know upto now, but let's see what the phone has got in store .

a) Screen-

   The Z1 has a 5" Full HD 1080p (1980x1080) pixel resolution Triluminous Display TFT Screen with a pixel density of 441 ppi which makes the screen look ultra-sharp. It is capable of displaying 16 Million colours. At 100% brightness it displays blacks with 0.38cd/m2 luminosity and whites of 580 cd/m2 luminosity giving it an overall compression ratio of 1513.

 

 

 

 

The X-Reality Display technology incorporated along with the screen improves viewing angles, contrast, displays saturated colours impressively. Also the reflectiveness on the screen is less and the display legibility under sunlight is good giving it a score of 2.9. It’s a multitouch display capable of registering 10 simultaneous touches. Overall the screen does justice considering the phone being the flagship model.

b) Performance-

    This phone is packed with all the latest guns and missiles. Let's see the amount of muscles it has got under its hood.  At the core it has a Quad core 2.2 Ghz Krait 400 Processor on the latest Qualcomm MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 chipset. It is powered by an Adreno 330 graphics processor. This phone has specs which is state of the art and second only to the LG G2 which has a 2.26 Ghz processor. So playing the latest games would not be an issue at all. It has 2 GB of Ram. 16 GB of Internal Memory and can support upto 64 GB of microSD card. Coming to its performance, this phone is an ultimate performer beating the LG G2, Galaxy S4 and HTC One hands down. When we ran synthetic benchmarks , the phone excelled in all of them. In Benchmark Pi (lower score the better) it scored a 112 which is just above the LG G2 which scored 108 which topped the test. In Linpack it scored 1010 which is just below the test topper LG G2 which scored 1030. IN Geekbench 3 this phone topped the test with a score of 2655. It also topped the test in AnTuTu 4 with a score of 30845. Also topping in Quadrant with a score of 20390. It also topped in GL Benchmark 2.5, GL Benchmark 2.7 and Epic Citadel with scores of 62, 25 and 55 respectively. It once again topped in SunSpider (lower score the better) with a score of 850. It scored 2401 in Browser Mark 2 and 2904 in Vellamo. Sony Xperia Z1 is one of the fastest smartphone you can have presently in the market. The Snapdragon 800 chipset really shows its performance leaving the ones with Snapdragon 600's behind.

c) Connectivity-

    This phone comes with a bunch of connectivity options. In the Cellular Area it supports all versions in GSM 2G, all versions in HSDPA 3G, and 4G LTE. It accepts only micro SIM. It supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot.  It supports Bluetooth 4.0. It supports NFC and micro USB 2.0. In the GPS Section it supports A-GPS and GLONASS. It also supports FM Radio. It also supports TV out function through the micro USB port. For the sensors it supports accelerometer, gryroscope, proximity and compass. This phone has all the connectivity options you can crave for and it does not miss out on any.

d) Software-

      This phone comes with Android Jellybean 4.2.2 installed.

 

 

 

 

You can update it to Jellybean 4.3 as of now and it will soon be getting Kitkat 4.4. For internet browsing it comes with Google Chrome, which is very impressive. It also comes bundled with the Office Suite 7 Pro, which gives you a word processor, an spreadsheet software and a presentation software.

 

e) Battery-

   This phone comes with a 3000 mAh battery. It has a great standby battery usage. Rest is descent, we get about a day's charge with web surfing and video playback. The battery is non user replaceable.  

f) Pictures, Audio, Video and Camera-

   This is also one of the strong features of this phone. The gallery has a good UI and has useful features packed into it. We can now increase the size of the thumbnails by a simple swipe gesture, it is very responsive. These all come under the pictures tab.

There is another tab called 'My Album', here you have all your online albums along with the ones stored on local network. Also there are maps and globes which show you the geo tag location of the photos. For the Audio there is the iconic Walkman player which is an updated one. It has a great UI with more options for sound enhancement.

    The updated Walkman music player, which is present on all 2013-Xperia smartphones is also on board. It offers the same cool interface as before, but this time it has more options for sound enhancement. The Walkman Player is divided into Playing and My music modes. In the My music section, you can update your album art and music information like album, year released. SensMe is also included, meaning you can filter your songs by mood - upbeat, energetic, mellow, dance, etc. You can also create playlists.  The Walkman player settings has been improved.  There's the familiar ClearAudio+ option, which determines the best audio quality settings depending on the song you're listening to. The audio output of the phone is excellent with good clarity but low loudness. The headphone output also is excellent. Coming to the video, I must say this is the best video player UI I have seen on any phone ("what the") You have beautiful preview pane at the top which shows you a glimpse of what is in the video when you select any one of them.

 

 It's connected to Gracenote, which helps you find additional information about the movies and TVs you have on the phone. It will even download posters for them and for movies; it will download metadata like genre, synopsis, director and cast. The phone showed no signs of slowdown when playing 720p and 1080p videos and could play them with ease. Also MP4, DivX, H.264, and MOV can be played without any problems but AVI, XviD and MKV formats refuse to play due to no preinstalled codecs. Finally coming to the camera, it has a 20.7MP front camera with a sensor size of 1/2.3" with Exmor RS Back Illuminated Sensor. It has a Sony G lens with a focal length of 27mm and an aperture of F/2.0. It has Sony BIONZ Processor for the image processing. Sony has packed all what they could in this phone.

 

 

The view on the viewfinder looks very fluid and smooth because of the high refresh rate of the sensor. The still image quality is superb with good colour accuracy and white balance, but the noise level s show some problems. In low light the images have a lot of noise and the noise compensation feature when kicked in removes a lot of detail from the image. For video capturing it can capture videos with a resolution of 1080p at 60fps. The video quality was fine without any issues.

 

g) Weatherproofing Ability- 

    This phone is IP58 certified, which means it is dustproof and waterproof. It can withstand water depth of 1metre for about 30 mins. The construction of the phone is such that its waterproofing abilities are not hampered in any way. It has a great protection on its ports which is incredible in my opinion.

h) Warranty-

   This phone comes with one year domestic warranty. This is as usual as other phones. International warranty would be better.

6. Conclusion-

   Finally all said, this one is a neat phone from Sony. With Splendid premium looks, good performance and a great build. This phone was released to improvise on the feature lack of the Sony Xperia Z and must say it has been successful in doing so. This phone is also reasonably priced for a flagship model of a good brand. With good overall features, I would certainly recommend this phone.