Sony Xperia X Dual

With the Xperia X, Sony hasn’t strayed away from its original OmniBalance design philosophy, so you get a rectangular slab with rounded corners. That said, the seamless blend of 2.5D curved glass at the front and the matte-finished metal back come together to result in a device that feels better in the hand than it looks. Add to that its compact size, and you have a phone that’s quite comfy to hold in the hand. The assortment of hues this phone is available in adds a bit of flair to the mix, and the one we have with us for review is the interesting-looking Lime Gold version. The overall look can be described as elegant, if not head-turning.

With 5-inches of 1080p goodness, and the usual bunch of Sony tweaks including TRILUMINOS tech, X-Reality for mobile, and Dynamic Contrast Enhancement, the screen on the Xperia X is quite capable. It reproduces colours faithfully, and is quite sharp, with no signs of pixelation.

Sony’s take on Android is very close to stock, and in the Xperia X’s case, the platform it ships with is Android Marshmallow.

The camera features on the Xperia X are among its key highlights, and for your shooting pleasure, the phone offers a 23-meg snapper at the rear, with a 13MP sensor faces the front to serve up the selfies. Strangely, 4K video support isn’t included, and there’s no optical image stabilisation either. Video can be shot at 60fps, while slo-motion vids go up to 120fps. The primary camera does offer some interesting features, such as predictive hybrid autofocus and object tracking. When combined, these two features not only let you track a moving subject, they actually attempt to predict the said subject’s path or trajectory to be able to offer more detail and sharper shots. On top of that, the quick capture feature promises you won’t miss special moments, as you can just press the physical shutter key on the side to shoot straight from standby. With a promised shooting time of just about 0.6 seconds, the phone wakes up from slumber, launches the camera, focusses, and clicks a picture. And in our tests, these features actually worked for the most part… making the Xperia X one of the fastest shooters we’ve seen.

A hexa-core Snapdragon 650 provides the horsepower, and the chip is mated to 3 gigs of RAM. This is the same combination we’ve tasted earlier on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, and as such, we were already quite convinced about the performance it delivers. Notwithstanding the fact that the Xiaomi device is priced significantly lower than the Xperia X, Sony’s new phone delivers smooth performance overall – without giving us any big reason to complain.