Sony Xperia XZ

The Sony Xperia XZ is a very good looking phone, no two ways about it. It oozes a premium feel that we’ve come to expect from high-end flagship smartphones these days — and that is precisely why our first impression immediately fades away after about two hours because it doesn’t do anything truly revolutionary with the design like the Moto Z. The phone is available in three colours - Forest Blue, Mineral Black, and Platinum. We got the Mineral Black variant for review and if not for the silver-coloured power button, the Xperia XZ would easily vanish into the dark like a stealth assassin. 

The one thing that most of us expect in our flagship smartphones these days is a 2K display but the Sony Xperia XZ’s 5.2-inch display uses a full HD (1,920 x 1,080) IPS LCD panel. And quite honestly, a display of this resolution is more than sufficient for daily usage. The only quantifiable benefit of a higher resolution display is in virtual reality but mainstream adoption is still pretty far away. Moreover, considering Sony’s penchant for making flagship smartphones every six months, using a FHD display in its current one is clearly a non-issue.

Over the years, Sony has been bringing minor refinements to its software. Now the UI of the software is close to stock, which is a good thing. On the flipside, you get a load of bloatware and annoying embellishments that feel rather unnecessary.

The thing with flagship smartphones these days is that we expect the absolute best in terms of the camera, and the long and short of it is that the Sony Xperia XZ has an average one at best despite using custom 23-megapixel IMX300 sensor. This doesn’t bode well for a company that essentially makes the best camera sensors out there. The 23MP 1/2.3-inch sensor which has an aperture of f/2.0 and it is coupled with a 24mm lens. On the front is a 13MP shooter with a 22mm wide angle lens. The camera also comes with three autofocus technologies - a hybrid of contrast and phase detection, and a separate laser autofocus. Sony has also added an RGBC-IR sensor (RedGreenBlueClear-InfraRed) to automatically sense the correct white balance for the particular lighting condition. The dedicated shutter button is a neat addition in our opinion; it opens the app swiftly and is ready to take a photo in a jiffy. 

The Sony Xperia XZ uses the fairly standard Snapdragon 820 quad-core SoC that uses two pairs of Kyro cores clocked at 2.15GHz and 1.6GHz each. This SoC also includes an Adreno 530 GPU for graphics intensive applications. Sony has added 3GB of RAM for apps and services as well, which might seem low but we still don’t have conclusive proof that more RAM means better performance. And, for most use cases the 3GB RAM is more than sufficient.