sony xperia xz2
Sony’s back with its best flagship phone in years, bringing with it worldfirst features and impressive specs £699 sonymobile.com/gb
…But hold on there, Samsung, because Sony might just have released the sleeper phone hit of the year
It’s okay, you can breathe a sigh of relief now... Sony has finally delivered the bold overhaul its Xperia range so badly needed, updating the design with a sleek mirrored finish and less blocky frame, and offering a great set of features inside.
Bragging rights
On the front of the Xperia XZ2 you get a Full HD+ (1080 x 2160) display that supports HDR and benefits from Sony’s X-Reality Dynamic Contrast Enhancer, creating images and video that look super vibrant. It’s a perfect match for the XZ2’s most advanced and exclusive feature: HDR video recording. This is a big leap forward for smartphones and looks lush – no surprise here, really, given how Sony’s flagships have always been strong with video. Obviously whomever’s viewing these videos needs an HDR screen to properly enjoy them, but it makes showing off your holiday movies to friends on your OLED TV more impressive.
You also get 960fps super slowmotion recording, as with the Samsung Galaxy S9, but on the XZ2 it’s in crisp 1080p quality rather than the S9’s mere 720p.
Sony has put a lot of effort into enhancing the XZ2’s low-light performance, in addition to a faster image processor, all of which makes it easy to take detailed snaps with plenty of depth. Colour reproduction is also good, with clean vibrant distinction. And we’re feeling the right hand-side mounted camera button, enabling immediate booting into the camera app.
There’s a little noise when zoomed into images, but this is the only small flaw compared to the S9’s camera.
Sony normally knocks it out of the park with internal hardware spec, and it’s the same story with the Xperia XZ2. The phone is rocking a all-round stellar hardware package that includes the rapid Snapdragon 845 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 3,180mAh battery supporting wireless fast charging.
The XZ2 has a rear fingerprint sensor that isn’t quite as comfortable to use as equivalents from HTC and Samsung, yet is far enough from the camera sensor that you won’t smudge it accidentally.
The XZ2 comes equipped with some serious audio credentials, too. High-res audio is delivered, along with DSEE HX technology that upscales files, and there’s a pair of stereo speakers that have been tuned to reduce distortion at higher volumes. The speakers are good but no replacement for a proper external speaker. Playing music from the phone on headphones was excellent – everything was clear and rich.
Pleasingly, the Sony Xperia XZ2 comes with Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box, and while the interface isn’t stock Android it is only very lightly skinned, so it still feels familiar and comfortable to use.
The battery life held up very well in day-to-day usage scenarios, with medium usage leading to the phone losing just over 50 per cent of its battery power over 24 hours.
Charging was rapid, especially from a low-level starting point, and it took the XZ2 about 40 minutes to attain two-thirds battery life when plugged in. The now widespread Qi wireless charging is here and it’s easy to position the XZ2 to get a charge (not the case with some phones).
Popularity contest
We’re not sure whether the Xperia XZ2 is going to be hugely underrated this year and struggle to sell, or if it will be a sleeper hit for Sony, but it definitely deserves to be the latter. The phone delivers on every hardware front and is housing some world-first features to help separate it from the crowd. Its screen, despite not inheriting the amazing 4K display of last year’s XZ Premium, is incredibly vibrant and pleasing to use.
Between that and the push to the new curved, sleeker design that feels far more at home among its premium competitors offerings, the XZ2 is much closer to the S9 in quality. It’s still not quite there – the bezels are chunkier and the 3D Creator tool (Sony’s equivalent of Samsung’s AR Emoji) is a let down – but it feels competitive, especially given that it costs (marginally) less than the S9.
While there’s no getting around the fact that the S9 is still the most polished Android phone overall, the Xperia XZ2’s strong hardware package and fully featured camera system have won us over enough to recommend it if you’re into video (and photography in general) on your phone as, in this regard, the XZ2 is the best option right now.