Sony Xperia XZ Premium
Sony is back with its 4K screen party trick, and it’s only marginally less silly than it was in 2015
“4K remains silly on a 5.5in display. It’s silly because there’s precious little 4K content. It’s silly because it drains the battery”
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £540 (£648 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275sony
Back in 2015, I reviewed the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium. What made it premium, according to Sony, was its 4K screen at a time when almost all screens on smartphones were 1080p. It was silly, especially given that it only worked in 4K mode for two Sony apps; YouTube and Netflix didn’t support mobile 4K. Even if they did, the awkward truth is that you don’t have magic eyes: you can’t see the difference between 4K and 1080p on a screen that small.
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, 4K remains silly on a 5.5in display. It’s silly because there’s still precious little 4K content for Android. It’s silly because it drains the battery.
That last point also means that Sony doesn’t run the phone in 4K most of the time: just an upscaled 1080p. Which in turn generates another silly point: if it’s not dazzling enough to bother with 90% of the time, is 4K worth it for the handful of cases when it can be used? “It’s great for virtual reality,” I hear you cry. Sure, but VR games aren’t rendered in 4K anyway.
Fortunately, the LCD screen stacks up rather well for quality. Brightness goes up to a very solid 524cd/m2 and the contrast ratio is great at 1,116:1. When Netflix and Amazon get round to supporting HDR through their mobile apps, the Xperia XZ Premium will be there to take advantage, too.
This Premium model benefits from the latest Snapdragon 835 processor, an extra gigabyte of RAM and double the storage of the regular XZ, at 64GB. The result is a phone that, unsurprisingly, feels buttery smooth to use and delivered similar benchmark results to the HTC U11 ( see the full set of results on p65).
Like the U11, the XZ Premium didn’t perform particularly well in our video-playback test, dying just a minute over the ten-hour mark – significantly less impressive than its nearby rivals. Anecdotally, however, the XZ Premium is one of the stronger performers we’ve seen, lasting an average of one day, 6hrs 36mins when measured with the GSAM battery monitor over the space of a week. I put the blame for the less-than-stellar official test results firmly at the door of that power-hungry display.
The phone continues to impress with the camera, a 19-megapixel unit with an aperture of f/2.0 and both phase-detect and laser autofocus. Those are similar specifications to the Google Pixel, and in well-lit conditions Sony’s latest certainly gives the big G a run for its money.
It’s good but, in my opinion, still not quite there. While the colour is certainly more vibrant on Sony’s snapper, it oversharpens objects, which results in a loss of detail. Things are worse in low light, with the oversharpening resulting in noisy patches with severe grain in darker spots.
Sony has another trick up its sleeve for the Xperia XZ Premium, and that’s ultra-slow-motion video capture at 960 frames per second. And this works brilliantly, provided you’re in a well-lit area.
Then we come to the design. Say what you like about Sony, but it has a style, and it sticks to it. While the likes of Apple, Samsung, HTC and LG have rattled through different aesthetics with practically every generation, Sony has stuck with its original formula: sharp angles, squared edges, reassuringly chunky.
That’s not quite the whole story: there are slight design changes compared to the XZ, but they really are slight. The long edges are more curved than the previous model, while the top and bottom of the phone are more severely square, leaving behind sharp corners that have a nasty habit of digging holes in your pockets.
Even if you aren’t seduced by its looks, you can’t fault Sony for getting the basics right: the Xperia XZ Premium is IP68 water-resistant; it has a microSD slot; and its fingerprint reader is positioned on the right-hand side, integrated with the power button. In my view, that’s the best place for it. There’s even a dedicated camera button and, happily, room for a 3.5mm headphone jack. Take note, HTC and Apple.
A 4K screen on a phone is still daft. But this is a marked improvement on the Xperia XZ in other areas, and while expensive, £650 matches rival flagship phones. In other words, you’re no longer paying as big a premium for a ridiculous feature as you were with the last generation.
But then there’s Samsung. The S8 costs only £30 more, and in return you get a lot more screen space. That’s the kind of price difference that becomes even less visible than the pixels on the Xperia XZ Premium’s screen when comparing monthly contracts. Octa-core 2.45GHz/1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor 4GB RAM Adreno 540 graphics 5.5in LCD screen, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution 64GB storage microSD slot 19MP/13MP rear/front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 NFC
USB-C 3,230mAh battery Android 7.1 77 x 7.9 x 156mm (WDH) 191g 1yr warranty