What Are We Missing From The Sony Xperia XZ Premium? (That Bezel Tho.!)

    Whats up? its Sony here, exited enough? now there are tons of tons of reviews about this flagship but im taking a step to review this phone after 3 months of usage,  you all would want to know how baad or good it is after couple of months usage right?  yeah right.. so why not stick around and see what i have to offer? oh yeas i give away money ( no joking)  lets see what it feels to own  this device after few months of usage...

The XZ Premium is all about excess. Why just have one piece of cake, when you could eat the whole thing? It’s packed with high-tech hardware, including the phone world’s first 4K, HDR screen, and a slow-motion camera that’s faster than just about anything else out there. At least when it comes to phones, anyway.

  Specs and Performance

The vast amount of pixels need a beefy processor to be moved around at high speed, and with its overall 20% to 25% performance increase, the new octa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 835 is perfect for the job. Qualcomm claims a 50% performance increase on the CPU side and 25% on the GPU side. We have not run the benchmarks yet, so we cannot vouch for this until April when the first device with the processor will be introduced to the market.

In fact, the new Adreno 540 GPU supports HDR10, which is a standard for the next-generation video content with High Dynamic Range (HDR) in 10-bit color. Snapdragon 835 devices are “UltraHD Premium Ready”, a TV/Video standard backed by large companies.

I guess that is the reason why the XZ Premium features a 4K HDR display, since Sony has always been big about playing the content exactly the way it was intended to be seen. With the new GPU, we can also expect higher performance for mobile gaming, specifically for 3D games.

Thanks to the integrated x16 modem (4×4 MIMO / LTE Cat16), the device is 4G LTE Gigabit compatible, so if you live in Sydney where the world’s first LTE Gigabit network by carrier Telstra rolled out a few weeks ago, you could enjoy up to 1GBps download speed. When there are a lot of simultaneous connections it is more likely to get 400 MBps or 300 MBps. According to Qualcomm several operators are testing their own infrastructure right now, but no exact timeframe for potential launches was provided.

On the data transfer side, besides the USB 3.1 connector that offers 5 Gbps speed for external transfer, the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) offers high-speed internal memory access at 1.5GB/s (!!), 3X the speed of the traditional eMMC internal memory. The XZ premium comes with 64GB internal memory, 4G RAM and a microSD slot for up to 256GB of extended memory, While playing with the phone, the Android 7.0-powered user interface was fast and responsive.

The Snapdragon 835 CPU is as new and powerful as you can get on a phone, and it’s easily fast enough to run anything in the Google Play Store. 4GB of RAM is still the sweet spot for swift multitasking, too. 64GB of built-in storage is ample, and you can always add more with a microSD card. Battery life isn’t decimated by that 4K screen, either - you’ll get to the end of the day before it’s time to recharge.

It’s a shame Sony didn’t put as much effort into design as it did with the hardware, though. The XZ Premium might be slightly shinier than its Full HD sibling, but you’d have a hard time picking the more potent phone out - they look almost identical. Compared to the skinny, streamlined Galaxy S8, it looks very old-school.

If you insist on the best hardware, the Xperia XZ is practically unrivalled, but sometimes too much cake can make you sick. Learn when to put down the fork, and you’ll be much happier in the long run.

    Camera

    On paper, the XZ Premium’s camera should absolutely wipe the floor with the competition. The oversized 1/2.3" sensor tops out at 19MP and has both phase-detect and laser autofocus to back it up. In practice, though, it tends towards overexposure, and overly aggressive image processing leaves your snaps looking unnaturally sharp. Video is another matter, though: ultra-slow motion clips at 960fps play life back at 1/40th of real time, letting you recreate all those Matrix fantasies without pro-grade equipment.

The cameras on the Xperia XZ Premium are pretty much the same as they are on the Xperia XZs. On the back, you get a 19-megapixel Motion Eye camera with a stacked sensor, which allows you to capture video at 960fps for a super-slow-motion effect. The camera captures about one second's worth of footage and then stretches it to about five seconds, which is fun to play with. You also get 5-axis stabilisation for the front and rear cameras, 4K video recording, and the ability to launch the camera app and capture an image by simply holding the shutter button down

Here are some images samples taken by Phonearena.com,





And of course I would love to talk about The Motion Eye is a large 1/ 2.3” sensor (7.7mm diagonal), larger than competitive smartphone’s sensors, according to Sony, and is able to deliver super slow motion movies at up to 1,000 frames per second (approximately 8x faster than conventional products*) in full HD (1920×1080 pixels) – thanks to its DRAM layer. Check the the second part of the video demo above, you will see how Super Slow Motion works, This makes the XZ Premium the “world’s first smartphone to feature super slow motion video”, which effectively capture 960 frames per second for two seconds during any video recording session. Users have to tap the Super Slow Motion icon on the screen to trigger the 2-second capture. Previously, Sony had cameras that captured at 960 FPS (equivalent to a 40X slow-motion) with the RX100 IV and RX10 II. It is amazing to see this technology make its way into phones.

      Design

    Hey... so whats up with that bezel tho ? okay i can hold onto that but clearly to me  they look ugly on my sight... So Sony’s signature sharp rectangles haven’t really changed since the first Xperia Z arrived in 2014, and the XZ Premium follows that trend. There’s 2.5D glass on the front and back, now, and the fingerprint sensor sticking out the side is surprisingly convenient, but those top and bottom bezels are looking particularly beefy next to LG and Samsung’s latest.  The phone measures 156 x 77mm and packs a 5.5-inch screen. For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S8 measures 148.9 x 68.1 mm and manages to squeeze in a 5.8-inch screen, it feels impressively thin at 7.9mm, however, and rock solid as well with not flexing or creaking.

The phone will come in Luminous Chrome, Deep sea Black or a rather fetching Bronze Pink colourway. It’s water resistant, and the finger print sensor is located in the side-mounted power button. We really like this location. Also, the large bezels make space for front mounted speakers. That's great if you use internal speakers a lot, as they won't get covered by your palms.

One final thing we need to mention about the design is just how reflective it is, as is exemplified by our images. It really could be used as a mirror, and looks great after it’s just been polished, but unfortunately, most of the time it’ll be covered in greasy fingerprints. Now, personally, that doesn't bother me, but it may annoy some, slightly more anal, smartphone users.

The HDR display does have a noticeably better colour gamut than comparable non-HDR displays. We tested this with some sample clips from YouTube, and we found performance on the Sony Xperia XZ Premium to be a bit better compared to the display on the Galaxy S8+, delivering slightly better details in the highlights.

   Audio performance on the Xperia XZ Premium is equally good through headphones, with a set of useful enhancements like ClearAudio+ and Surround sound (VPT) to take advantage of. You can fine tune the frequencies with EQ presets or set it manually. You don’t have to worry about blocking the speakers with your palms since they face forward, however, the volume doesn’t get very loud.

 Conclusion 

   With the heating issues that plagued its predecessors out of the way, Sony's newest flagship is a legitimate competitor to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is just as powerful, has an excellent display, is waterproof, has decent battery life, and offers a very good set of cameras. Its main weaknesses are its aesthetics and ergonomics, and the new Samsungs smoke the Xperia in this regard. We really hope to see a more modern design language in Sony’s next generation. The chrome finish might tempt some buyers but isn’t practical for real-world usage, so we highly recommend you look at the other colour options if you’re considering buying this phone.

    At the time of writing this review, the Sony Xperia XZ Premium is priced at Rs. 59,990, which seems a bit on the higher side considering that there's only a relatively small spec bump compared to the Xperia XZs. If Sony hopes to push good number of units off the shelf, then it needs to get more aggressive with pricing, as the Galaxy S8 would undoubtedly look more attractive to buyers.

    Besides high pixel count, Sony offers the world’s first Super Slow Motion video capture at 960 fps in 1080p resolution, a high-speed anti-distortion shutter, and predictive capture, Thanks to its new 3-layer Motion Eye image sensor.   Powered by the powerful Snapdragon 835, the fastest SoC from Qualcomm, which improves power efficiency by 50%, CPU performance by 50% and GPU performance by 25%, the device delivers an impressive 4K HDR experience on the display, with deep contrasts and a broad color gamut.

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