Gadgetory

what's up guys lon here from Android authority and this is the Sony Xperia x8 ooh ultra and this is Sony's newest mid-range smartphone it's arguably not quite as exciting as their upcoming flagship the XE too but it's still worth taking a look at because it gives us a pretty good idea of what Sony is trying to do here in 2018 and the direction that they're headed so I've been using this for the past week now and I want to give you guys my thoughts on it so let's get right into it so I want to start with the design of the XA 2 ultra because I think that's where you're gonna notice a pretty significant amount of changes and when you're looking at this phone from a distance you might not really notice anything it still has the same boxy rectangular look as other Sony devices but once you look a little bit closer you will notice some differences here so the first thing you might see is that the bezels are a lot smaller all the way around you won't really notice it quite as much on the top and bottom because they're still kind of thick but on the sides they're practically non-existent and the screen basically runs edge to edge now so it sort of catches it up with the other designs that we're seeing on the market it's completely made out of aluminum so it has a really solid and sturdy feel to it and it has some other really nice design touches as well like the slightly curved back and the curved sides and then the chamfered edges along the top and bottom to give it a more premium look one thing I will say about the XA 2 ultra is that it definitely lives up to the Ultra name this is a very big phone and normally I don't really talk about the sizes of Android phones anymore because pretty much every Android phone out there is a big phone and a lot of manufacturers have done a really nice job of making those big phones feel smaller by shrinking down the bezels and also switching to 18 by 9 screens and the x8 to ultra does do some of that obviously with the thinner bezels but it still has a 16 by 9 display so it still feels incredibly wide and it's also really tall and really thick that it's a little bit uncomfortable to use in one hand if you like big phones you probably won't mind it but for me I'm just not a fan of how big this phone feels just in case you're wondering xa to ultra does have a headphone jack so they are keeping that feature around for their mid-range lineup but unfortunately we can't say the same thing when it comes to their flagships now the other big change here that you're gonna notice is the placement of the fingerprint sensor this used to be embedded in the side mounted power button but it now has been moved to the back underneath the camera and I like this placement it's very easy to reach with an index finger it's nice and spacious and it's also pretty fast at unlocking and the best part about it now is that it finally works in the US Thank You Sony as I mentioned earlier this is a 16 by 9 display and it measures in at 6 inches with a resolution of 1080p and 1080p spread across a 6 inch screen isn't going to result in the sharpest looking panel but it still looks great to my eyes I can still comfortably read text and browse webpages and it's also very vibrant especially if you use the built-in super vivid mode which really pumps up the color and contrast and it is an IPS panel but sony has always done a really great job with their smart phone displays and the XA 2 ultra is no exception I have great viewing angles and it also gets plenty bright that viewing it outdoors is not really an issue on the inside it's packing the Snapdragon 630 processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM which are pretty run-of-the-mill mid-range specs but it's still plenty fast and responsive I haven't had any issues with lag and 4 gigabytes of RAM is still plenty for a smooth multitasking experience it's not gonna give you the craziest benchmark numbers if you care about that sort of thing but in terms of real-world use I don't think there's really a whole lot to complain about one of the biggest benefits to the Snapdragon 630 processor is the battery efficiency and when you pair that with the massive 3580 milliamp hour battery of the XA 2 ultra you have a recipe for some really awesome battery life and the battery life on the XA 2 ultra is fantastic it easily gets me through 2 full days of heavy use and a consistent 6 hours of screen on time sometimes even close to 7 so if you're a heavy user or a light user you should have no problems getting through a full day on this phone one of the more interesting features of the XA to ultra is actually the cameras more specifically the front-facing cameras because there's two of them the main sensor is a 16 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization which is gonna help with low-light and also help you take less blurry selfies if you have a shaky hand the second camera is an 8 megapixel wide-angle sensor that is gonna make it a lot easier to fit more people into the frame or fit more of the background into the frame but it's at the expense of slightly lower quality next to the 16 megapixel camera is what sony calls a slow sync flash and what this is supposed to do is properly illuminate your face and the background when you're taking a selfie because normally what tends to happen when you use a flash on the front-facing camera is that your face will be illuminated but the background remains completely dark and this is supposed to solve that and in everyday practice it does work you do get to see a lot more of the background but you also see a lot more noise get introduced into the shot so it really isn't quite as impressive as it seems on the back side is a 23 megapixel camera with an aperture of f28 oh and it's capable of a maximum ISO level of 12,800 which is pretty high for a smartphone but something that I thought was really weird is that you can't manually dial in that ISO level with Sony's manual mode it's just something that happens automatically when you're in a really dark situation even then you're not really gonna want to shoot at those ISO levels anyways because there's gonna be an incredible amount of noise and at around a thousand ISO or higher you can already see a lot of noise creeping into the shots and low-light shots in general are not really that great on this camera they're very washed out when it comes to color highlights are overexposed and they're very muddy when it comes to detail the camera does bear a lot better in well-lit or daylight situations which is not really all that surprising you're gonna get much better color reproduction and better sharpness and I would say the cameras biggest weakness is its lack of dine range it really crushes the shadows that you lose a lot of detail in those areas and HDR mode does help out a lot with that but I'm not a fan of how it's buried in the settings menu and it's only accessible in manual mode which makes it feel a little bit cumbersome and unintuitive now as far as the software goes it's Android 8.0 Oreo with Sony's Xperia customizations on top and I like Sony's software because it keeps the experience pretty close to stock but you do get some usual Sony customization like the Xperia theme engine and the PlayStation integration and there are some other Sony pre installed applications but it's nothing that we haven't really seen before from previous Sony phones now specific to the XA to ultra is a one-handed mode that lets you shrink the screen down and makes the phone easier to use in one hand and it has some other nice additional UI tweaks like letting you shift the dialer to one side to make everything easier to reach if you're looking to pick up an X a to ultra it's available now as an unlocked GSM device and you can find it through carriers like Best Buy in Amazon and at the time of this video it's actually a little bit cheaper on Amazon but the normal price is 450 bucks if this was a sub 400 or smartphone I would say this is a no-brainer purchase because it does have a lot of really good things going for it and it's a pretty solid mid-range smartphone from Sony it has a much more modern design it has long lasting battery life and it has a fingerprint sensor that finally works in the US but at 450 bucks it puts it pretty close to budget flagship territory with bones like the 1 + 5 t and honor view 10 which can be had for fifty dollars more and arguably offer a better bang for the buck so at $450 it's a little bit tough to recommend and like many Sony phones that have come before it the price of the XA 2 ultra is going to be its biggest downfall so that pretty much wraps it up for this review guys I hope you all enjoyed it if you did please give it a thumbs up we definitely appreciate it subscribe to the channel which is down below if you haven't already hit that notification valve so you don't miss out on future videos and of course check us out on social media in Graham Twitter snapchat Google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below and of course check the website as well for more in-depth coverage and Ruth or decom because we are your source for all things Android