Gadgetory

so Sony is a pretty interesting company when it comes to mobile products they're not really conforming to what's going on in the industry with the bezel the screens the dual cameras and whatever else they're just sort of doing their own thing and making phones the way that they see fit and whether that's gonna work for them or work against them only time will really tell and the sony xperia x z1 is their latest flagship and it's really just more of the same from sony but this phone does have some interesting things going for it let's talk about the not so interesting stuff first if you used a sony phone within the last five or six years the design of the xz1 will look very very familiar it still has that overall boxy rectangular look but Sony has done a few things to sort of freshen up the design a little bit it has the loop design so these sides are rounded off which makes it feel a little bit more comfortable in the hand but it's still not quite as comfortable as something like a Galaxy s8 or an LG V 30 and this loop design has now been extended to the top and bottom of the phone so if you look closely the top and bottom are ever so slightly bowed out so the phone actually no longer stands vertically on its own anymore and in the hand it does feel quite nice it's completely made out of metal so it does have a very sturdy construction but the overall look of the phone just feels very dated compared to everything else we're seeing in 2017 and because sony has been using this overall design for so long it's starting to get a little bit stale at this point taking a look at the front of the xz1 the display it's not going to be the most eye-catching part about this phone the display doesn't go edge to edge it doesn't have curved glass it's just a pretty standard looking display it's 5.2 inches it's an IPS LCD with a resolution of 1080p but it is a very good-looking screen it has really nice colors really good viewing angles and it also gets plenty bright that's seeing outdoors even in direct sunlight is not an issue and the software does allow you to tweak the colors of the display you have a perfect that will give you a more natural and flatter looking image and then you have the standard mode which is the default that cranks up the vividness just a little bit and that you have a super vivid mode which really cranks up the saturation and the contrast but this was my least favorite of the three modes because it looks really unnatural so I just sort of stuck with the standard mode which is a perfect balance between the professional and the super vivid mode now the bezels surrounding the display are quite large especially along the top and bottom but Sony does make good use of these thicker bezels by giving you front-facing speakers which I do appreciate but historically Sony's front-facing speakers have been pretty weak but on the EXCI one there's a new smart amp now that's supposed to give you 50% more sound pressure and it's supposed to make the speaker's a lot louder and they definitely do sound a little bit louder but it's still not quite as loud as other phones that I've heard and they passed with front-facing speakers so while I do appreciate the stereo sound that you get with these front-facing speakers I still wish there was a little bit more volume to these speakers just in case you're wondering the xz1 does come with a headphone jack and sony has always put a pretty big emphasis on audio with their smart phone so you have a lot of support for a lot of high res audio codecs and you also have Sony's proprietary technology that can upscale any of your music to give you a closer to high-res sound on the inside the xz1 has your typical set of 2017 flagship specs so snapdragon 835 and 4 gigabytes of ram and there's not really a whole lot to say about the performance of the x8 one it performs just about as well as any other flagship with these same specs it's very fast its responsive it opens apps quickly multitasking is not a problem here either with bored gigabytes of RAM and it also plays all the graphically demanding games perfectly fine without dropping any frames so there's really no issues here at all with the performance of the XE one in terms of features it's got all the typical stuff that you might expect from a Sony flagship its IP 68 so it's protected against submersion and water or using it in the rain it has 64 gigabytes of internal storage and it also has a micro SD card slot if you need more but one thing that it does not have is a fingerprint sensor at least not if you live in the u.s. which is something sony has been doing for a while now so it's just something you have to live with now as far as battery life goes it doesn't have the biggest battery that we've ever seen in a smartphone it's 2,700 milliamp hours which sounds pretty small in 2017 but that hasn't necessarily tanked the battery life in my experience I can still get through a full day with casual use the key word here being casual and that consists of checking emails web browsing social media texting and maybe the occasional YouTube video but if you're doing more intense things like gaming a lot or you're using Sony's 3d Creator app which we will get into the phone does tend to get quite warm and in that case the battery life does go down rather quickly but for most people I think the battery life is going to be perfectly fine and of course it does have the standard quick charge 3.0 so it doesn't take a whole lot of time to top off or fill up so there's a couple of things that makes this phone interesting the camera and the software let's start with the camera first so the camera is a 19 megapixel sensor that Sony is dubbing motion I and essentially what this means is it can capture unexpected motion or emotions such as a baby smiling and basically the way this works is it will actually take three photos before the one that you take yourself if it detects there's any unexpected motion or emotion in the frame and it actually works surprisingly well and because of Sony's predictive hybrid autofocus it can capture these photos with very little to no motion blur every smartphone camera right now has its own gimmick and the xz1 is no exception and the gimmick here on the EXCI one is that you can use the camera to create 3d scans through Sony's new 3d creator app and you can scan pretty much anything that you want whether it's people's faces food or any other random object and it works surprisingly well I was surprised at how well it captures details on people's faces and how eerily similar it looked and with these 3d scans you can print them off if you have a 3d printer but even if you don't have a 3d printers Sony has partnered with some online 3d printing companies like Shapeways and sculpt do if you want to print them off yourself and they've made it really simple and easy to do through the 3d creator app and eventually you'll be able to use these 3d scans as a gaming avatar or insert yourself into a game once Sony finalizes the partnerships with those companies the most important aspect of any camera of course is the picture quality and picture quality on the EXCI one is just okay in good lighting situations you can get some pretty nice-looking shots the photos are vibrant without looking overly saturated but the camera lacks a lot of dynamic range and it really crushes the shadows that you lose a lot of detail in those areas and in low-light the photos look overly processed that it makes noise really easy to see and you get a lot of weird artifacting in places that you would not expect to see them and highlights are also very overblown you get a lot of lens flares a lot of streaking and a lot of blooming and lack of OAS really hurts the performance of this camera the software experience on the XZ one might actually surprise you a little bit because it's the very first Android phone to run 8.0 Oreo out of the box and that's gonna be a big selling point for the XE one at least until people start getting their hands on Google's brand new pixel - and of course with 8.0 Oreo you get all the Oreo features they would expect like notification dots native picture and picture support a revamp settings menu etc the list goes on and on the only thing I really don't like about these software experience on the XZ one is Sony skin on top of Android while it is very light and very close to stock it hasn't really been updated to fit the aesthetics of Oreo so hopefully Sony updates that soon because right now it does feel a little bit outdated so if you're looking to buy the Sony Xperia XE one it's available now directly through Sony or other online retailers like Best Buy and Amazon for a price of $700 and $700 isn't necessarily cheap but considering we're in the era of the thousand dollar smartphones $700 doesn't sound all too bad at this point but should you buy the sony xperia x z 1 overall it's a really solid smartphone and it does all lot of things well and it has some pretty interesting things going for as well like the 3d creator app and the fact that it's running android 8.0 oreo but that selling point is going to be relatively short-lived and i think only the most die-hard of Sony fans will really appreciate this phone so if you really enjoy sony's design you really enjoy sony's mobile products then you'll really like this phone but if you're looking for just a solid Android smartphone with some really nice features there's a ton of better options out there as always thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed this review of the sony xperia XE one if you did please give it a thumbs up down below we definitely appreciate it and subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already and of course check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below and of course check out the website as well and your tooth or decom because we are 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