Gadgetory

this is the sony xperia XZ 2 it's a phone completely different than any other phone Sony's ever made but it takes some design cues from previous devices in its lineage and while older experience were sharp corner bricks of devices the XE 2 is feeling a lot more natural and I mean that quite literally the xperia x e 2 is designed around water Sony wants this thing to fit perfectly in your hand and the shiny back reflects well pretty much everything this is one of the most reflective devices I've ever used and it honestly reminds me a lot of the HTC u 11 the phones even waterproof with an IP 68 rating which fits pretty nicely around the whole ambient flow design philosophy if you only saw this phone from the front side you'd probably be tricked into thinking that Sony hadn't changed the design at all it's really squirted off like the previous experience but it does have slightly rounded corners that might give it away as an imposter the other subtle difference here is the addition of dual stereo speakers Sony's added a very thin slit at the bottom to send sound towards you and it's also using the earpiece as a secondary speaker now these speakers actually sound really good and I'm actually preferred them to the pixel to excels though they didn't seem to get quite as loud Sony's also completely redesigned their vibration system with what they call a dynamic vibration motor this is much larger than typical vibration systems and it was designed to immerse you in your media this happens with video music and really anything that makes sound from your phone after testing it with music and movies I found that it's really nothing more than a gimmick I'm glad Sony put more thought into the haptics on this phone but I'd really have preferred that they focused on making that vibration motor as good as the iPhones before mixing it in with media the xe2 is using a 5.7 inch 1080 by 2160 panel at 424 PPI and it honestly looks great Sony hasn't switched over to OLED yet but I am totally fine with LCD for now it's still pretty difficult to get a good OLED unless you're one of a few select manufacturers and I'd prefer that Sony used a great LCD display before using a mediocre OLED one the screens HD are compatible to mean you can watch all that new content with less banding and a much wider range of color there isn't a ton of HDR content out there right now unless using a streaming service like Netflix but the phone can actually upscale non HDR content to look better than it did previously they included a copy of the Jumanji trailer on this thing to demonstrate the HDR effect and it actually looked pretty good we turn this thing over you'll really start to see where Sony changed the design the phone's pretty thick at 11.1 millimeters but I really didn't mind the thicker rounded design makes it easier to hold which is really important with this phone because otherwise it's a little unwieldy the fingerprint reader and camera lens are really just placed in the wrong spots almost every time I picked up this phone my finger landed directly on the camera lens sony says that they went with this Omni balanced design to help make it feel even lis distributed but I would have preferred that this was a little top-heavy if it met the fingerprint reader and camera were in a better spot the xe2 is slippery like really slippery they fell out of my pocket probably a dozen times this week and I've got a number of hairline scratches on the screen I need up needing to set it facedown on the table while I worked and even then it made me a little bit nervous the rear camera is 19 megapixels and it was honestly pretty disappointing this is an HDR enabled camera that can shoot 4k video but the quality was just lacking photos didn't seem to adjust well to different lighting situations and the highlights almost always seemed blown out Lulay shots resulted in smeared images which I can only assume was the fault of badly adjusted shutter speed and they really hoped that Sony improves on this camera in their dual lens Xperia XC 2 premium the selfie camera is sadly equally as bad it's 5 megapixels which is a little bit low for today's social media fueled world and the images came out looking pretty soft other manufacturers are rapidly making these front gamers better and I'd really like to see Sony jump on that train ignoring the bad quality of the camera itself Sony's often some interesting features to make this phone more valuable for a small subset of users the 3d imaging feature is back and it produces higher quality models than last year's model Sony's enabled the front facing camera to model your own face and I was actually pretty surprised at how well it worked this is a really neat feature though so it's only really valuable if you're a 3d animator or just won a 3d bust of your own head Sony's also reintroduced the 960 FPS super slo-mo feature at an updated 1080p resolution but the footage just looked bad I tested this in an extremely well-lit environment but the video still came out super grainy it's fun for a good minute but it's definitely unusable for any serious projects when it comes to the internals the xc2 is one of the best phones you can get right now it's got Qualcomm's latest snapdragon 845 processor 64 gigabytes of internal storage with microSD card expansion and 4 gigabytes of RAM now you could definitely fit some more ram in there and I'd love to see the storage expanded to 128 gigabytes but the 4 gigs of ram was more than enough for everyday use and having the option to upgrade storage is awesome some other phones manage RAM much worse than this thing and I never saw any lag during multitasking with a variety of apps performance was the least of my issues here and I'm really glad that Sony made their Android Oreo skin so simple and uncluttered that 8:45 is actually pretty great with battery life I saw about 6 hours of screen on time with the 3180 million power battery and the phone charged up really really fast with Qualcomm quick charge 3.0 though I'm hoping that they pick up 4.0 in the next version of this phone Sony's new phone reimagines what the Xperia line is meant to be its specked out internals wonderful screen and great speakers make a strong contender but does this awkward shape gimmicky features and $799 price tags still make it worth of purchase well I like this phone quite a lot I'd probably wait to see what oneplus and Google do before jumping into a new Sony flagship so that's the sony xperia x z2 if we missed anything you'd like to know more about make sure you leave your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned to our socials and website because of course we are your source for all things Android