Gadgetory

with Sony's mobile future on certain three new Xperia z5 phones are released this year a compact version which is more affordable smaller and made with more plastic pieces a premium model which is pretty pricey a little more showy and pushes the envelope a little but right in the middle we have the standard Sony Xperia z5 hello everybody I'm crystal and Gary Sims at a great review on the Xperia z5 compact a couple weeks ago so make sure you go check that out too to see the differences between these two devices but for now let's take a closer look at the Sony Xperia z5 when it comes to design Sony hasn't had any drastic changes in their Xperia but that might not be too much of a bad thing for some people the z5 is very square like the other Xperia films the corners are ever so slightly rounded but nowhere near as much as other phones I always thought the LG g4 looked very rectangular but it's nothing compared to the z5 s design it's definitely not my favorite smartphone when it comes to design but I do think it has a sense of luxury and elegant Ness to it more so than other smartphones on the market right now around the z5 we have a smooth metal frame with frosted glass on the back of the phone it looks really beautiful and feels really good too but the glass does make it a little slippery especially since there's a frosted back and that gives it more of a matte feel to it it's not too thick although thicker than the z3 Plus at 7.3 millimeters all around and it's pretty light even though it may not look it at 154 grams we have the sony logo and the Xperia logo on the back along with an NFC icon which is a little weird although NFC is important is not like some huge stand up feature or anything but who cares I guess on the top left we have our 23 megapixel camera with this LED flash underneath the front of the phone sports a 5.2 inch HD screen with some decently sized bezels in the top and the bottom and above it is a front-facing camera and a little notification light that by default is white but you have the freedom to change now if you look a little more closely at the front of the z5 you'll notice these front-facing stereo speakers on the top and bottom almost hidden to keep the front of the phone looking very clean they sound good too they're not very loud however and they are definitely better speakers on phones but the front-facing speakers found here on the z5 are better than any speaker found on the bottom or back of any other phone on the right side of the phone were greeted with a lot of buttons that experie users have been familiar with the power button is on top and placed almost near the middle and this year Sony designed the power button to be flush with this border so you have to kind of push it into the phone to activate it it does have a nice squishy clique to it but it can be a little hard to initiate that click with it being so flush with a side the power button does double this time though as a fingerprint scanner it's a pretty small area for a fingerprint scanner but it does a pretty good job at reading your print it's quite fast not the fastest but it gets the job done and overall the reliability is decent it depends what finger you're using you'll probably end up registering your left pointer finger or your right thumb it may be a little awkward to use the scanner with your left pointer finger so it may have some trouble scanning sometimes but your right thumb should be very reliable below it is our more conventional volume buttons they feel very responsive and stick out like we're used to with volume buttons on phones the only thing that makes these buttons a little unconventional is a placement they are so low whether you're using the phone in your right hand or left hand it can be a little awkward to press them and finally on the bottom we have a dedicated camera button which sticks out and has a lot of travel to it it feels quite nice so when holding this button the camera app will quickly launch which is very convenient and once in the app by clicking the button it will snap a picture this button is really only practical when taking pictures in landscape as it feels almost like you're snapping a picture with a DSLR or something the bottom is home to our micro USB charging port and what looks like a keychain hook the left side is where we can access our SIM card and yes also our micro sd card the problem is is really hard to access them first you have to use your nail to undo the flap and then continue using your nail to pull out the thin plastic housing if you're picking up this phone and are constantly exchanging SD cards maybe make sure you skip a finger one nail filing one reason these may be so hard to access is because they need to be kept apart ected as this phone is IP 68 certified dust proof and water-resistant Xperia z5 is sporting a 5.2 inch IPS screen at a 1080 by 1920 resolution is a pretty nice screen too and in terms of colors is fantastic colors are very vibrant and whites are very white maybe leaning a little toys a warm side but they still look very nice if you want a more saturated image you can easily do so within settings the screen gets pretty bright too you may have trouble seeing it in direct sunlight at times but it can get brighter than a good amount of phones out right now apart from colors though the HD screen is not quite as beautiful as a lot of other 1080 by 1920 phone displays it almost appears to be a slight step back from the z3 plus it seems like there's a very slight haze over everything in a way coming from the oneplus 2 that has an even lower pixel density than the z5 the z5 definitely is a weaker in terms of screens when triggering fast animations like the pulldown notification menu text and icons seem to have a subtle ghost effect to them more so than other HD phones all that being said the display is definitely not bad and now performs a lot of displays when it comes to color representation but in the other areas it falls behind Sony stuck with the Snapdragon 810 processor on the Xperia z5 along with the three gigs of RAM with this phone being 10 grams thicker than its predecessor you would think Sony would be able to put a bigger battery in the z5 but it's actually 30 million powers smaller than the z3 plus at 2900 milliamp hours really 30 milliamps isn't much of a difference as we'll find out later so does the a10 processor make the phone hot well when I first got the phone and installed on my 40 something apps I use at once yeah it got hot but from what I could tell just as hot as it did on my LG g4 note 5 + 1 + 2 when doing the same thing in normal u so I never noticed a phone getting the slightest bit hot but when doing more CPU intensive stuff like gaming the z5 did get noticeably hot once again no more than any other phone I've used maybe technically it does overheat a bit more than other processors but I wasn't able to notice it by just feeling gary sims tested this morn death in his z5 compact review on this channel and pretty much for an app to stop working due to overheating you have to really be doing something crazy like shooting 4k video for over 20 minutes the great thing about Sony Xperia phones is their software the Xperia z5 is run Android lollipop 5.1.1 and it actually looks close to stock Android there are a lot of additions sony added to the software however but not too much to make stock Android designs unrecognizable for example you can change a clock style on the lockscreen to some different options and you can rearrange your icons or even hide some in the notification pulldown and the freedom to decide which icons are shown on the status bar is also present with the z5 software so you can hide the battery percentage or time kind of like what you're capable of doing with Android marshmallow themes are also available that include live wallpapers that move depending on where you touch my favorite is the Xperia theme that will slowly change color depending on how often you use a phone the important thing is everything runs very smoothly when you first turn on the phone after powering off there will be a bit of a lag for a couple of minutes but after that you shouldn't notice any stutters or crashes by default the app opening and closing animations are bumped up to make the overall experience feel very snappy Sony gave the newest Xperia a bump up camera sensor from twenty point seven megapixels to twenty-three megapixels along with that we have our autofocus LED flash and although there's no optical image civilization unfortunately the software video stabilization does a pretty nice job as you'll soon see so I was pretty excited to test out this camera because some of the best smartphone camera sensors are supplied by Sony and all of our Sony's website they boasts about the picture quality this thing can take they even fought the megapixel count on the back of the phone unfortunately the camera is not as great as you would think and on top of that the whole megapixel count is very misleading I'll have to address first that even though Sony is boasting that the Xperia z5 is a 23 megapixel camera really that should mean 8 megapixels sure the z5 is capable of shooting in 23 megapixels but for whatever reason the camera software is not optimized for it so when comparing a 23 megapixel shot to an 8 megapixel shot the 8 megapixel shot will often times look undoubtedly better better colors better dynamic range and better looking textures sony seems to notice as well as a megapixels is enabled by default but there are times where 23 megapixels look better so just makes things a little confusing if you don't want to have to mess around with these settings just stick to 8 these next pictures were taken with 8 megapixel so in normal lighting conditions pictures are actually very nice there's a lot of detail in these pictures and colors look very good they have a nice saturated look to them there's a little sharpening going on but most of the time at least a better picture dynamic range looks very good sometimes they can over expose a little but nothing too unusual here's a situation where I think 23 megapixels actually makes a better looking picture when you're standing really far away from a very complicated looking focus point the 8 megapixel software enhancements seem to be a little too much over sharpening everything so using the unoptimized 23 megapixels actually ends up looking better than the optimized 8 see what I mean this just gets confusing anyway medium light pictures is where the quality will begin to take a dip they still look very nice but you'll start to see some purple creeping into the darker areas of the photos and then when you get into low-light pictures forget about it the purple has attacked anything that is dark looking will have this purple hue to it the same can be said for the front-facing 5.1 megapixel camera and good light pictures look very good nice details and it exposes perfectly in medium light selfies are still great even in low-light selfies look pretty good details are lost and photos can be a bit grainy but the colors are better than the rear facing and low-light it seems to get that purple human selfies you have to go to extreme low-light video looks very good on the z5 everything seems exposed correctly and even though there's no optical image stabilization the software makes up for it and creates a pretty smooth image I was pleasantly surprised like I said before 4k is available too although when shooting for long periods of times the phone may overheat there's also tons of camera features and effects like a our FX multi camera face and picture and more like I said the battery is ever so slightly smaller at 2900 milliamp hours but it doesn't seem to affect the battery life the dzifa should last you an entire day especially if you use the many battery saving modes that the sony pact to the software like stamina mode and ultra stamina mode without using any battery saving modes I was able to get at least four and a half to five hours of screen on time with the Xperia z5 and that's what spending lots of time browsing the web sending lots of text and taking some pictures throughout the day it's a very reliable battery and with charge 2.0 you can charge very fast so is the Sony Xperia z5 worth picking up over his predecessor the z3 Plus well there's not really much new here there's a fingerprint scanner that works very well there's a new and bigger camera sensor but it doesn't really make much of a difference the internals are pretty identical I don't think it's worth upgrading if you already own the z3 plus if having a fantastic camera isn't too much of a concern for you and you're looking for a reliable elegant looking phone with enhanced stock Android software the Sony Xperia z5 could be a good choice if you don't - price tag of course well thanks for watching my review everybody I hope you enjoyed it and comment below letting me know what you think of the Sony Xperia z5 also make sure you check out these other cool videos on the side here and if you want the Android or thority app make sure you click up here on the Google Play Store link and last but not least head on over to android authority comm for more full coverage as we are your source for all things Android