Gadgetory

this episode of TechnoBuffalo is brought to you by domain.com the sony xperia z5 premium is the very first 4k smartphone in the world but saying the z5 premium is a 4k smartphone it's kind of like buying a universal remote that supports all kinds of devices and using it just for your TV you could totally do it it just doesn't make a lot of sense - here let me show you what 4k video looks like on the sony xperia z5 premium okay that's it you've seen it all you've seen all the 4k video that you can watch because the only way that you can watch 4k video on the z5 premium is to either watch a pre-loaded video or watch the 4k content that you shoot with the camera everything else on the device is rendered at 1080 so yeah there's a 4k display on the front but that's about all it is sure it's representative of where we're going and where the future is going and what we can do now but in practice it really just falls flat now that's not to say that the z5 is crappy or useless or not a great phone the z5 on its own without the premium tag is actually a very good phone it's a little more expensive than I'd like but it is Sony's flagship line so at a price of 629 pounds I really am expecting a lot it's got a Snapdragon 810 under the hood some decent camera optics front and back three gigs of ram and a really nice bright display in my seven days using the device I didn't feel particularly overwhelmed by the quality of the 23 megapixel camera on the back the app was really messy there were way too many modes you have to switch to turn on 4k video it wasn't a great experience overall and the quality of the photos that it took were fine subjects were pretty sharp but lower light photos were a little noisier than I would have liked and colors were very very washed out I will say though that two-stage shutter button on the side oh I wish more manufacturers would put that button on those devices I love having that thing there and I used it a lot the build quality also feels kind of weird I don't know what it is about this phone like on paper it seems like it should feel awesome the glass the plastic the combination of the two it just doesn't really gel the outer edge feels too cheap compared to the glass and the glass is too fingerprint II compared to everything else and it just feels like a kludgy mess it's a little bit thicker too because that fingerprint scanner is on the right side which i think is a great place for it but that added bulk while I don't think we need thinner smartphones this added bulk really does make the whole thing feel like a bit of a blocky sad veiss I really like the placement of the fingerprint reader on the side but it did not perform very well in my experience even just a little bit of sweat is enough to get it to ask you to try again and again and again granted Brandon did not have the same experience with his review so you can check that out over on the site I do want to give Sony props though this is the first om skin since og cents way back in the day that I actually really like things here are actually material and it does seem like Sony actually went to the extra effort to make sure that things feel at home on Android except for this glorious Fantasia background that you can have as a live wallpaper the z5 premium also does have the water-resistant writing that the z5 has so you absolutely can't stick this thing in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes so that is definitely something to consider that's not something that you get with the 6p it's not something you get with Samsung's devices so if you're looking for something in the five six hundred dollar price range that is water-resistant and this might be the phone for you if you're a die-hard for Sony's Xperia Line then look picking up a z5 makes perfect sense you know what you're getting into picking up a z5 premium on the other hand makes no sense at all whatsoever unless you're interested in seeing what 4k looks like on one particular video then you're not gonna find a lot here for you since everything in the UI from top to bottom is rendered in 1080 yes that does get you a crazy high pixel density of 801 PPI but are your eyes really that good at that point it's really well beyond diminishing returns and well into stupid territory our eyes can only see so many pixels per inch so going all the way up to 801 definitely does seem like overkill look I'm not one to balk at progress but progress for the sake of progress is a different thing entirely in my book it's a little bit wasteful look there's there's not a lot to do with a 4k display on a smartphone just yet we just can't handle outputting in 4k all the time so while I appreciate that it's possible now just because you can doesn't mean you should and in the case of the z5 premium you as I was doing this review I was thinking domain so I was thinking domain.com and I wouldn't made sure that what is 4k dot video was indeed available for you guys to pick up so you can head over to domain.com use the code TechnoBuffalo and get yourself 20% off of the domain what is 4k dot video which we apparently need because there isn't a whole lot of 4k video to watch on the z5 premium anyway that was a sweet domain that you guys can register and remember when you're thinking domains I think domain.com