Gadgetory

Corsairs Raptor lion of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you like click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Sony Xperia z1 let's start with everything everyone else already told you while we open up the box it has a quad-core 2.2 gigahertz Krait 400 Snapdragon processor with an adrenal 330 GPU and 2 gigs of RAM it comes with Android 4.2 which is a little bit older now but there is a planned 4.4 upgrade it comes with a micro cable as well as a wall wart charger some manuals and that's the end of the unboxing portion it has wireless AC bluetooth 4.0 NFC 16 gigs of on-board storage with expandable microSD which is definitely a plus with so many phones not having that it has a good camera it's a 21 megapixel camera but it doesn't have necessarily the best performance Sony does a lot of processing on the images there's a lot of sample shots out there you can go check those out I didn't actually do any and it has a 3000 milliamp hour battery which is a very noticeable upgrade over my daily driver which is the HTC One on a light day and a normal day I could go 2 days and I can definitely make it through a fairly heavy day usually I'd have about a 40% charge left after a normal day so that's that's awesome because I'm used to having to recharge the one every day no matter what now I've been using the z1 for about two weeks now but on poun first removing it from the box my initial reaction was man this thing's pretty heavy it's very solid feeling with a glass front and glass back so it actually reminds me of the old iPhone 4 where it just it feels like quality in the hand but I did find it a little bit slippery and my wife said the same thing all those slick didn't have that problem at all with his larger hands it should also be noted that the haptic feedback is among the best that I felt it's not overpowering and you know many implementations feel like the thing is gonna fall apart in your hands that wasn't the case for this phone so speaking of the screen in the front of the phone there's not a whole lot there there's a 2 megapixel 1080p front camera for video chat there's a speaker up at the very top with a notification LED built into it the speaker sounds great by the way but I did find the at the very top of the phone a little bit awkward because I'm more used to putting my ear right about here and that's in the front buttons are actually completely software and they are built into the screen like many newer phones on the right side of the phone we find one of the cheapest SIM trays that I have ever encountered in my life but the great thing about it is that it does happen to be to list so I guess that is definitely a plus we've also got a side lock button which I'm kind of indifferent to normally I'm used to a top lock button I didn't find this was any better or worse and a volume rocker that I see what they were trying to do it has kind of a curved shape to it so you should be able to feel where it is but I found it was harder than I guess they were going for to actually figure out which one I was pressing so it was a lot of trial and error there's also a two stage camera button which is really nice to have so you can launch the camera anytime from anywhere and you can prime it and then go just like you can with many points two cameras also on that side of the phone is a wrist wrap anchor I really thought this was a nice touch as well on the left side we've got microSD expansion up to 64 gigs micro USB yes these plastic covers are kind of lame but I understand why they're there more on that later and then finally there is a charging connector for the official Sony dock on the bottom we find nothing but a speaker grille and on the top we find nothing but a three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack so back to that screen with the excellent haptic feedback it's 1080p it's 10-point multi-touch as if you could get ten fingers on there it's a try aluminous LCD display with x-reality engine and the first thing i did was turn x-reality off because i was watching and moving I was like this looks terrible it seems to crank the sharpness up to 200 and for some reason I felt like colors looked worse too but maybe that was just the color shift from changing the angle of the phone it was noticeable enough and off axis viewing was bad enough that I did notice it day to day but with that said you still have very sharp text because it is still a 1080p LCD display and with x-reality turned off video viewing was satisfactory but it's definitely not as good as something like the HTC One the z1 is very fast but what isn't these days I did find that animations like expanding folders in the app tray felt a little bit slow at first but I did get you to them in the overall experience is very smooth the default sound scheme is also soothing and natural especially compared to Samsung's horrible one I didn't feel the need to change it at all the only issue I had with the setup for that is that volume all the way down silences the phone when you use the button on the side versus HTC is implementation where all the way down is vibe and you actually have to very intentionally go one up to get to silent with that said you can hold it down and go directly to vibe instead of silent so it's just a matter of being used to it I think for something like that the default screen timeout was 30 seconds so that is a thing that I changed right away to a minute but this is just part of their very aggressive power savings that does turn into real-world battery life improvements so I can't really fault them there if their power savings scheme also includes location-based Wi-Fi and limited network connectivity although you can whitelist certain apps when the screen is powered off the best thing about their power savings is that just like their find your lost phone feature it harasses you to turn it on I love that because that's how you get people to actually set things up while the phone is great as a first phone there were certain things that really irked me about the setup process so first of all is that account creation for Sony Entertainment Network is a little bit ridiculous it wants an eight character password with no repetitions of three of the same in a row mixture of numbers and letters you know what screw off because I can choose a passphrase as 25 characters long it doesn't have any of that stuff and it's still a much stronger password than something that does adhere to that regulation so I'd like to be able to choose my own password I understand who is trying to protect but I wish that it would give me the option to just have something longer there transfer wizard if you have an existing Android phone is also quite uncompetitive compared to HTC and Motorola the ones that I've used which are just wireless and you just install an app this requires a PC or Mac to complete it's a 25 megabyte application that you have to download that then wants to run in the background on the PC you need to plug a cable into one phone then the other it gives no progress indicator and timed out both times that I tried to use it I mean that felt like a very 2010 experience to me the other things that bugged me I guess for the fact that it prompts me to like Sony on facebook and follow them on Twitter the first time I sign in I think Sony's a little bit too grown-up for that but I guess I thought all I had to say negative about the phone once I was done with setup things got a lot smoother something that I'm starting to really like is soft buttons so I mean just this is just an example but when you're typing something and the keyboard opens up it actually changes what the button looks like to indicate the functionality this might not be an issue for power users but for someone like my mother having the button actually indicate what its gonna do so it's a little down arrow to make the keyboard go away I think that's fantastic and that's something that hard buttons on the HTC One doesn't really offer speaking of the keyboard I didn't really like it the spacebar is very small and combined with the long travel distance between keys because of the large screen I found it hard to be accurate the great news about Android of course is all I had to do was install Swift key and I'm done one thing I did like however is that the backspace just speeds up individual character deletion rather than starting to eat whole words as you go back and I did find it a lot easier to control pictures in the messaging app are actually kind of cool as well you can like draw stuff which was a bit of a neat experience the two times that I tried it I sense like a couple of messages but it seems like again the kind of thing that you'd use twice and then not worry about too much because there are so many advanced messaging applications like whatsapp and BBN and all that kind of stuff that I think a lot of people are gonna replace that core functionality but again for people like my mom it's great that they do have a better messaging app than what I'm used to seeing maybe it's the fact that I come from iOS as my first smartphone experience but and actually use the desktops and widgets much I tend to access almost everything from the app tray and this was something that I really liked swiping in from the left on the app tray gives you access to the Play Store as well as a variety of different ways of sorting the apps that makes it really easy to access your most-used maybe it's a stupid thing but I really enjoyed it they also have a quick settings implementation that I really liked you swipe down from the top you can completely configure this it arranges everything in a sensible manner and it saved me the trouble of installing power toggles really liked it and compared to something like TouchWiz it's not huge and like bright green looking for whatever reason and compared to sense it requires fewer clicks to get at your most frequently used things multitasking on the other hand wasn't a great experience and I did find that being only being able to see three apps that were recently accessed on a 1080p screen wasn't really out quit I really like HTC's implementation here with the nine most recently open applications visible I did get teased on my moto X review for doing a 5-second summary of call quality so I would like to talk about that a little bit guys call quality is excellent and there are no complaints I guess that was five seconds again no but seriously the phone app is well laid out and aside from when you're dialing by by spelling the person's name not sorting by the version of that person because I've got some people or I have four numbers for them that you used most recently no complaints here I did like at being able to have access to my in call controls so my mute and speakerphone and all that stuff as well as my keypad sometimes but then there was one more other thing that bothered me a little bit and that was when I'm in the middle of a call and I'm dialing in you know like options or pound or whatever else it doesn't actually show up so when you're dialing into something like a conference call and you go oh I entered the wrong passkey you can't actually double check it alright so that was a lot of stuff you just heard about what I liked or didn't like based on the experience of actually using it as my daily driver but what's the verdict Linus well it's not that simple you can weigh the pros and cons and spec sheets all day but the Xperia z1 has one trump card and since my phone is a loaner phone that I have to send back to Sony I'll be finishing the rest of this shot in the bathtub while watching YouTube videos on my phone so we're gonna go with the video that's actually by me this is our build guide and we are definitely definitely in a filled bathtub here guys we got lots of water we got lots of water and we are just gonna drop that phone right in the water you can no longer hear the sound however the video playback is most assuredly still running now one thing to note is that the touch screen doesn't operate very well underwater but I guess that's pretty normal so I'm gonna go ahead and tell it ya know it's okay that the battery is low and we're gonna go ahead and drop it back in so basically guys who is this phone for we're gonna hopefully overlay some underwater footage from the phone of my hairy legs here just to show you guys that it is indeed working down there but who is it for well it's for people who don't want to worry about getting wet if you're an outdoorsy person a party goer just someone who wants to record videos in Lorain then all the other phones are kind of a non-factor and you might as well just be only shopping for an Xperia ray phone because that's the only one that really comes with that truly compelling feature like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any feedback on how 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