Gadgetory

step right out folks come and see the amazing Xperia z5 premium featuring an astonishing 4k screen it's everything you've ever seen and done a hundred times but now in 4k yes friends 4k is the future and the future is now the Scimitar RGB from coarser features 17 programmable buttons a 12000 DPI optical sensor and a shape designed for comfort and MMO and MOBA games learn more at the link in the video description alright so I guess that silly intro bit gives away some of my concluding thoughts on the z5 premium but I've got a bit of a routine to run through here so let's get that stuff out of the way first if you've seen one Sony's e-series device you've pretty much seen them all at this point so the z5 premium holds not too many surprises up its sleeves it's got a blocky shape with an unadorned back panel save for the camera and flash a micro be charging port with wrist strap loop on the bottom a dedicated shutter button volume rocker and a lock button with integrated fingerprint sensor on the right a headphone jack and noise cancellation microphone on the top and finally ok I guess it does have some surprises a microSD expansion slot along with a dual SIM card tray making this phone a winner for frequent travelers who load up a lot of media for trips and have phone plans in multiple countries or even just people who want to save a few bucks here and there leveraging cheaper data on one carrier and cheaper voice on another for example at the front are dual forward-facing speakers a selfie camera and the main event the 4k screen but I'll talk more about that later the ergonomics of this phone were a bit of a mixed bag for me I mean I liked the design of the iPhone 4 a lot and I still do but one of the reasons that the the like heavy blocky solid feeling metal and glass design worked so well was that it was small and therefore easy to handle without dropping and this carried over quite nicely to my new daily driver the Xperia z5 compact which I reviewed quite recently but at the size of the premium variant I mean we're talking about a 5.5 inch display phone here with substantial forehead and chin bar areas it is pretty darn unwieldly a curved back and lighter construction would likely go a long way to remedying this for me but there are some trade-offs there as well to a man or lady every phone person who touched the z5 premium or saw me using it said something along the lines of wow it really lives up to the premium name and that was without getting to experience the 4k screen which I guess leads us pretty well into the screen first things first at this pixel density we're talking a whopping 800 pixels per inch it's a freaking miracle that Sony managed to get a back light to shine through the electronics at all the fact that they also managed to deliver a bright accurate display to boot is a freaking miracle but there's some bad news about the screen as well in the time that I was using the phone it actually almost never ran at its 4k native resolution this is for a couple of reasons number one is that Android lollipop doesn't have proper 4k support so it'll only switch in a couple of apps two of which by the way our Sony's own album and video apps but even though that will be rectified in the future some what dpi support is kind of an issue - problem number two the fact that running at 4k puts unneeded strain on the phone's processor sapping battery life means that even after the Android marshmallow update Sony will likely leave this limitation in place so there you go most of the time your 4k display will be running at 1080p instead something that in the past I would have liked dropped the phone like a hot potato and said uh run away run away because running LCD displays that anything but native resolution has traditionally destroyed text sharpness but in this case actually it was just fine and I wouldn't have even noticed that it has a 4k display if you didn't tell me in fact 4k content even didn't look materially different from sharpened 1080p content at this size which raises the entirely new question of well what is the point then to which I would reply Android handset makers Sony include just don't know how else to differentiate from the crowd I mean look at the rest of the specs of this phone two gigahertz Snapdragon 810 CPU with adreno 430 GPU 3 gigabytes of RAM AC Wi-Fi NFC FM radio quick charge 2.0 fast charging fingerprint scanner I mean it's got everything but the kitchen sink and hell if Sony shipped it with one of those it would just be a great demonstration of the ip68 water and dust protection the thing would still work I mean that is some fairly stand out stuff I mean the Snapdragon 810 is still a mini furnace that thermal throttles noticeably after only a few Geekbench runs but performance is still well within the acceptable range and anyway what else is Sony supposed to use and therein lies the problem no matter what gimmick Android makers throw at their premium devices they can't differentiate from each other let alone from Apple I mean it wasn't that long ago that having front-facing speakers made headlines and if you had a solid camera on an Android device you were going to sell a lot of units but the z5 premium has both of these things the camera which I actually glossed over earlier by the way is a 23 megapixel affair with 4k 30fps video recording slo-mo and it performed admirably in my typical full auto testing of the device but today those things amount to nothing Android phone makers have given it everything they've got and people are still buying iPhones in greater numbers than ever before so what do they do well they go back to bigger and better numbers even if it's actually meaningless like even more meaningless than ever before like we turned it off 99% of the time meaningless it's kind of a shame though because from reading other folks reviews of the z5 premium it feels like Sony and therefore everyone covering the phone got so focused on the 4k display that they missed that this is also just a really solid device the 30 for 30 milliamp hour battery got me comfortably through everyday while I was using it and Sony's OS skin continues to small evolutionary improvements without ruining the Android experience which is which is sweet but just not enough to win me over or to recommend that especially for the price Wow you run out and buy one and on that subject D brand makers of the high quality of vinyl skins that you see on the devices in our phone reviews now I could spend some time telling you that D brand is very affordable they have inexpensive shipping around the freaking world their skins are high quality and they're cut precisely and they've got a bunch of different styles but I'm not not going to tell you any of that stuff I'm going to tell you today is that D brand actually has a special exclusive 48 hour only color it is an orange carbon fiber the same one that you saw in scrapyard war season 3 on the back of my macbook that's kind of like an LT t orange so you guys are going to want to check that out at the link in the video description right below they've can put it on a phone they can put it on a console they can put it on a computer pretty much you name it they'll put it on it unless it's like your grandmother I don't know why you would want a vinyl skin on your grandmother I mean I guess it would protect her from incidental scrapes and scratches and make her look better maybe there's something to this anyway guys thanks for watching if this video sucked you know where that button is but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions for which are up there by buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum that gets you a little contributor badge now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out the video where I show off the update to our 100-plus terabyte actually it's like 20 23 times so yeah it's well over a hundred and twenty terabytes in its new configuration storage server we made some changes