Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kip EHD here and this is the Sony Xperia z1 or z2 people will call it it's basically it tuned up and refined Xperia Z surprised alright so it is a major step up on the inside from the Xperia Z flagship and we'll get to that in a second but on the outside it is more of an incremental upgrade with some minor tweaks here and there and improvements to the design and the overall way it feels in the hands so the whole actual outside of the Xperia z1 is reinforced metal with this black plastic band on the inside which is good because it's not the other way around now the buttons on the side of the phone I think are really well placed especially for smaller hands they're on the right spots and with the typical Sony full edge-to-edge glass on the front and the back of the phone it does have two effects one it makes the phone feel super premium and high-end in the hand expensive even it's actually heavier but number two it makes the phone feel actually a little bit more delicate the metal doesn't quite wrap around to the front or the back so if you drop this phone on either of its faces it will hit glass so I kind of got these mixed feelings holding in the hand it doesn't feel bad by any means but just like the Nexus 4 and the iPhone it naturally made me more careful not to drop it so a lot of people are going to love the look of and just a pure aesthetics of the Xperia z1 and that's great because it's a really good looking phone but to me it still has the same problem as the original Xperia Z where it doesn't really know if it wants to be a ruggedized device or not it's a great-looking device in the first place but then you add the fact that it's IP 58 certified so that means it's dust proof it's water resistant for up to one meter deep for up to 30 minutes so in order to do that it has to add a whole bunch of these different things where it needs to cover up all the different ports it has to have almost no openings the speaker has to be significantly worse it has this permanent screen protector on that you cannot remove and a whole bunch of other things that are all sealed up about the phone to make it IP 58 certified but does anyone really need that in a phone and at the end of the day it's glass on the front and the back and it's not exactly the most rugged thing in the world I feel like if this device was not IP 58 certified and if they didn't cover every single port with flaps and if they didn't worry about the display being certified and had open speaker and just had a a much more traditional built device it would be a lot more appealing to me but all the stuff is no different than the Xperia Z and neither is the power button that feels a little bit mushy or the completely awful speaker on the bottom all these are sacrifices that Sony's made to get this beautiful device to survive some rain or some mud or being dropped in the shallow end of a pool or something like that the worst of it is actually the SIM card tray it's an absolute disaster to get the SIM card into the flexible plastic tray thing and then into the phone and taking it out is even worse so thankfully most people will only have to do that one time but there are also some nice subtle things that have changed on the good end like the notification LED inside the earpiece is probably the prettiest on a phone next to the lg optimus G and you probably never know if no one told you but there is a permanent screen protector on the glass that you'd probably never see if you weren't looking for it and speaking of that display it's a completely similar story to the Xperia Z it's rocking a 5-inch 1920 by 1080 panel which brings it to 441 pixels per inch super sharp with bright vibrant colors and relatively contrast II pleasing images until you turn it off axis that's where it falls apart because of the protector that they put on the display to help it pass that IP 58 certification the Xperia z1 has some pretty poor viewing angles when it comes to color reproduction you can see here compared to the Moto X that it starts getting weird at only about thirty degrees off-axis and by then it just looks totally washed out and you're missing all the color and contrast as you know the rest of the quirks about this phone like the flaps that you have to open to charge it and the glass front and back in the new design they're all things that you can get used to after just a little bit of use but this display this display was the one thing that I could never get over because it's the one thing that you have to look at when you're using your phone and a lot of people argue you'll never use the display off axis but trying to show just one other person some movie or something on your phone you'll have to deal with these incredibly poor viewing angles even when gaming when you turn the phone a lot you're going to have to deal with this but there's another Hardware feature that we can talk about that's gotten a lot of attention on the z1 and that is the camera and it's a pretty good one now a lot of people automatically look at that 20 megapixels and assume whoa must be in the top five smartphone cameras now it's actually not but don't get me wrong it's not bad at all it's like number six but it has its pros and cons but first I want to say that this phone has just about the perfect button layout for taking pictures like a boss so anyway opening up the camera app from any shortcut for single notices the viewfinder frame rate is very high and it takes you into Sony's superior auto mode by default which is supposed to choose the best photo mode to use by evaluating the situation but it turns your image size down to 8 megapixels and turns the image stabilization off by default which is weird so I was getting a habit of switching to manual mode and turning into 20 megapixels and turning the software stabilization on now the phone's camera actually has a pretty big sensor bigger than the one in the galaxy s4 and in the iPhone so if you want to take that for granted it does give you a nice shallow depth of field it also has a benefit of Sony optics and Sony like we know makes great cameras so that should be all good there but the images were decent at best they're not going to shock anyone that you took them from a camera phone or anything mostly because the image processing is meh and the colors really aren't that vibrant they sometimes look a bit dull but the sharpness is definitely there and the focus was pretty accurate in regular light so they tend to look alright the camera really struggle though in low-light I have to mention that the very colors and the artifacts and the noise patterns in low-light were just really bad the flash didn't help either so there's no real optical image stabilization so it's really not that good in low-light but lucky for us sony has put a lot of effort into the Xperia skin and the camera is one place where you can really see a lot of it in action the manual mode has that exposure control dial so you can choose how to meter the image manually which is nice and again it's in that sweet spot with the awesome button layout I really like shooting with it future software updates in addition to the one that the phone's already received can probably work on processing the images a bit better though but as of right now the camera is just pretty good not the greatest as a lot of people expected it to be but I have a full sample image gallery linked right below that like button if you want to check all those out now the rest of Sony's Xperia skin is very familiar if you've used any other Sony phone and it's obvious that Sony is putting a lot of effort into improving this and making it a better usage experience it's running here on top Android 4.2 jelly bean and since this phone is rocking a Snapdragon 800 processor yes it is a great performer like it crushes through benchmarks browses the web super smooth and very fast and is just all-around rarely stutters at all like you would expect from a Snapdragon 800 device and as responsive as the software is they've really added a lot of stuff one example to take advantage of the larger display is the smaller windowed apps that we've seen on other big-screen phones they come from the multitasking menu here and there's only a few of them but it's a step in the right direction and hopefully other apps will be able to plug into this in the future and there's also the menu dedicated to power saving at Sony's added in it seems that they were very concerned with battery life when they made this phone the Xperia z1 has a sealed in 3000 milliamp hour battery already so it lasted all day with regular to heavy use but even more impressive was the standby time it actually is one of the better standby times of any Android device I've used so that's thanks to all the modes that automatically kick in when you're not using it for a while and the rest of the using the phone is exactly as you would expect really I mean I haven't found any app that it can't handle or any games that it can't run smoothly its overall a buttery experience I'm just hoping Sony keeps their finger on the pulse here and updates this device to Android 4.4 when it comes out because I think there's going to be some interesting google experience stuff that skin phone users are really going to like so at the end of the day the Xperia z1 is exactly what it sounds like it's so sort of a refined tuned up more bold Xperia Z which is great because if you really like the original Xperia Z you're going to love the Xperia z1 but if you're in the same boat as me where you didn't like the Xperia Z some software wasn't really for me I didn't like the way it looked as much then you're probably not going to like the Xperia z1 either because they're very similar in that regard but either way that's why the comments section is open let us know what you think of the Xperia z1 right down there below and you'll see me answering a whole bunch of comments as well below either way thank you for watching this video if you enjoyed if you want to see more videos like this one there's a subscribe button below as well for you to check that out click it and never miss another video thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys this you