Gadgetory

Sonne might have walked away from the ultra high-end market but that doesn't mean they aren't building premium products I'm Juan Carlos bag nail for pocket now and here's our full review of the Xperia X now Sony's mission with the X is to trim the fat stepping back from marketing bullet point specs and focusing on the stuff that matters right off the bat we need to send a shout-out to the folks at cloak code UK for helping us out with a loaner after our first review unit arrived DOA much appreciated as North American experience will ship until the end of this month so what we get is a phone which represents an interesting set of compromises the flagship phones for example have largely moved to quad HD displays but daily phone use is pretty well accomplished at 1080p which is where we find the accent it's 5 inch IPS LCD it's a bright and colourful screen which just loses out to AMOLED when looking at outdoor readability our review unit came with three gigabytes of RAM in 32 gigabytes of storage stereo speakers flanked the display there's a 13 megapixel camera up front and 23 megapixels on the back this is all powered by a Qualcomm 650 chipset any 2620 milliamp hour battery moving to the aesthetics design language is tricky territory many will feel that Sony should be making more aggressive style changes but we can't fault the engineering here clean simple lines high-quality materials it's terrific execution of the Xperia look the X doesn't break any new ground but a satin finished metal back and minimal badging add up to an attractive handset in reviewing last year's Xperia z5 we ran into issues using the power button mounted fingerprint sensor but we're happy to report that this hardware is better refined on the X the thin vertical surface can still occasionally miss but we're much happier with how this phone unlocks and we're also happy to see how conservative Sony is with software alterations common elements like the notification tray and the settings menu are pretty much stock the app drawer is tweaked but so long as we can revert to an alphabetized layout we're cool we get a branded PlayStation app though I don't have a ps4 to pair with it and alongside that we do have some value-added software pre-installed apps can be disabled but I prefer being able to just completely uninstall apps like AVG moving to performance there were some concerns about Sony using a mid-range or chipset but the Qualcomm 650 performs slightly better than last year's Qualcomm 808 it's plenty powerful to get you through most situations overall it's a snappy phone and handles most games well Marvel future fight still has issues with Qualcomm chip sets but implosion runs like buttah now taking a look at the photography experience we would expect the Sony camera to include a killer sensor and top-tier optics this definitely holds true for the X the sensor lens combination is very good we see some odd choices though in software and image processing first of all talking about this camera requires a little nuance by default the shooter produces eight megapixel stills Sony is intentionally squishing image size down to reduce noise and produce a higher quality final image so is this a 23 megapixel camera or an 8 megapixel camera well you can shoot at the full res of the sensor but output generally does look better at the reduced resolution but then we get into a whole host of other issues the object tracking system is extremely twitchy the color processing is very aggressive in terms of exposure and saturation and we're stuck with a ton of individual modes to help you but really we could just use a better manual mode that includes more settings than white balance and exposure compensation the outlook doesn't get much better switching to video we don't have the benefit of Hardware image stabilization and Sony software smoothing produces a buzzy output especially a faster frame rates we've seen phones with less powerful Hardware shoot UHD video but here we're capped at 1080p and we can confirm thermal throttling you'll only be able to shoot about nine minutes of video in one stretch before the phone will shut you down ultimately this is still a good camera though we feel like it's fighting us most of the time we're using it and the overall experience stacks up poorly when compared to similarly priced phones audio reproduction is also an exercise in more frustrating compromises will always be fans of front firing stereo speakers these aren't the loudest but they are detailed and certainly benefit from pointing in the right direction namely at your face you headphone audio however just doesn't live up to Sony's legacy looking at the analysis the numbers are nearly identical to another mid-pack performer like the galaxy s7 this leads us to believe that Sony is using whatever stock DAC comes with the qualcomm chipset paired with a pretty average amp the X is fine but it's far from class-leading and we really shouldn't be surprised when a smaller battery performs worse than phones with larger batteries to be sure this phone easily made it to dinner time during average use days but I didn't have much room left to spare now looking at a movie test streaming 30 minutes of HD video over Wi-Fi at 50 percent brightness the Xperia acts drained 10 percent of its battery making this one of the poorer performers we've run through this test for our usage this was a phone that handled short Sprint's really well though this might not be the device for folks looking to maximize their screen on time during the day we also couldn't quite get a handle on quick charging our review unit came with a European charger but connecting two different fast chargers the best we could manage was a 27% recharge over 30 minutes we imagine a Sony charger will likely juice this phone up a bit quicker so let's wrap this up where's that leave us with the xperia x I really did like using this phone more than I thought I would it's a well-built snappy handset in a vacuum this would be a killer offering we do run into one small issue though this thing is priced just outside the top tier of smartphones a little savvy shopping lands an unlocked galaxy s7 within spitting distance of the xperia x price we hear pride ourselves on trying to figure out who a phone might be for instead of just playing the worth it for the money game but at five hundred and fifty dollars this phone is a tough fit there's definitely a demographic of people who will like this device but we're not exactly sure who those people are and we can't believe it's a very large audience we really want to celebrate Sony's experiment here walking away from impressive specs which don't actually add much to the daily smartphone experience but price plays a critical role in this market and it seems unlikely that the Xperia X will turn Sony smartphone sales slump or around as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review you