Sony Xperia Z review

The Xperia Z was Sony’s flagship phone for 2013, and continued the screen size and resolution arms race with its 5in, 1,920×1,080 display, which compares well to contemporary rivals such as the Full HD-equipped HTC One. It also has all the specifications you would expect from a high-end smartphone, including a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and a camera with a huge 13-megapixel sensor. It’s not as old as its name makes it sound either, as Sony released both the Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z3 in 2014, with the original Z only dating back to Febuary 2013.

Read our full review of the new 2015 Sony Xperia Z5

Sony is continuing to support all its powerful Z-series phones and tablets. The Xperia Z is currently running the latest Android 4.4 Kit Kat operating system, but that’s not the end of the road for it. Early in 2015 Sony is promising to update the Xperia Z to Android 5.0, effectively giving the phone a whole new lease of life. You can read all about it in our Android 5.0 review, but we’re yet to see what Sony’s take on the new operating system will be. Its Snapdragon Pro S4 chipset should be up to the task, but we can’t say for sure until the update rolls out.

In April 2015, a post on Sony’s blog said that Xperia Z Android 5 updates would begin rolling out “in a few weeks time” – this hasn’t started as of the end of April, but keep an eye on your software update notifications.

The display’s Full HD resolution is the same as that of the HTC One, but the slightly larger screen size should make text more legible at this resolution. We found we could view web pages in desktop mode and still read all the page’s text easily without zooming in. This is a trick that the HTC One also pulls off, but we found the Xperia Z’s extra 1/3 inch screen size made reading more comfortable.

Browsing desktop web pages without zooming in is possible on the 5in 1,920×1,080 display

The display is hugely bright, but we did notice some slight light leakage around the edges when looking at large blocks of black. The screen also suffers in comparison to AMOLED screens such as that of the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which has far deeper blacks. It’s still an impressive display, though, and seeing as no smartphone has an AMOLED screen of both this size and resolution it would be churlish to complain.

The display’s certainly good enough, and large enough, for watching films and for gaming. We tried it out with the Asphalt 7 racing title, which looked fantastic, and almost like something off the PlayStation 3.

To accommodate such a big display, the handset is understandably huge, and you’ll struggle to use it while carrying an umbrella. It’s only 3mm wider than the HTC One and has a larger screen, though, so the Xperia Z isn’t excessively large as this generation of smartphones goes. A screen this big also requires a large battery to power it, and Sony has gone for a chunky 2,330mAh model – very similar to the 2,300mAh battery in the HTC One. Unfortunately, despite having such a big battery, the huge screen takes its toll. The phone managed 5h 48m in our continuous video playback battery life test, which is below average, showing this is one Android phone that will require regular charging.

Sony has taken a different approach to HTC when it comes to the phone’s design. Instead of the HTC One’s all-aluminium body, the Xperia Z is all about the glass front and rear. Sony is tight-lipped about the kind of glass it uses, but leaks from a Sony press conference suggest it has toughened Dragontrail glass on the front and the more common Corning Gorilla Glass on the rear. It does look good, but we didn’t find it as comfortable to hold as the HTC One with its rounded edges and cool burnished aluminium.

You could never say it was ugly, but we think HTC has trumped the Xperia Z with its aluminium One

The Xperia Z does have a party trick, though; it’s fully sealed against water and dust ingress, so will survive a rain shower or a drop from a top pocket into the toilet. The flaps covering its various ports are rubber-sealed and feel very sturdy when they clip in and out, so we’re not too worried about them breaking off.

We have absolutely no complaints about the phone’s performance. It may have scored a relatively slow 1,890ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, compared to under 1,000ms for the fastest phones, but its 1.5GHz quad-core processor runs Android smoothly without any jerkiness or hiccups. We ran the test again using the Dolphin browser rather than the Xperia Z’s default Chrome, and the score improved to a much more respectable 1,357ms – the current mobile version of Chrome does seem to struggle with the Sunspider benchmark.

Sony’s customisations to the operating system are tasteful; a large chunk of the homescreen is dedicated to a huge Sony Entertainment Network link/advert, but this is easy to remove if you don’t like the look of it.

Depending on how you like to use Android, you may prefer Sony’s light-touch customisations to the rip-it-up-and-start-again of the latest version of HTC Sense, which turns your entire homescreen into a giant news feed from your social networks and various content providers.

Apart from the (removable) advert for the Sony Entertainment Network, Sony’s Android customisations are fairly unobtrusive

We were impressed with the Xperia Z’s keyboard; the screen is large enough that it’s easy to type accurately and quickly. At first, having to switch to the second-screen of buttons to access the full stop and comma keys annoyed us, but it’s easy to customise the keyboard layout with the keyboard settings wizard, which gives you the choice of turning on comma and full stop keys, and adding punctuation as a long-press to each key.

Sony has made sure you can get the keyboard layout you like

The Xperia Z’s 13-megapixel camera uses an Exmor RS sensor, which is designed to be particularly impressive in low light. Compared side-by-side with a Motorola RAZR i’s camera, which is a fairly standard smartphone model, under low light the Xperia Z’s sensor produced brighter images with far more detail.

Under indoor lighting conditions, when compared side by side with photos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S3, the Xperia Z really shone. This is one of the few phones we’ve seen that can take sharp photos indoors, and we saw very little noise or evidence of excessive noise reduction. It’s very impressive.

Impressive focus and little noise indoors – CLICK TO ENLARGE

Outside, we were impressed with how the Xperia Z handled exposure; many phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S3, bleach out the sky, but the Xperia Z’s camera picked up individual clouds. Colours are accurate, but for sheer amount of detail you can’t beat the Galaxy S3; it picked up significantly more detail than the Xperia Z’s camera, making images more lifelike.

Great exposure, but the Samsung Galaxy S3’s camera picks up more detail outside

We also ran our new indoor video tests on the Xperia Z’s camera. We’ve set up a test scene in a camera tent in order to see how smartphone cameras perform under different lighting conditions, and how they deal with movement. We video the scene with the room lights switched on and with additional illumination from lights positioned at the side, then with the side lights only and finally with no lights at all apart from some moving LEDs.

The Xperia Z performed very well in this test, with surprisingly little noise in the footage. It also coped well with the LEDs in the scene – many phones flare out the strong light source, but the Xperia Z didn’t have this problem. The one major drawback was that the phone struggled to keep focus in low light during the test, instead hunting around for a focal point.

The Z1, Z2 and Z3 have all now replaced the original Xperia Z and it is starting to show its age. If you can still find it for sale anywhere chances are you’ll be paying over the odds for a phone that is out of date and well behind cheaper, newer handsets such as the Moto G and Moto X.

This is not a phone worth buying new; it’s too expensive compared to newer phones but still performs like a two-year-old smartphone. With that said, if you can find one second-hand for around £100, it might be worth a punt due to its excellent build quality and water resistant design that rather outdoes similarly priced phones from the same era. With that said, some users have reported dust making its way into the camera lens, which could be an irritating issue. Battery life, which wasn’t particularly good two years ago, will have only got worse with a used handset so you may need to buy a replacement and then somehow fit it yourself, which isn’t easy as the phone isn’t designed to be opened by amateurs.