Sony Xperia M5 review: A mid-range handset for UK selfie fans

Sony’s hit phones tend to be a bit hit and miss, don’t they? The Japanese giant’s Xperia X failed to live up to our expectations when we reviewed it, while the Xperia Z5 and Z5 Compact weren’t that different from the outgoing Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact handsets. Now the Xperia M5 is here, and we’re hoping it marks one of Sony’s high points.

Therefore, it’s with slight trepidation that we approach the Sony Xperia M5, the new version of the – still, frankly new Xperia M4 Aqua. The latter was one of the best mid-range smartphones of 2015, and costs around £150 – so the Xperia M5 needs to be much better to justify its higher, £300, asking price. So is it any good? Read our review of the Sony Xperia M5 to find out.

Design

With its glossy frame, reinforced corners, and gorgeous frosted rear glass, the Sony Xperia M5 is almost the spitting image of the Xperia Z3+, which was one of Sony’s 2015 flagship handsets, and the gold version I was sent for review is particularly stunning.

With this kind of build quality, it’s a world away from the plastic and faux leather combo of the S5 Neo and even the Nexus 5X’s comfy, soft-touch unibody can’t hold a candle to it. It’s a shame it doesn’t come with the same power-button based fingerprint reader as the Z5 and Z5 Compact, instead opting for one of Sony’s traditional circular power buttons, but it’s not really that surprising when this is still, largely, a mid-range handset.

The M5 has a much higher specification than the M4 – hence the increase in price. It has a 5in, Full HD display, a 21.1-megapixel camera on the rear, and a huge 13-megapixel camera on the front. That’s a big upgrade from the M4 Aqua, but at this kind of price, it’s also go to compete alongside other £300 phones like the Nexus 5X and Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo.

Performance

The Sony’s Xperia M5’s octa-core 2.0GHz MediaTek MT6795 processor and 3GB of RAM are arguably the phone’s greatest undoing, as I’ve never seen a MediaTek processor outperform its Qualcomm-based equivalent. In Geekbench 3, for instance, the Xperia M5 managed scores of just 586 in the single core test and 1,429 in the multicore test, the latter of which is 1,000 points slower than last year’s M4 Aqua. It’s certainly no match for the Nexus 5X, which scored 1,235 and 3,489 respectively, and even the S5 Neo‘s Exynos 7580 produced faster scores of 724 and 3,547.

Fortunately, Sony’s Android 5.1.1 interface is still relatively smooth during day-to-day use, but there can be a slight delay when returning to the home menu, for instance. Apps can also take a little longer to load than its main rivals, and there’s a pause whenever you bring up the onscreen keyboard.

Its Peacekeeper score of 697 also wasn’t very promising, and it took a significant amount of time for it to load all the pictures on the Guardian homepage. Scrolling up and down the page while it was loading was surprisingly smooth, however, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble browsing the web as long as you don’t mind waiting for the pictures to pop in.

Gaming

Gaming performance wasn’t great either, as its offscreen Manhattan test score of 425 frames (6.9fps) in GFX Bench GL 3.0 is almost twice as slow as the Nexus 5X. It’s not particularly well suited to playing graphically intense games, then, but even titles like Hearthstone weren’t wholly unplayable. It struggled to maintain its frame rate when I laid down new cards and encountered speech bubbles, but at no point was it so bad that it made me want to stop playing. That said, its forte is definitely simpler games, as Threes! was much smoother and easier to play than Hearthstone.

Display

It’s a shame the M5’s hardware isn’t better, as Sony’s 5in, 1,920×1,080 resolution display looks great. With a peak brightness level of 542.61cd/m2, it’s more than bright enough to use outdoors without any visibility problems, and colours look rich and vibrant thanks to its 92.2% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut. Blacks aren’t particularly fantastic at 0.53cd/m2, but a contrast ratio of 840:1 still provides a reasonable amount of detail in dark photos and videos.

Battery Life

You’ll need to keep tabs on the M5’s brightness levels, however, as setting it to 170cd/m2 and playing a video continuously only produced 8h 55m of battery life, which is pitiful compared to the S5 Neo’s 16h 27m, and it doesn’t compare very well with the Nexus 5X’s 10h 14m either. Admittedly, Sony’s power-management software is brilliant when it comes to squeezing more out of your phone’s 2,600mAh battery, but activating its Ultra Stamina and Low-battery modes do mean you’ll have to sacrifice everything but its most basic phone functions.

Camera

Before you turn on the phone, however, the first thing you notice is the massive 13-megapixel front-facing camera. It produces surprisingly decent shots, too, as it’s not only quick to latch on to your face, but you can also set it to capture photos automatically simply by smiling. The results are a tad over-processed when viewed at full-res, as there’s a fair amount of visible grain and rough artefacts, but detail levels are good and they’re more than acceptable for uploading to social media.

It also has a plethora of special selfie filters in the camera’s Style Portrait mode, but not all of them are wholly successful. The Film and Red Lips filter, for instance, were very hit and miss, as they often failed to correctly apply a rather blaring shade of red lipstick to my mouth, and the phone’s chipset was also clearly struggling with all the extra processing, as there was at least a couple of seconds delay on the screen. It’s a fun diversion, though, and certainly a lot more selfie-orientated than the Nexus 5X and S5 Neo. 

Sadly, the rear 21.2 megapixel camera was altogether more disappointing. While colours and contrast were reasonably accurate on its Superior Auto mode, the aggressive noise reduction completely robs each shot of any kind of fine detail, leaving all but the objects closest to the centre of frame rather soft and blurry. Landscape shots without anything in the foreground were particularly poor, as even the centre of the frame was lacking in focus.

Switching to Sony’s HDR backlight mode did improve outdoor shots somewhat, but cars in the road, for example, were still very soft and smoothed over, even if nearby buildings and road signs were visibly sharper than their Superior Auto mode counterparts.

Indoor shots suffered the same problem, too, even in bright lighting conditions. Here the fur of our teddy bear was almost painterly, and the text on our medical poster was full of grain and illegible words. Bizarrely, sharpness actually improved when I switched off our external lamp, as the words on the poster became legible and our train set and post card had more defined edges. Switching on the flash didn’t make it much better either, although colours were noticeably brighter and richer as a result.

Verdict

Ultimately, though, the Xperia M5 struggles to distinguish itself from the similarly-priced Nexus 5X and Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. Its large front-facing camera and copious selfie modes will no doubt be enough to sway some, but those after a more general mid-range handset are better off looking elsewhere. Personally, I’d pick the Nexus 5X thanks to its plain version of Android, faster internals and its great camera, but the S5 Neo also makes a compelling case with its incredible battery life, expandable storage and equally brilliant camera. Either way, the Xperia M5 is left feeling distinctly average by comparison, as well as a disappointing follow-up to last year’s M4 Aqua.