Sony Xperia Z5 review
PROS
- Fantastic display
- Camera works well in varying conditions
- Excellent fingerprint scanner
CONS
- Uncomfy design
- Dated UI
- It gets too hot
KEY FEATURES
- 5.2-inch 1080p display
- Snapdragon 810 chip
- 3GB RAM
- 32GB internal storage
- Android 5.1.1
- 23MP/5MP cameras
- Manufacturer: Sony
- Review Price: £549.00
WHAT IS THE SONY XPERIA Z5?
Sitting between the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact and Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, the regular Z5 might seem like the least interesting of the trio. It doesn’t have the small, yet powerful nature of the Compact or the 4K display of the Premium.
But, if you spend some time with the Xperia Z5 you'll realise it's a great phone; with an ace camera, vibrant display and plenty of power tucked underneath its frosted glass back.
It rights many of the wrongs caused by the awful Z3+ and, while it's still far from perfect, it’s probably the best Xperia currently on the market.
SONY XPERIA Z5 REVIEW – SCREEN
Sony uses a lot of buzzwords when talking about Xperias' Triluminous and Bravia Mobile Engine screen technology. Most of the time it's marketing drivel so I'm not going to bore you with it. All you need to know is the screen on the Xperia Z5 is fantastic, in pretty much every way. It’s bright, vibrant, accurate at representing colours and packed with detail.
Sony says quad-HD doesn’t really add anything to phone screens of this size and for the most part I agree with them. This is why I'm not bothered by the fact that, unlike Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Motorola’s Moto X Style, it doesn’t include a pixel-dense quad-HD panel.
I can’t pick out individual pixels on its 1080p screen and the IPS LCD panel displays colours with fantastic amounts of accuracy. Whites are bright, yellows and reds are vivid without becoming oversaturated and if you don’t jack the brightness up too high, blacks are deep and inky.
Viewing angles are also fantastic and it’s surprisingly useable in bright light, with glare rarely becoming an issue.
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SONY XPERIA Z5 REVIEW – DESIGN
Sony clearly believes it’s on to a winner with the overall look of the Xperia series, because its phones' designs have barely changed at all over the past four years. I would have liked to see a bit of a refresh this time around, but there’s no doubting that Sony has made a sleek smartphone. The straight sides blend seamlessly into rounded corners and both the front and back are covered in Gorilla Glass.
Generally, I’m not a fan of phones with glass backs. The glass attracts smudges and they’re far too easy to crack. I must have gone through at least four iPhone 4s and even the strengthened glass on the back of my Samsung Galaxy S6 cracked after a drop from barely a foot.
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My first issue is solved by the frosted glass used here. It stays completely smudge free and has a lovely matte finish. I didn’t even think it was glass when I took the Xperia Z5 out of the box, as it feels more like plastic to the touch.
As I haven’t dropped it yet – thankfully – I can’t say whether or not it’ll be forever damaged after a meeting with a concrete slab, but my instinct says that it would.
This time around, Sony has ditched the circular metal power button that was present on all other Xperia devices and replaced it with a flatter, longer version.
There’s good reason for the change, as it now has a fingerprint sensor baked in. Fingerprint readers on Android have hit the big time, but no one is really sure yet where the best place for them to go is. On the back below the camera? On the front? Nope. Sony’s side-mounted version is the best yet.
Putting the sensor into the button you always use to unlock the device just makes sense and Sony’s interpretation is fast and accurate. Out of twenty tries, the scanner worked flawlessly every time.
I do have a few issues with the Xperia Z5’s design, however. The biggest being the placement of the volume keys. They’re situated just on the lower right hand side and I find myself constantly hitting them accidentally when I reach for the power button.
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I also really dislike how the rim ever so slightly juts out past the glass back. It makes the phone uncomfortable to hold, with it digging into my palms.
Unlike the Xperia Z5 Compact, which is a little on the chunky side, the vanilla Z5 is slim, measuring 7.3mm.
Like previous Xperia Z phones, the Z5 is waterproof and holds an IP68 rating. With it being waterproof you’d expect to be able to use it in, you know, water? But Sony thinks otherwise. It doesn’t want you actually using it like a GoPro in the swimming pool or shower. Instead it’s there to protect from an accidental drop in your cup of tea or being left out in the rain.
Thankfully, just like the Z3 and Z3+, there aren’t any pesky flaps covering up the ports. No one like flaps covering up those vital ports, do they?
SUMMARY
OUR SCORE:
USER SCORE:
SONY XPERIA Z5 REVIEW – PERFORMANCE
A lot of the problems that plagued the Xperia Z3+ stemmed from Sony's choice of components. It was powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810, a chip that notoriously ran hot. So, it might seem odd to layman that, on the surface, the Xperia Z5 looks to be using the exact same chip.
But the 810 in the Xperia Z5 is a slightly upgraded version that supposedly solves the overheating problems. From my time with the Xperia Z5 I'm not convinced this is the case.
During bouts of gaming, even with titles that I don’t class as graphically intense, the phone gets hot below the camera. The heating issue gets worse when I fire up Asphalt 8 or Lara Croft Go. I wouldn’t be as fussed if it was only a minor temperature hike, but the Z5 got hot to the point I hat to move by fingers on several occsaions. The phone even gets hot when playing Spotify, which is odd.
The other major problem with the Xperia Z3+ was that its 4K recording was basically unusable. Capturing footage for longer than a few minutes caused the device to spew up a worrying overheating message and then crash. Thankfully, this problem seems to have been fixed on the Z5.
As a test, I left the camera recording a 4K video for half an hour. Aside from eating though almost half of my available storage, it didn’t crash or make the phone hot. Discounting the gaming bits I mentioned earlier, performance and stability on the Z5 are great. Switching through apps is fast, Chrome never feels sluggish and lag is non-existent. It’s a great performer
But, for a flagship device costing £539, packing a high-power processor and 3GB RAM, I expect this.
The powerful chip produces impressive benchmarking scores too. With a 4,720 result on the multi-core GeekBench 3 test it outmuscles the LG G4 (3,260) and HTC One M9 (3,952), but just falls short of toppling Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge+ (5,014). On AnTuTu, it scores 53,155, putting it above the Nexus 6 (51,855) and Moto X Style (51,350), but below the iPhone 6S (59,069).
To be completely honest, I’d still have preferred Sony to go with the Snapdragon 808. The small losses in performance are easily made up for by the better heat control.
You get 32GB of onboard storage, though this can be supplemented by a microSD card. These cards are about to get a whole lot more useful in Marshmallow, as the OS will let you use them for proper system storage.
The dual front-facing speakers are well positioned, but they fall into many of the same traps as other phones. Volume is loud enough, but audio is tinny and lacks any sort of oomph. It’s fine for YouTube, but not really for music.
Call quality on 3’s UK network, and also a network in Taiwan, was on par with just about every other phone I’ve used this year. No one ever complained they couldn't hear me, which is the important thing.
SONY XPERIA Z5 REVIEW – SOFTWARE
Testing the Z5 I couldn't help but thing, "come on Sony, it’s time to ditch your Android skin". Running atop Android 5.1.1 (Sony has already announced the Marshmallow update is coming), the custom UI certainly isn’t as heavy as say Huawei’s awful EMUI, but it still takes away from the OS' user experience experience.
It lacks the modern look of Lollipop, with ugly default icons, fonts and widgets. There are also some annoying apps pre-installed – Kobo books (I don’t know anyone who uses this) and AVG Protection – that shouldn’t be there.
I do however like how you can rearrange, add and take away icons in the drop-down settings menu. So thumbs up for including that Sony.
Like other recent Sony phones, the Xperia Z5 comes with a suite of Playstation apps. There’s PS Video, PS Music – this is just Spotify, not sure why it’s renamed here – and PSN. The main draw of these is the Remote Play app. This lets you stream games from your PS4 to the phone, and pair up a Dualshock 4 controller so there’s no fiddling about with on-screen controls. It works well, but I don’t really have a desire to use it, aside from for demo purposes. PS4 games are designed for the big screen, not a 5.2-inch phone display.
The overview multitasking pane has been altered slightly, with mini apps that can be popped out and used at the same time as other apps. The feature is restricted to Sony apps though, so if you tend to replace all the native apps with Google’s alternatives this feature won’t be of much use.
There’s also support for high-res audio files and Digital Noise Cancelling, so if you’ve got the relevant files and some decent headphones you can enjoy noticeably better audio quality on the Z5.
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