Sony Xperia Z5 Dual Hands On Review: Old wine in a new Bottle

Amidst of Navratri-Dashara celebration Sony has decided to launch two new flagship phones – Xiperia Z Premium and Xperia Z Dual in India. With the arrival of these two devices at India shores, buyers are going to have a tough time deciding between Samsung, Apple, Google and Sony. What turns the table in Sony’s favor is how successfully they have fitted a 4K display on a phone. Yes, you read it right. Sony’s Z5 Premium is the world’s first 4K phone. However, Z5 dual is the much more manageable, yet equally powerful Xperia, which will also be selling for a good 10K less. We got opportunity to play around with both the phones for some time. Here, our take on Xperia Z5 Dual.

Key Specifications of Xperia Z5 phone:

Also Read – Sony Xperia Z5 Premium First Impressions: World’s First 4K Display Phone

Body and Design:

Sony has finally made some alterations to its OmiBalance design to make it more appealing. The all new Xperia Z5 series phones flaunts new OmniBalance 2.0 in which more focus is on the minimalistic design. The unibody phone is compact and charms with its simple yet elegant looks. Like Xperia Z3+, Sony has used dual-glass body in this phone too. Luckily, Sony has moved on from glossy glass to a frosted glass this time which is non-reflective and keeps fingerprints and smudges at bay.

Sony has tried to do something different with edges of this phone. The side edges aren’t flush with the glass surface, both on front and rear side, and the sharp protruding edges kind-of dig in your palms. Sony justifies the particular design choice by saying that it will keep scratches at bay, when your phone is lying flat on the table, though we are not sure if we completely buy that.

The ‘soft corners’ which we also saw on Xperia Z3 are still there and will protect your phone from shattering against drops.  corners can handle all the shock in the case of sudden phone drop from the hand. Xperia Z5 is also comes with IP68 certification which means it is resistance to dust and water proof for up to 1.5 meter and 30 minutes.

Sony has reworked on the button designs and moved from circular geometry to rectangular. The volume rocker is placed closer to the bottom edge, which makes it a bit inconvenient to reach in portrait mode, but on the Xperia Z5 dual, it didn’t appear to be a big deal. The newly designed power button consist a fingerprint sensor. You have to press the power button first and then you can scan your fingers. In our testing, the fingerprint sensor is very fast and accurate.

Display:

Unlike Xperia Z5 Premium, which gets the 4K display, Z5 Dual has to manage to get a 5.2-inch Full HD IPS screen with 428PPi (pixel per inch) density. Having said that, the 4K display on the Premium variant is an overkill for most practical purposes. The Z5 Dual screen offers good color reproduction with deep black levels and wide viewing angles. Unlike Samsung’s Super AMOLED display which generally produce over saturated colors, this Sony display keeps colors vibrant yet real.

Hardware:

The Specs of Xperia Z5 are in line with prevailing market trends. The device runs on a top-of the-line 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor coupled with Adreno 430 GPU and 3GB RAM. This is the same chipset which powered the Z3+, but looks like Sony has managed to resolve heating issues with this one. In terms of storage, phone gets 32GB (Around 24GB free) on-board storage which is expandable up to 200GB with the help of microSD card. The phone handled pre-installed game like Modern Combat 5 well without any heating issue or lag. The video playback performance was also great.

Camera:

Sony has been trying to pitch this phone as the world’s best camera phone with fastest autofocus. Shutterbugs gets a 23-megapixel primary snapper with autofocus and LED Flash. Sony claims its onboard autofocus system take only 0.03 seconds to focus. In our limited try-out autofocus indeed appeared quite fast. We will soon comeup with a detailed camera review for Sony Xperia Z5. In this age of selfies, Xperia Z5 Dual is armed with a decent 5-megapixel front shooter.

Battery and connectivity:

Due is its unibody, the Xperia Z5 comes with a non-removable 2,900mAh battery which is little sub-par. According to company claims, phone can last up two days on a full change with normal. To compensate battery size, Sony has added Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology and with the bunched Sony Quick Charger. The smartphone has dual-SIM card slots, 4G LTE support, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, Bluetooth, GPS and NFC.

Conclusion

Based on our initial experience, we are some how more fond of the Xperia Z5 dual as compared to the premium variant. Its compact, manageable, and the frosted glass and frosted aluminum on the edges feels amazing. In our opinion, the Green color variant looked best.