Sony wants you to know three key things about its new flagship smartphone, Sony the Xperia XZ Premium. These are: its 4K HDR display, 920fps slow-motion camera, and its incredibly fast 4G connectivity, which can hit an impressive-sounding 1Gbits/sec on the download.
The three things I think you should know are that the screen looks brilliant (but it has more pixels than your eyes can see); the slow motion camera is also great, but it’s almost unusable; and the gigabit download speed the XZ is capable of is the most exciting thing to happen to a smartphone since the Samsung turned the Note 7 into a pocket-grenade lottery.
Sony Xperia XZ Premium review: Tl;dr
Of course, these aren’t the only improvements to Sony’s latest flagship handset. We’ve come to expect incremental improvements from each new Sony smartphone, and the Xperia XZ Premium isn’t any different.
The best thing about it is its octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. In addition to those headline features, this has the new Adreno 540 graphics processor on board, paving the way for the XZ Premium’s crazy sharp 4K HDR screen, plus improved Hexagon 682 DSP and Spectra 180 ISP companion chips, which enable the phone’s predictive photography and 920fps super slow motion capture.
Other core specifications include 4GB of RAM, a microSD card slot for storage expansion and 64GB of storage.
Sony Xperia XZ Premium review: Design
There are no real shocks in this department. And that’s not the slightest bit surprising. All Sony’s smartphones have a “unified design” and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is the latest in the evolution of this.
The XZ Premium has Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back sandwiched by metal antennae on the top and bottom of the handset. The phone is available in two colours: “Luminous Chrome” and “Deepsea Black”, both of which have a special coating to help you keep the phone free of greasy fingerprints.
There’s dust- and water-resistance in the shape of an IP65/68 rating – just like the Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge and the 2016 Sony Xperia XZ, meaning it’s dust tight and water resistant for up to 30 minutes in 1.5m of water. The only other, slightly tedious, thing to note is that Sony has also managed so make this phone 0.2mm slimmer than its predecessor (the Sony Xperia Z Premium).
The result? A cold, polished and expensive-looking smartphone that feels good, and very thin, in your hands.
That 4K 5.5in display looks great, too, although unless you plan on spending a lot of time mounting the phone in a VR headset, the extra resolution is largely pointless. The difference between this and even a 1080p resolution screen of the same size is difficult to discern with the naked eye. Hopefully, though, the new Snapdragon 835 chipset will help keep the power draw down, as this was one of the big problems with the Sony Xperia Z Premium.
Sony Xperia XZ Premium: Camera
Over the years, Sony has spent a lot of its energy trying to differentiate itself from the competition by creating new smartphone camera features. This time, the major advancement is the ability to capture super slow motion at 920fps. This is an impressive feat. For comparison, the iPhone 7, which captures excellent slow motion footage, is only able to record at 420fps.
The problem is that Sony only lets you record at 920fps in bursts of 0.82 seconds, which turns into six seconds playback at regular speed. And prepping the phone for this super slow-motion mode is a classic example of Sony’s “unique” take on ease-of-use. Open the camera app, switch to video, switch again to slow motion mode, start recording then press the super slow motion icon when you want to capture 0.82 seconds worth of 920fps action.
The footage you get out of the phone in this mode looks great, but it might take you a couple of attempts.
Slow motion aside, the Xperia XZ Premium is a capable phone for everyday smartphone photography. It has a 19-megapixel camera with a 1/2.3in sensor, and the pixels on that sensor are now 19% bigger, too.
And there are other improvements that Sony is bringing to the table, with the help of the Snapdragon 835’s DSP and ISP chips. This year, the development of note is “predictive photography”. The idea here is to help users capture action shots by automatically starting to take images when the camera detects movement in the frame. These images are stored in a special memory chip, dedicated solely to the use of the camera, and are only saved to permanent storage if you press the shutter button in the moments shortly before or after movement occurring in the frame.
Example: you’re on holiday and your mate wants a shot of him jumping into the pool. You frame the shot. Your friend leaps but you’re a fraction late with your press of the shutter button. “Predictive photography” has you covered, you can select one of its automatically captured images, in this case before you actually hit the shutter button.
Sony Xperia XZ Premium review: Early verdict
I like the Sony Xperia XZ Premium. It’s a highly responsive phone – as you’d expect from any 2017 flagship – and while I’m not a huge fan of the half-inch top/bottom bezel, other than that, the design is solid.
I’m probably most excited about the ridiculously fast download speeds it can achieve, but given that you’ll only see these super fast download speeds (at least in the near future) towards the end of 2017 in the UK, and only then in small urban areas, that’s one for the future.
As for the of the phone – well, it’s lovely. First impressions are that the camera’s going to be more than capable at holding its own; and that the 4K HDR screen is so bright that checking your messages in the middle of the night could lead to temporary blindness. Whether that’s going to be enough to justify the (inevitably) high-price, remains to be seen.