Sony Xperia Z5 Premium: Android's new 4K king of bling (hands-on)

Sony needs a new flagship phone: it wasn't the Xperia Z3+ or the Xperia Z4, but it's the Z5 that everyone was calling for.

Launched as a triplicate of handsets, the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium sits at the top of the pile, bringing with it new levels of bling. Why else would you give a phone a mirrored finish, unless it wanted to undeniably be the centre of attention?

Well, thanks to the small matter of a 4K display, there's plenty to look at both on the front and the back of Sony's latest hero handset. 

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium display

Let's start at the top, because that's what you want to know about, right? The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium has a 5.5-inch LCD IPS display with a 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution. You probably don't yet have a 4K television in your house, but Sony wants to put one in your pocket. 

That resolution gives the Xperia Z5 Premium a pixel density of 801ppi, higher than anything we've seen before. There's been a battleground recently around the 500-600ppi mark and never has anyone said that that pixel density was too low.

What does this mean in reality? It means that the Z5 Premium has the ability to deliver fine detail more accurately than lesser devices. Whether your eyes can see that or not is a different matter.

Many will argue that this is really about Sony showing the world what it can do and we're all for that. We spent some time watching videos on the Xperia Z5 Premium and they look stunning. There's bags of detail, but there's a huge caveat that comes with it: sample content will always look good, that's what it's designed for. 

What we can't determine yet is how much of a difference that 4K display will make when set alongside, for example, a 5.5-inch 2K device (like the LG G4) playing the same content. That's something we'll be looking at in detail in our full review closer to launch.

What we can say is that the display is very good. The colours look fantastic, the viewing angles are excellent, there's punch and pop to everything. But at the same time, there's little out there that calls for that level of detail - many games run at 720p or 1080p, most streamed content is the same, and we doubt that any app developers are looking to boost apps to make use of such a high resolution display.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium 4K upscaling

Sony has said that a 2K display isn't relevant because there's no 2K content and there never will be. There's only Full HD or 4K content, and that fits with Sony's end-to-end 4K story. You can capture, share and view in native 4K on the Z5 Premium.

Of course, there isn't, currently, a huge amount of 4K content either (Netflix and Amazon Instant Video streaming, BT Sport Ultra HD, none of which you can get on a phone). But Sony says that upscaling is a huge part of the equation. Exactly how upscaling to 4K is more relevant than upscaling to 2K we'll never know, but that's something for Sony's marketing department to figure out.

Here the 4K upscaling is handled by Sony's X-Reality engine. If that sounds familiar, that's because Sony has been using X-Reality as a display boost in Xperia handsets for a number of years. Now it incorporates 4K upscaling too.

The upscaling aims to make sure that everything looks better, including YouTube, Netflix and anything else you want to watch.

We'll say this: having spent a long time looking at this phone, X-Reality here really works. Without it, video content just looks ok. With X-Reality turned on, it pops out and is laced with fine detail. The image above is cropped from a photo of the display, but it shows the sort of difference when you turn X-Reality on.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium design

The Xperia family all exhibit the same design language. It's a minor evolution from the Z3 and previous devices, but sticks to the minimalist approach, sandwiching a metal frame with glass front and rear.

It's a design we're mostly all for. Sure, there's still some space above and below the display that feels a little underutilised, but on the whole, we've come to accept that this is how Sony is doing phones.

The edges now are slightly flattened for a squarer profile than previously. Slimness no longer seems to be the prime concern and we can't say it matters, because the Z5 Premium feels great in the hand, even if the size will be a barrier to some. The Xperia Z5 Premium measures 154.4 x 75.8 x 7.8mm and it weighs 180g.

There's a wonderfully silky anodisation to the edges, which are still softly curved where they meet the glass, so nothing feels too sharp. Xperia is now engraved on the side for a little extra branding. Some might complain, but we think it looks great: there's something hypnotic about tracing your finger along that line of lettering.

While most of the Xperia Z5 handsets have a lovely frosting to the rear, there's only one thing that people are going to be talking about: the mirrored silver finish of the Z5 Premium.

It displays an exuberance from Sony that we don't always see. It's impractical, of course, but there is absolutely no mistaking what you're looking at. It's so offensively bling, an expression of excess, we can't help but want it. Sure, we'll carry a cloth to polish it with too, as it is the absolute definition of fingerprint magnet.

The Z5 Premium is waterproof, with open Micro-USB and headphone sockets. There's no sign of USB Type-C sadly. There's a covered tray for the SIM and microSD card, supporting up to 200GB.

There's also a fingerprint scanner, again, another reason for the flatter sides. It replaces the round power button that has adorned Xperia Z devices since their inception. That's pushed the other controls - including a dedicated camera button - down towards the bottom. That fingerprint scanner is FIDO compliant, so it's ready for future payment services.

The Xperia Z5 Premium fingerprint scanner falls naturally under the thumb when you grip the phone. It should make for seamless and secure unlocking, although we haven't had the chance to use it in anger just yet.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium specs and hardware

Aside from the display, you'll find that the specs are very much the same across the Z5 family. The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor with 3GB of RAM. There's 32GB of storage, but you'll need to take advantage of that microSD slot if you've any serious desire to watch 4K content.

Sony assures us that the Snapdragon 810 doesn't overheat - a problem that faced the recent Xperia Z3+ - and we didn't find it warm during our testing time. We even tried recording a good length of 4K video and it didn't heat up. But that's no test for what might happen when you're charging, syncing, and watching a 4K movie. We'll be sure to test that when we get to fully review the phone. 

The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium battery life is going to be one to watch. Sony has a good history with battery life and this phone is packed with a 3430mAh battery. It benefits from Quick Charge 2.0 charging and Sony has taken a number of steps to ensure the battery life is long. For example, Sony has added memory to the display, meaning that the CPU can be cut as soon as the display is showing what's needed. This is managed by the microsecond, with Sony saying it helps cut main CPU usage and reduce battery drain.

Sony is sticking to its guns and saying the Z5 Premium battery will last for two days in Stamina mode.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium camera

There's a new camera module on the Xperia Z5 family. It's now a 23-megapixel Exmor RS for mobile sensor, paired with a closed loop actuation module for image stabilisation and a new 6-element lens. (Pre-production unit photographed, hence the lack of digits under the camera.)

There's a lot new happening in this lens, addressing focusing speed, zoom, low light and handshake. We've seen some demos of stabilised video captured on a bike and the normal vibration and wobble was almost totally smoothed out. 
But the real headline is the use of Hybrid AF, which claims a 0.03 second focusing time in good conditions. The aim here is to make sure you don't miss the action because the camera can't focus. Again, this applies to both photos and video, with fast continuous AF in video.

Looking to address the problems with digital zoom, the Xperia Z5 Premium now has something called Sony Super Resolution Technology, offering 5x zoom in higher quality than previously. Sony's tech analyses the pixels in a frame and replicates the patterns to reproduce the detail. The image is output at 8-megapixels, but the idea is to let you use the zoom without losing all the definition.

The test shots we took with the Z5 Premium looked great and the focusing was fast. We can't judge the performance on pre-release software or until we've got it into the real world, but expectations from this camera will be high. 

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium software

Sony phones have had similar looking UI for a number of years. There are new themes to match the minimalist looks of these handsets, but there isn't much of a change here. If you're a Sony user, it's all pretty familiar stuff.

Some of the things we complained about previously have been changed, however. Now you're not faced with Sony's What's New service quite so aggressively, but head into the settings menu and everything looks as it did before.

We didn't have the time to drill through the software in great detail, but we didn't spot anything that really utilises the size of the display. LG on the G4 offers split screen functions and Samsung on Note 5 offers a range of multitasking options, something that the Z5 Premium might benefit from.

The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium will launch on Android Lollipop and there's no word on a timeframe for update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

First Impressions

There's something about the Xperia Z5 Premium that leaves us a little conflicted. We're not entirely sold on the display resolution being as high as it is. We can't wait to test it in more detail alongside lower res rivals - including the regular Z5 - but we can't help enjoying the fact that Sony is being excessive. Ultimately, this is a great display regardless of the resolution and everything we've seen so far is good.

And we've come to love that mirrored finish. It's brash and offensive and impractical, but who cares? You'll not find anything else like it out there and that's an attractive trait.
There will certainly be those who have doubts about the choice of the Snapdragon 810 chipset for this handset due to its thermal reputation and the performance of the Z3+. That means the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium has more to prove than any other phone of recent times: it has to demonstrate that a 4K display makes a difference; it has to demonstrate that Sony's new camera can beat down strong performance from Apple and Samsung; it also has to do all this while not overheating and not draining the battery ridiculously fast.
We were waiting for a new Sony flagship and now we've got one. Welcome to the new 4K king of bling.

More: http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/135065-sony-xperia-z5-premium-android-s-new-4k-king-of-bling-hands-on