Let’s start with why I ended up with buyer’s remorse. I used to have a brilliant white color Lumia 920. But after 2 and a half years of constant falls, swims and being buried in a sweltering desert, on 1st on January I dropped it(it’s a tradition every year to drop phones, don’t ask) accidentally and cracked the gorilla glass completely. The best part, it still works! The damn thing just won’t die!
So I made up my mind and decided to splurge a lil and get one of them high end flagship models. I looked at Huawei and Samsung, but boy do they look like gigantic iphone ripoffs. I saw the Xperia Z5s were on offer at Jumbo.(Just a side note for context. I am living in Dubai for 6 months now and the Jumbo I bought the phone is in MOE) I checked out the Z5 which was simply brilliant, but then the sales assistant showed me the slightly bigger Z5 premium which was only a 100 dollars extra. I saw the 4k display, the elegance of the design and immediately bought it. Now for the review.
Specification: It’s top of the line like any other flagship phones. I don’t know what’s happening to android phones, but this phablet has a spandragon 810 processor with 4 performance cores and 4 slower cores(seriously, my laptop has only a quad core cpu!) and a pretty powerful gpu, 3GB RAM, 32 GB internal memory, a lovely 4k 5.5 inch display, a massive 3430 mAh battery and an awesome fingerprint reader built right into the power button. Connectivity options are the standard with 3G, 4G, NFC, bluetooth and dual band wifi a/b/g/n/ac. It has a 23 mega pixel main camera with a DSLR grade(albeit a very low end one) sensor and a 5.1 mega pixel front facing one. In all honestly, a phone really can’t be more powerful than this, but somehow android manages to slow even this beast down. I’ll come to this later.
Design: I always liked Xperia’s designs even from the dumb phones era. Maybe I am just biased because I like sharp industrial designs. Xperia Z5 Premium doesn’t disappoint me, It’s like holding a space age device made from black crystal. Yep, it’s that cool. It has a full glass front and back. You can actually see your own reflection on the back. There are times when I confuse myself which side is the front due to the reflective back. The top has the headphone jack. The right side has the power button, volume rocker and the camera button in that order. The power button has a fingerprint reader built into it and the button is set slightly inside the case which works nicely. I won’t press it by accident while holding the phone. On the left side there’s the dual sim slot and the micro SD card slot covered by a plastic cap thingy(I honestly don’t know what they are called). The bottom has the micro USB port and that’s all. Very simple, clean and elegant design. I couldn’t ask for more! Well there are two issues I am having right now though. First, the phone is a fingerprint magnet. The glass back isn’t helping very much from showing all my paws prints on it. But I can live with that because it looks very cool and don’t mind wiping my phone often. Second issue is again because of the glass back. You really can’t place the phone on smooth surfaces. You know what happens when you place an ice cube on a sheet of ice or a smooth surface right? If you don’t know or can’t imagine it right now, buy this phone. It’ll teach you some physics about friction;-) . That’s right, the phone skates around on smooth surfaces. Never leave it on a glass table if you know what’s good for the phone and the money you just spent. I almost let it fall off the table because of this twice. Never going to leave it out for people to ogle at you anymore Xperia. Never.
Performance: Lets be honest, with the specs mentioned above, this is not going to be a stuttering painfully slow phone. It’s very fast in opening or switching apps and screens. But sometimes apps hang for a bit before you can switch to them. I figured the phone really can’t do anything about it unless Android decides to improve this bit. Being Android 5.1.1, I guess the OS is busy licking lollipops once in a while. I can only imagine Android 6 toasting marshmallows over the CPU soon(Yep Sony is releasing Marshmallow in January 2016). Yeah never really liked Android and don’t ask why I got an Android phone either. I am thinking exactly the same.
The camera is simply brilliant. The photos are as good as a point and shoot cybershot camera and sometimes even better. The main camera does sometimes get stuck trying to find faces(if you turn on that feature), but if you point at them for a second more, it’s all good. I haven’t tried the front camera yet since I am not into selfies and dread people using one of those sticks to selfies. I tried to record a 4k video, but the problem is file size. The video itself is absolutely gorgeous, but a 30 second video was close to 4GB. I really can’t afford to get a 128GB SD card just to shoot 4k videos and I also don’t have a 4k TV to watch my videos. So I am sticking with 1080p videos from now on and there’s really nothing to complain. Colors look natural in both videos and photos and I also heard that this camera is one of the best out there. I am at least happy about this part.
The fingerprint reader built into the power button is simply wonderful to use. All I have to do to unlock my phone is press the power button and keep my finger on it for another quarter of a second and am in. How cool is that? I got 5 of my most frequently used fingers registered in the phone and no matter which hand I use, I get to look cool unlocking the phone;-)
The 4k screen is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. I admit I never had a 1080p screened phone before so can’t really know the difference between the two, but moving from the Lumia’s 720p to a 4k is mind blowing. The clarity, the colors, the contrast, everything is just out of this world. Thanks to this phone, I decided to get a 4k TV soon. But here comes the bad part. The screen sucks on the battery with a straw I tell you. Keep the screen on for 5 mins and 1% battery will be gone. Read something for 30 minutes and you lose 10%. Yeah sure it has rapid charging feature and all, but if I am traveling, would I have a power socket next to me all the time to do the rapid charging? No I won’t and I don’t think it can last more than a day with normal usage. It was quite disappointing to figure this out the hard way. Maybe one day battery is the norm in Android world, but where I come from, I used to get 2 days solid on my Lumia 920. So yeah relatively, this is a disaster for me. And hence my buyer’s remorse. I should’ve gone for the Xperia Z5. It has as slightly smaller battery, but the screen resolution is only 1080p, so it should last more than a day easily.
In the end, one of my best friends said once, "Do not underestimate ones own stupidity" and I did underestimate my own stupidity buying this phone. Well, it’s just my own opinion in the end. I want more power and my phone to stay alive for a couple of days, but you might not worry about the one day battery life. So here’s the verdict. It’s a brilliant piece of technology. Once you get used to the 4k display, the amazing quality of photographs and videos, the fingerprint reader and the feeling of holding a black onyx slab in your hand, you will never want any other phone. There are issues like since being covered in glass, won’t survive a fall and battery won’t last more than a day. So would I suggest this phone to you? well do you have 60, 000 lying around? yeah sure go ahead. If not, go for the Z5 or the Z5 compact. They are far more worth the money than this show piece.