Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSony continues their line of flawless flagships
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2017
Sony, Sony is a very strange company sometimes and can really make you wonder what in the world they are doing, but one thing has seemed to always hold true throughout their insane decisions, quality. Everything Sony has ever made has absolutely flawless quality, all of their products are the epitome of perfection, and the Xperia XZ absolutely continues that tradition.
I had an Xperia Z3 for two years before buying this phone, and I was stuck on outdated Android 5 because of T-Mobile pretending they never sold it, and I refused to switch to another brand, even with old, outdated Android, and it starting to show its age (although, still running fantastically well, and if I could get a newer OS on it, would probably still be using). Sony's Xperia line of phones are just so far ahead of everything Samsung, LG, or whatever else is out there it's unbelievable. My Z3, after *two years* still managed at least two days worth of battery life, no problem. And I have no doubts that the XZ will live up to the greatness that has been established.
One thing that absolutely floored me as soon as I started using the XZ was its camera, now my Z3 had a pretty damn good camera too, and before that I had a Lumia 925 as my daily driver, but the XZ's camera is *scary* how great the pictures come out, from my testing I have a damn hard time believing that a phone took them. Obviously a DSLR can still do better, but for something you will always have on you? The camera on this phone is unbelievable, and the "laser autofocus" system is stupidly fast and very accurate, in under a second the focus is perfect and right where it needs to be, even in low light conditions. Some testing I did was in a room with just a 40w lightbulb on and it had focus almost instantly, every time.
Performance is stellar too, it just flies through everything I even try throwing at it, even while downloading all of my apps onto it there was barely any stutter, and now that everything is installed and up to date, everything just glides.
I also like how out of the box the default configuration pushes you towards full device encryption, and when you put in a microSD card it pops up a notification asking it you would like it encrypted as well, massive props to Sony for pushing for privacy there.
The only real negative thing I can even think of saying about it would be that the fingerprint reader is disabled on the US version of the ROM, which, honestly doesn't really bother me that much, but would be a nice feature to have. Luckily, if I do want it, flashing the UK ROM enables it no problem.
Overall, it is a stunningly gorgeous phone that completely exceeds all of my already high expectations from previous Sony phones, it's a damn shame that there are no carriers that still offer Sony phones in the US so that more people can see how great they are. Even paying full price upfront, it's still worth it.
Stop looking at the garbage that LG and Samsung put out that die after a year (more of a jab towards LG there, everyone I know has had at least one LG phone die to bootloop woes, and Samsung isn't much better), and go with Sony, you won't regret it.