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Should You Buy Sony Xperia XZ Premium: Review

Sony just didn’t have much innovation in its smartphones. But that has been corrected in a big way with the introduction of shiny Xperia XZ Premium. Although it’s a nice phone and have some good features, but overall it may not worth buying as there are just better devices out there at a lower price.

XZ Premium has the world’s first 4K HDR display in a smartphone — it’s the latest new tech combo for TVs, and Sony has roped it into a mobile device. Sony now has a partnership with Amazon for 4K HDR content, and the HDR element truly does wonderful things for color reproduction.

Beside nice display, Sony’s new flagship phone also has a new camera system called Motion Eye. The curious thing about this setup is that it has embedded fast memory right into the camera stack, allowing it to produce another world first for phones: the super-slow motion of 960fps at 720p resolution. This rapid burst lasts for only 0.18 seconds, so technically you’re only capturing something closer to 180 frames, but the effect is still quite compelling when stretched out to a regular 30fps.

One thing that may go against that even at a high price; Sony opted to stay away from fingerprint scanner. In a market where the feature is getting popular day by day and every other phone is equipped with a fingerprint scanner.

The addition of memory also helps it to start buffering shots as soon as the camera detects motion in the frame — so that when you press the shutter button, there’s absolutely no lag, the camera will just pull the image it was already taking at that moment. This is the sort of system that will rely heavily on good autofocus, and Sony is bringing back the triple-sensor system from the Xperia XZ: there’s laser AF, an RGBC infrared sensor for adjusting the white balance on the fly.

As far as specs go, we might not have expected Sony to tout the latest Snapdragon 835 processor in its new flagship, as it does, but there is a catch here— Sony has the latest and best Qualcomm chip while others are still offering the Snapdragon 820 and 821.

Other notable features include water resistance, rated to IP65 and IP68, a thinner profile at 7.9mm, and MicroSD storage expandability. The phone’s battery is a reasonable 3,230mAh, and there’s a fingerprint sensor integrated into side-mounted power button as usual. But the Xperia XZ Premium is really all about the camera, display, and processor combo. Each of those three components promises a great deal, and if Sony can finally strike the right balance and deliver an uncompromised device that makes the most of its various parts.

But even after that, the latest phone by Sony is not appealing. At price tag of $900 and with no fingerprint scanner. Other makers are giving better features at a lower price, the success of Sony Xperia XZ seems to be unlikely.

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