Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review :
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium
Handling the 5 Premium
What's around the screen
Cap-less USB port at the bottom • The microSD/nanoSIM tray
The controls of the Z5 Premium are all on the right
The top and rear sides
Xperia lockscreen, lacking widgets
Homescreens and widgets
Customization • Themes
Notification area • Quick settings
App Drawer
Task switcher • Small apps • Google Now
Introduction
Sony's flagships have always been playing off each other in a nice but, after a certain point, rather repetitive way. When Sony decided to pass on QHD-screens, it looked like it had the right reasons to keep up with 1080p for flagship generations on end.
Today, however, the company is finally ready for a jump in screen resolution and it's making that jump with a bang. What better way to stir things up than the first 4K display on a smartphone? Meet the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium.
If your natural inclination is to be wary of lofty model identifiers "Premium" may give the wrong impression. But we guess Sony just had to come up with an original way of calling its phablet flagship without the involvement of any Plus moniker as the competition does.
To be fair, the Z5 Premium does bring enough novelties to the series to deserve its name. The first ever 4K display on a smartphone is surely a catchy headline feature, but we shouldn't also miss the fact that it comes spread over a display that's 5.5-inch in diagonal, a size that was so far missing from Sony's flagship portfolio. It is also available in the signature Chrome paintjob, making its rear a near perfect mirror for possibly some nice selfies with the main camera.
Besides that, you get all the perks that the original Z5 has - the side-mounted fingerprint scanner, the new 23MP camera sensor, the enhanced connectivity, and the more powerful chipset. It's still waterproof too!
Yet, the Xperia Z5 Premium plays it safe where it has to and isn't defying the established design language of the Z series. Instead it refines the familiar dual-glass styling and smartens up the looks with the new mirror rear finish and an improved metal frame. We are quite fond too of the discreet fingerprint reader integrated in the power/lock key on the right.
Key features
- 5.5" UHD (3840 x 2160px) IPS LCD display with 806ppi (4K in layman's terms), X Reality for Mobile, Triluminos technology and Dynamic Contrast Enhancer; scratch-resistant glass, oleophobic coating
- Android OS v5.1.1 Lollipop with Xperia launcher
- Octa-core Qualcomm MSM8994 Snapdragon 810, feat. a quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 and quad-core 2 GHz Cortex-A57 and an Adreno 430 GPU and 3GB RAM
- 23 MP camera with 2160p@30fps video recording; 5.1 MP front-facing camera with 1080p@30fps video
- 32GB of built-in storage and a microSD card slot
- LTE Cat.4 (150Mbps)/Cat.6 (300Mbps), region dependent; Dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac; A-GPS/GLONASS receiver, Bluetooth v4.1, FM radio with RDS
- Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
- 3,430mAh non-removable battery
- IP68 certified - dust and water proof up to 1.5 meter and 30 minutes
- Fingerprint sensor
Main disadvantages
- 4K available only for multimedia content
- Waterproofing comes with a disclaimer
- Non-removable battery, no wireless charging out of the box
- No IR port for remote control of consumer electronics
For all other manufacturers, native 4K resolution support will only be coming around with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Sony have come up with a clever way of going around that limitation. All the screen graphics - everything about the user interface and most of the apps - is rendered in 1080p (Full HD) and it's then upscaled to UHD, except videos and pictures.
This little trick shouldn't put a stick in Sony's wheels as the Z5 Premium 4K resolution display promises unrivalled visual experience exactly where it matters - in multimedia content consumption.
This must be something to look forward to, isn't it? Well, we're getting there.
It looks like the phone itself got all the premium treatment and there was nothing left for the accessories. There's nothing Premium about the retail box contents of the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, which we got - just a regular 1.5A charger and a USB cable. A headset was missing, but one will be included in the retail package, region dependent, of course.
Honestly, we expected at least a bundled quick charger, but we guess that's not covered by the premium tag.
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium 360-degree spin
The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium features a bigger display than the regular Xperia Z5, which means it is the first of the Z series with a noticeably bigger footprint. The Z5 Premium measures 154.4 x 75.8 x 7.8mm, which is some 9mm taller, 4mm wider and half a mil thicker than the regular Z5 flagship.
The Premium has gained some weight too - at about 180g it's almost 30g heavier than the Z5.
Coincidentally, that's the exact same footprint (weight not considered) as the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+. True, Samsung has squeezed in a 5.7-inch display, but the dual-edge design makes direct comparison impossible.
You would need an Adobe Flash-capable web browser to visualize the interactive 360-degree view above.
Design and build quality
The history behind the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium might be quite an interesting one, but we'll probably never know for sure. The Z5 Premium, unlike the Z5 and the Z5 Compact, comes with a reflective glass on the back (no matter the color flavor) and a stainless steel frame similar to the Xperia Z3+. It's almost like the Z5 Premium was supposed to come out with the Z3, but got pushed back a couple of seasons.
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium
Anyway, we don't mind the design decision at all, especially the gorgeous chrome version we got. It reflects about as much light as your everyday household mirror, if we're to trust our entirely non-scientific bare-eye tests. Flashy as it is, it all means it's near impossible to keep clean unless you lock it up in a glass display box, which you definitely wouldn't like to do.
The black and gold paintjobs are also reflective, but not even close to the chrome version. It seems to be the signature of the Premium lineup, and it indeed looks captivating, but to keep it this cool, you have to clean it hourly. Maybe it's worth it, who are we to judge?
The color aside, the Xperia Z5 Premium looks like any other Z model, especially the black-clad version. Once you look up close you realize it's an odd blend between the materials of the Xperia Z3+ and the detailing of the Z5. Then, of course, scaled up to accommodate the larger screen.
The phone feels very pleasant in hand, but it also demands to be handled with care - the polished metal frame and glass panels are super slippery. A secure grip is nearly impossible, god forbid you leave it on any sloping surface. You've got a premium phone and you have to give it the proper care and attention, that's the deal.
Handling the 5 Premium
The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium doesn't look like an experiment or an outsider, but more like the highlight of a generation of Z phones. You can tell it sums up the traditions of the series and keeps the signature elements while putting a little twist that lets it stand out.
Sony has produced a stunning piece of smartphone indeed. It's just one that needs the extra care and attention.
Controls
In practice, the Z5 Premium has reasonably thin side bezels with some more meat top and bottom - but overall - the typical Xperia proportions. The front has the stereo speakers, the selfie camera, a couple of sensors and the primary mic hidden below the bottom grille.
What's around the screen
You get a capless microUSB port on the bottom, a capped card slot on the left and the same corner inserts on the metal frame as the Xperia Z5. We have to warn you both SD and SIM cards reside on a very flimsy plastic trasy, which is very easy to break and even easier to get stuck inside when some of the cards dislodges.
Cap-less USB port at the bottom • The microSD/nanoSIM tray
The fingerprint sensor is midway on the right, but did we mention the low position of the volume rocker before? It's between the camera key and the lock key and we found its placement to be very odd and uncomfortable.
The fingerprint scanner is positioned thoughtfully on the surface of the side Power/Lock key and is very comfy to use. Sony's decision to put it there is an equivalent of LG's rear control deck - an innovative take on a popular feature, which boosts the usability a lot.
The scanner is very fast and responsive and we had no problems with the unlocking procedure. It doesn't work when the screen is asleep though, you'll have to push it once with, say your thumb, and if recognized it will open your homescreen in about a second.
The controls of the Z5 Premium are all on the right
The audio jack and the second mic are on top of the frame. The entire rear is one big travel mirror with only the 23MP camera lens and the tiny LED flash standing in the way.
The top and rear sides
Display
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is the first smartphone to feature a 4K display or UHD as it's also known. To be more specific it utilizes a 5.5" IPS panel of 2160 x 3840 pixel resolution. The resulting pixel density of 806ppi is well above anything we've seen on a smartphone or even a tablet for that matter.
4K is another name for UHD resolution or 2160 x 3840 pixels. That's an awful lot of pixels - something along the lines of 8.3 million of them. Phones so far had only been able to go as high as 1440 x 2560 pixels (3.7 million pixels). And Sony's own Xperia line has never gone higher than 1080 x 1920 pixels (2 million). So with this phone, we're essentially rocking twice or even four times the usual number of pixels on the screen. An insane jump in resolution, right?
The screen in the Xperia Z5 Premium is the first of its kind in a smartphone. It's an amazing engineering feat and it's surely a challenge for any sort of a mobile hardware to pump out so many pixels to the screen.
Sony made it possible by putting a 4K panel inside the Z5 Premium but rendering mostly everything in 1080p resolution. Yes, it's a concept that you may find a bit hard to grasp at first. The 4K panel the phone utilizes only reveals its benefits when you check out high-res images and video on it (it works with online video too).
When we approached the phone for a detailed test, we had quite high expectations. We expected to see an image that's infinitely better than what we had seen before. Long story short, that was hardly the case.
It turned out the screen worked just as advertised but the benefits of the higher resolution over say, a 5.5-inch QHD screen, are not readily noticeable with our bare eyes. We did notice an improvement over a 5.5-inch 1080p screen once the 4K high resolution mode kicked in but it was mostly in the way that textures looked smoother, rather than with higher detail.
What we did appreciate however is the fact that at no point did we notice any downsides to the upscaling from 1080p to 4K of the regular interface elements or the apps that don't run in 4K. You shouldn't have any concerns about the picture quality and sharpness when the 4K mode is not used.
In fact, the upscaling is so good, that there is no easy way to tell when the 4K mode has kicked in. The effect is hardly perceivable with bare eyes and the switch is instantaneous unlike what other reviewers would have you believe, so what we did is we hooked up the phone to the Android SDK and we inspected its events log just to keep track of the turning on and off of the high resolution mode.
It turned out that the Xperia Z5 Premium automatically changes the resolution output once proper content is detected. This means that if you open a high-res image with a proper app such as any gallery or image editor, you would be seeing it in the screen's native 4K resolution. The default gallery works this way for sure.
The default video player, as well as the popular MX Player, which we tried, receive the native resolution upgrade as soon as you load up any video higher than 1080p.
The YouTube app is also allowed to use the screen in its native 4K resolution even though the app settings only offer streaming video resolution of up to 1080p.
If there is a game that supports 4K resolution, we couldn't find one. The same goes for the few Google Cardboard style VR apps we downloaded for testing. The few games we tried all ran in 1080p.
Interestingly, the web browser didn't utilize the high resolution mode either.
So yes, the screen is indeed a 4K one and it's indeed capable of showing all those 8M+ pixels. It's just that you can hardly tell the difference over a phone with a QHD screen.
Nevertheless, Sony deservedly gets all the 4K screen bragging rights and there is no way anyone's taking those from them. We also think that handling the high resolution mode this way is an excellent balance of user experience, performance and battery life.
Besides the 4K side of things, we also subjected the Xperia Z5 Premium screen to our usual battery of tests and measurements. The maximum brightness of the screen (566nits) turned out quite in line with what we got from the regular Xperia Z5 (583nits) though this one wouldn't go anything higher than that in Auto mode even in bright environment. The level of blacks is similar as well, which works out to a similarly average contrast ratio (966:1) as the Z5's (986:1).
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| 0.10 | 106 | 1060 | 0.65 | 680 | 1053 | |
| 0.10 | 90 | 900 | 0.59 | 583 | 986 | |
| 0.08 | 78 | 963 | 0.59 | 566 | 966 | |
| - | - | - | 0.68 | 789 | 1158 | |
| 0 | 208 | ∞ | 0 | 363 | ∞ | |
| 0.00 | 172 | ∞ | - | 410 | ∞ | |
| 0.10 | 150 | 1563 | 0.43 | 590 | 1382 | |
| 0.16 | 180 | 1139 | 0.30 | 399 | 1334 | |
| 0.00 | 152 | ∞ | 0.00 | 398 | ∞ | |
| 0.15 | 175 | 1180 | 0.44 | 534 | 1221 | |
| 0 | 102 | ∞ | 0 | 321 | ∞ | |
In terms of sunlight legibility, the Z5 Premium is again, pretty comparable to its Z5 sibling. Both get decent scores, but there is still a lot of room for improvement left. It's all down to the relatively high reflectivity of their screens.
Sunlight contrast ratio
Much like on the Xperia Z5, color rendering without image enhancements is off to a higher extent than we're used to see lately (Avg deltaE 7.1 for the primary colors plus black and white), but it's the white to blame as it has a relatively high bluish tint (deltaE 14.6). Still, you would certainly have a hard time noticing a color cast without a reference.
Color accuracy of course takes an extra hit when you turn on the screen image enhancements such as the X Reality for mobile mode but not as much on the Xperia Z5 (Avg deltaE 7.2 in the Z5 Premium) but the representation of the whites remains unchanged in this mode. The maximum brightness however is reduced in this mode - down to about a maximum of 535 nits.
As usual, display colors are a matter of personal taste and perception so if you don't need calibrated color output, you will probably be quite happy with the default settings of the Xperia Z5 Premium display.
You can fine tune the display color rendering to an extent as Sony gives you fine grain sliders for adjusting the Red, Green and Blue channel saturation, but the UI is far from user friendly and unlikely to produce any meaningful results without a reference point sitting side by side with the display. Even worse, as soon as you start fiddling with those sliders, the maximum brightness will take a hit. They also don't allow lowering of the saturation of each channel, but only an increase, which is the opposite of what we would try to do with this screen if we're after calibrated color accuracy.
Battery life
The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is powered by a beefy 3,430 mAh battery, sealed-in, as expected. It scored an overall endurance rating of 66 hours, which is above average and certainly impressive, having in mind there is a 8M+ pixels on this screen to light up.
The Xperia Z5 Premium definitely did alright in our call and web tests, but it did average on the video test and standby.
An endurance rating of 66 hours is still above average and it means that the Z5 Premium should be more than happy to offer that many hours of our test pattern usage - one hour of browsing, video playback and calls a day respectively and the rest - standby.
Such usage pattern is of course entirely artificial, but we've established it so our battery results are comparable across devices. And if it doesn't quite fit your bill, you can easily hop on to our battery life chart and adjust the pattern to your liking for an even more comprehensive comparison.
Connectivity
Sony is offering the Z5 Premium in both a single SIM and dual SIM variant, just like the Z5. The handset offers quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA support. LTE is enabled and Sony has multiple regional models to make sure the Xperia Z5 will work with the most widespread 4G networks at Cat.6 speeds.
Local connectivity features dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac and Wi-Fi Direct. There is also support for Bluetooth 4.1 with A2DP. Satellite navigation is also a given, with GPS and GLONASS or Beidou (market dependent) support.
The Xperia Z5 Premium also has an FM radio with RDS.
The phone doesn't offer an IR port, but it does come with NFC.
There is a microUSB 2.0 port for charging and data connections and now, and since the Z3+, it no longer needs to be covered by a flap to stay water protected. Media transfer mode is supported for accessing the phone's built-in memory and microSD card over the USB cable.
USB host functionality is present, but requires a little more work than simply plugging in a device with an USB OTG adapter. There is a special menu under Xperia Connectivity in the settings that allows you to "discover" a plugged USB device. It still works as expected, but it requires the extra legwork.
Being part of the premium "Z" line has a few other features to mention, like the MHL 3 TV-out support. You can also output your phone's screen wirelessly via the Miracast protocol or Sony's Xperia Connectivity Throw option.
The app also lets you share your media over DLNA by creating a media server, as well as connect to a PlayStation DUALSHOCK 3 (or 4) wireless controller.
Last, but not least, the Z5 Premium offers advanced active noise cancelling when paired with a supported handset like the Sony MDR-NC750.
Android Lollipop with Xperia launcher
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium comes with Android Lollipop right out-of-the-box and, even better, the Marshmallow update is already in development. The ROM pre-installed on the Premium is mostly identical to its Z5 sibling in terms of user interface and features.
The Android OS on Z5 Premium runs on 1080p resolution, upscaled to 4K. The native high res mode is available only when viewing images and video - including YouTube. Games and VR apps didn't only started in 1080p resolution.
As far as the Xperia launcher goes, Sony has gone to great lengths to preserve its signature look and feel over the years. This even extends to the bundled applications. Most of them are also practically untouched as far as navigation and UX goes, but now employ all the extra visual eye-candy of Android Lollipop.
The lockscreen is very simple - it can display some notifications and support quick shortcuts for the camera and the dialer. That's it - no widgets or multiple panes are available. You can protect your lockscreen by Face, Pattern, PIN or Password unlock and in the Z5 Premium even fingerprint, in ascending order of security.
Xperia lockscreen, lacking widgets
The homescreens are business as usual - there are five of them and you can have up to seven. You can place widgets, app shortcuts, toggles and folders by your choosing.
Homescreens and widgets
You can set various live and static wallpapers, add widgets and shortcut, or change the UI theme. You can also choose which icons will be visible on the status bar, and which should remain hidden.
Customization • Themes
The notification area uses the standard Lollipop-style pull-down effect with multiple levels. Customizable quick settings are on the top and notifications on the bottom. The aforementioned can be accessed by swiping from the top twice, but Sony has also preserved its two-finger swipe gesture, which extends the full shade in one stroke.
Notification area • Quick settings
The app drawer is laid out across multiple pages and you can sort the apps in various ways. However, in this new version of the launcher the signature left swipe-out menu is gone. Instead it is replaced by a small drop-down menu on the right and the search bar is at the top.
App Drawer
The Xperia Z5 Premium uses the stock Android task manager that lets you switch between the recently opened apps, as well as terminate any of them with a side-swipe. Close all key is available.
The so-called "small apps" are also available in the Xperia Z5 Premium and are accessible via the task manager. They are similar to Samsung's Mini Apps, and pop up tiny widget-like applications on your homescreen, which you can move around and use without having to open the full-fledged app.
The list of small apps really tends to differ from one Sony to another for some reason and on our unit we found a default set of nine of those available: Active Clip, Browser, Calculator, Calendar, Timer, Touch Block, Music, Bookmarks, Gmail.
You can launch only one instance of a Small App, but you can open multiple Small Apps simultaneously.
Sadly, you can't disable the small apps entirely and will always have them cramming your recent apps whether you use them or not.
Task switcher • Small apps • Google Now
Finally, Google Now integrates with your Google account and can access your daily routine, internet searches, email, etc. and give you information relevant to your interests and daily needs
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