Sony Xperia Z1 Review, Price In India, Details

Monday, October 14, 2013

Sony Xperia Z1 Review, Price In India, Details

What happens when a company like Sony, decides to merge its two specializations — a quality camera and a popular smartphone — into one product? The result could either be a disaster or the perfect syncing of two. The Xperia Zl manages to nearly achieve the latter.

Style and design: For a smartphone with a 5-inch display, the Zl is sleek, and fits well in your pocket. We liked how the screen and the back panel merge into the body. The keys are placed right, and easy to operate. Display and user interface: The Xperia Zl has an impressive 5-inch TFT screen with a resolution of 1080x1776 and a density of 480dpi, offering crystal clear display. The multi-touch works great. Although, the Zl uses Jelly Bean 4.2; a customised user interface by Sony, makes up for it. There's a new home screen, a different set of widgets, and an app menu that is divided into three separate screens with a sliding menu on the right to manage your apps.

Camera: Simply put, it's great. This isn't because of the 20.7 MP tag, but because we saw the camera in action. Whether it is creating a video (it can record 1080p) or clicking photos, thanks to the G Lens, its competent CMOS sensor and the large F2.0 aperture, the clarity and colour reproduction is always impressive. Though, pictures in low-light conditions are grainy in auto mode, the manual mode gives better results. The front camera, 2.1 MP is also good.

Battery: The 3000 niAli battery is better than we have seen in any Android smartphone, and with normal usage including around 3 hours of browsing and 2 hours of talktime, it could easily last for 24 hours. Handling: The Xperia Zl is dust and waterproof upto 1.5 metres. We put the phone under a running tap, and it survived, which means you can relax even if it falls in a bucket or even the sea.

Performance and connectivity: The Zl is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800, a 2.2 GHz quadcore processor and Adreno 300 GPU, making it an opt choice for mobile gaming. The Zl packs a punch with a 2GB RAM and internal storage of 16GB (12 GB available for usage). But what makes even smarter is options like Screen Mirroring, which enables you to show the screen of your phone on a TV, NFC and apps like Social Live, which allows you to uplink videos live to Facebook. Overall, the Zl offers great balance between a camera phone and a smartphone. Unfortunately, though, it feels like a glass slab, and if you aren't careful, it might slip out of your hands.

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