Sony Xperia Z2 Reviews

Smartphones are steadily swelling to pocket-stretching proportions, and Sony’s latest flagship, the Xperia Z2, is no exception. The Sony Xperia Z2 fully embraces the bigger-is-better mantra, edging fractionally ahead of premium rivals such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8 with a massive 5.2in screen and pixel-packed 20.7-megapixel camera.

Sony Xperia Z2 review: Design and features
With the design of the Z2, Sony hasn’t strayed far from the design of its predecessor the Xperia Z1, or its diminutive stablemate the Xperia Z1 Compact, and that’s no bad thing. Glass plating shimmers across the front and back of the handset, and the flattened metal edges darken into curved strips of grey and black as they arc around the phone’s circumference. Compared to the rather underwhelming exterior of the Samsung Galaxy S5, the Sony’s design is altogether classier.
Beneath that pretty exterior, the Xperia Z2’s 163g body remains just as tough and resilient as ever. Corning’s Gorilla Glass is notable by its absence – instead, Sony has made do with a generic “scratch-resistant” glass on the front and back – but the phone’s aluminium skeleton means the Z2 still feels solid and well built.

It’s also waterproof. Look around the edges, and you’ll see pop-out flaps on either flank sealing in the microSD, SIM card and USB connections. The handset’s IP58 rating means the Xperia Z2 can survive a swim in 1.5m of (fresh, not salt) water for up to 30 minutes. And should you leave the flaps open, onscreen reminders badger you to seal them closed before venturing into the great outdoors.

In fact, there’s very little missing from the Xperia Z2’s feature list. There are no pointless fripperies such as heart-rate monitors (we’re looking at you, Samsung), but Sony has ticked all the important boxes with support for up to 150Mbits/sec Cat 4 4G connections, dual-band 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4 and NFC. And while it’s disappointing that Sony hasn’t managed to accommodate a removable battery, the massive 3,200mAh unit sealed inside bodes well for battery life.

Sony Xperia Z2 review: Display
Up front, Sony has squeezed in an excellent 5.2in display. Its Full HD resolution makes for crisp, pin-sharp images, and it’s easy to believe Sony’s claims that the new Triluminos panel has a wider colour gamut than the previous model. The IPS panel’s even-handed colour reproduction helps to serve up lively yet natural-looking images, dredging up detail right across the colour spectrum, and it deftly reproduced even the trickiest of our test images. If there’s a weakness to the Sony’s performance, it’s that the IPS panel’s black level is a touch high: blacks appear noticeably grey next to the inky nothingness served up by the AMOLED screen of the Samsung Galaxy S5.

Technically, the Xperia Z2’s display isn’t quite as bright or high-contrast as the best handsets, but it’s not far off. We measured a maximum brightness of 411cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 1,245:1. Just like the Samsung Galaxy S5, the Xperia Z2’s backlight only really struggles in strong, direct sunlight. Here, the HTC One M8’s display remains more legible thanks to the extra potency of its LED backlighting.

Sony Xperia Z2 review: Performance and battery life
The Sony Xperia Z2 is powered by a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU, backed up by an Adreno 330 GPU and 16GB of onboard storage. Unusually, Sony has attempted to give multitasking performance a boost by pairing the 2.3GHz Qualcomm CPU with 3GB of RAM.

In everyday use, it’s a combination that simply flies through Android KitKat 4.4.2, and Sony has milked a little of the Snapdragon 801’s power to add little visual flourishes, such as the twisting waves in the background that ripple as you swipe between homescreens.

It comes as little surprise to find that benchmark performance is broadly very similar to other handsets equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU. We recorded scores of 937 and 2,693 respectively in Geekbench 3’s single- and multi-core benchmarks, just a mite behind the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5, and in the GFXBench T-Rex HD gaming benchmark, the Sony found itself narrowly in the lead, averaging a smooth 29.3fps.

The Xperia Z2’s performance in the SunSpider browser benchmark was disappointing, however. Sony’s handset completed the test in a sluggish 920ms, more than twice the time taken by Samsung’s Galaxy S5. We didn’t note any untoward lag or sluggishness in general browsing, though, and every website we tried was handled without a stutter – we suspect Sony simply has some work to do when it comes to optimising for this test.

Thanks to a huge 3,200mAh battery sealed behind the glass rear panel, the Xperia Z2 has impressive reserves of stamina. Under normal use, including shooting photographs, streaming music and browsing the web, we found we were regularly able to get through a day and a half before needing to break out the mains charger.

Our suite of battery benchmarks told a similar tale. The Xperia Z2’s total estimated runtime of 3hrs 9mins in the GFXBench battery test was some 47 minutes longer than the HTC One M8’s time. Only the Samsung Galaxy S5 does better in this test, lasting 4hrs 24mins, but as it does this by artificially limiting the maximum frame rate, it’s not a fair comparison. In our other tests, the Xperia Z2 showed a clean pair of heels to the competition, with audio playback over 3G depleting the battery at a rate of only 1.89% per hour, and 720p video playback consuming just 5.6% per hour.

Sony Xperia Z2 review: camera performance
Sony has retained the same Exmor RS 20.7-megapixel sensor as found in the Xperia Z1, but given the front camera a little resolution bump from 2 megapixels to 2.2 megapixels. The Xperia Z2 also adds a couple of new features to the list. Optical image stabilisation now makes the grade courtesy of Sony’s SteadyShot technology, and video recording is now supplemented by high-frame-rate 720p 120fps and 30fps 4K modes.

The Xperia Z2’s Superior Auto mode drops the resolution down to 8 megapixels, but it does a good job of taking shots in most situations. And it doesn’t just dump the extra pixels –it uses oversampling to combine the light-gathering power of multiple pixels. As a result, colours are realistic without veering towards undersaturation, and there’s plenty of detail. Once the lights go down, the large 1/2.3in sensor and oversampling do their bit to keep images from becoming too noisy. There are some ugly, smeary compression artefacts once you zoom right in to pixel level, though – something that becomes even more noticeable once you flick on Manual mode and start poring over the 20.7-megapixel shots.

Still photos aren’t quite the match of the best phones out there, however. Low-light shots are a little soft and lacking in fine detail compared to Nokia’s Lumia 1020 or Samsung Galaxy S5, and the Galaxy S5 easily trumps the Xperia Z2 in brighter scenes, delivering noticeably more detailed, tightly focused pictures across the frame.

Sony has packed in a variety of other features, too, such as picture-tweaking filters, a Vine video mode, and a background-defocus mode for introducing artificial bokeh, but they’re little more than novelties. The background-defocus mode is particularly disappointing; the processing smears the edges of in-focus items to make for messy, unrefined results. The Timeshift burst mode is by far the best of the bunch. Capturing 61 images in two seconds, it’s a boon for capturing tricky action shots.

Video is a strong point. The constant refocusing can prove distracting, but 4K video is teeming with detail, even in low light. The Timeshift video mode works well, too, capturing 720p video at 120fps, then allowing you to quickly click and drag an onscreen slider to select which part of the clip you want to slow down. Neatly, both the edited and the original video are saved separately – you can go back and edit the original footage on a PC later.