Sony Xperia 1 II Review (4K Display Phone With Sony Alpha Optics) By GSMDome

Hi guys this is json. com, and I'm here with a review of the Sony, Xperia 1 mark ii. I know it's long overdue, but better late than network, so is the early 2020 Sony, Xperia flagship with which comes with a 4k display and at the same time, with a triple back camera with some extra sensors that we didn't cover enough in the unboxing. The price remains high at 900 dollars and this one comes in black purple or green, and it's the only 4k display phone on the market this year, at least in the mainstream. Now, let's talk about the design. First and foremost, we obviously are dealing with a long format.

Its haters are calling the handset a remote control for your TV. That's the vibe they're getting is definitely long, but also narrow, which makes it fit in the hand easily. However, it's also rather slippery. It's glossy on all of its sides. Basically, now the materials are definitely premium.

I'm talking about glass at the front glass at the back side and, of course, there's an aluminum frame in between the thickness is pretty decent at 7.6 millimeters and the weight is also decent at 181.4 grams. Now this device also has gorilla glass, 6 protection at the front and back an ip65 ip68 certification for water and dust proofing, even though it's narrow and so long, you would think that it would be easy to use the single hand well, not exactly because it's very long, so it may tend to slip from the hand when you're trying to overreach to the top part. Now, aside from that uh, the buttons here are well pretty small, that's something I always complain about on these Sony phones, they're rather slim skinny and tough- to find by only feeling them anyway. The good thing about this format is actually the experience you're getting when you're using the device in the uh landscape mode. So portrait mode doesn't do it justice? Okay! So that's more like it.

As I said before, uh the actual nice experience when using the phone happens in landscape in gaming and videos, but in portrait it's a bit of an odd duck, and it also has some pretty thick bezels at the top and bottom okay, so polarizing and slippery. Those are the main conclusions, but also rather light in the hand now display wise. What we're getting here is a pretty quality screen. It's an OLED 6.5 inch with a 4k resolution, HDR support and only 60 hertz refresh rate. We have one billion colors displayed and let's actually go ahead and watch a clip, a video, a test, video on said screen and by the way, it's actually one of the few times when I actually get to enjoy this video at its full quality of.

Let's see here, 4k, so proper 4k should be proper 4k, and here we go okay. So this is the test video, which shows you that we got we're getting a pretty thick top and bottom bezel. However, the screen is quite amazing: it's bright, it's got different colors a white palette of colors also pretty wide angles. Some of the deepest blacks around the OLED is definitely a joy to watch. Videos on and the contrast is also rather fine in sunlight.

The pixels have a gentile matrix arrangement and going further from that, we also did our usual tests, which involve the brightness, and here we go. As you can see here, we achieved 443 lux units, which is rather good. It beats the galaxy s20 series, definitely the s20 and s20 ultra, but it stays below the OnePlus 8 and Huawei Mate 40 pro, as well as the note 20 ultra. It's also almost the equal of the Xperia 5 they're. Very, very close.

Now, aside from that aspect, there are uh quite a few tweaks which you can perform to this screen, and you can do that by going to the settings department display- and here we go, so we got image quality settings- you can set it on a standard mode or creator mode. We also have video image enhancement motion blur reduction, which actually tends to replace the higher refresh rate, at least in theory. Okay, we also have the white balance adjustments once again, a ton of options. I haven't seen any phone on the market with so many adjustments and even custom ones. You can set them here: the red, green or blue white balance options, okay, other than that brightness adaptive, brightness, sleep, dark team and so forth.

So a satisfying experience, the only phone with a 4k screen on the market, and now we go further to find what's inside the phone, it's the Qualcomm, snapdragon 865, seven nanometers, plus outscore CPU, accompanied by eight gigs of ram, and also by 236 gigabytes of storage of the UFS 3.0 variety, and I should probably mention that there's also micros card slot on board, which you can access by pinching with your nail this tray here. Okay, now we're off to the benchmarks, and before we get to the benchmarks, I should probably mention that the phone doesn't suffer from lag. So that's nice to see performance is a-okay and games ran fine, no lag, no stutter! No freeze and no overheating, so this is the Xperia one mark ii. This is the result in on two to eight, which is quite solid. It's placed on the 10th spot, and we've tested.

Quite a few phones beats galaxy s20 ultra and the joy p40 pro stays below the Motorola edge plus and galaxy s20 Fe 5g in geek bench 5 multi-core. This is the score we're just above the Xiaomi mi 10 pro, which was a bit of a beast performance wise, so not bad. Also beats the Huawei p40 pro plus stays below the OnePlus 8 and the before 7 pro. When it comes to gaming, we always rely on 3dmark slingshot, extreme BS 3.1. I know it's a mouthful, but it's relevant, it's above the galaxy s20, ultra and s20 plus, and the null 20 ultra 5g, but it stays below the Xiaomi mi 10 pro and the OnePlus 8 and the Oppo fine x2.

Basically, it should be around top 10 or maybe top 11 or 12. Once the year 2020 is out, which is not a bad feature for a phone with only 8 gigs of ram. Now, if you want to discuss temperature, we got it here, and this is the result. So here we go tests and temperature in games, 36 degrees Celsius, not bad and in benchmarks we achieved 33.6 degrees Celsius. So definitely no overheating this time around okay.

So I think it's high time we discussed the battery of the phone. So considering it's so light, there have probably been some compromises. It's a four thousand William hour battery. Nowadays, it's four thousand five hundred or five thousand media per hour- the norm once again, four thousand William hour here with a 20 watt charge supported, but only an 18 watt charger. Bundled I don't know why don't ask me? We also have wireless charging supported here and, let's get straight to it, as you can see, we did the video playback test.

We achieved 11 hours and 38 minutes nothing to write home about, but also not as bad as expected from a 4k display, definitely above the Nokia 8.3 5g and the Nokia 9 preview. Why compare it to those? Because there aren't many flagships from this year or the past one uh below it? Okay, so uh models that go past. It is galaxy, s20, ultra note, 20 ultra and the whole p40 pro by seven hours. So in the end, while the result may seem, okay, as you can see, the phone is placed on the 169 spot. So could be better a bit better in the PC mark test, 10 hours and 55 minutes.

It's, actually. Okay, above the ASUS before 7 pro above the Galaxy Note 20 ultra, but those are working with a different refresh rate below the Xperia 5, the galaxy s20 plus and p40 pro by 3 hours. Charging is a bit on the long side with one hour and 54 minutes. Nowadays, we see phones, charging in 33 minutes or 45 minutes and after 30 minutes of charging. Here you get 44, which I would say it's well decent.

There are the typical stamina modes in the settings department, and now I think, it's time to discuss the acoustics, starting with the fact that we do have an audio jack here and the speakers are stereo, and they're cut into the front of the device. So you can enjoy the stereo experience when holding the device in landscape. So one is here, and one is here for a proper stereo acoustic experience. Now we're going to play some music copyright free- and here we go my now as you can see each time, I tweak the volume. There is also an extra option, which appears and lets me activate a special well feature which lets me tweak the dynamic vibration, which is here, and it's actually supposed to supplement the experience and make you feel the bass stronger.

It actually distracts me from the experience. Okay, so stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos, DSE ultimate upscaling the experience. Well, the bass is very powerful. The sound is pretty loud, but there's a bit of distortion at the top volume and the high notes aren't that impressive, but the voices were okay. So that's my conclusion: we also did some tests with a decibel meters, so we got them here, so we first measure a typical acoustic sample.

We achieved 84.9 decibels at the bottom and 86.2 decibels at the top side, since most phones have the speaker at the bottom. I actually use this one as a landmark, and just so you know um using these values, we surpassed the Xiaomi mi 10 pro, but we scored below the OnePlus 8 and the Galaxy Note 20 ultra, for example, also below the Xperia 10 mark ii. In video games. We got as high as 96.5 decibels, which you can see here. Uh, usually 100 decibels is the mark, but this is rather okay.

It surpasses Huawei p40 pro plus and Galaxy Note note 20 ultra. It stays below galaxy, s20 fan edition and the before 7 pro, and here we are in the camera department. First, we don't have a punch, hole or um well notch for the front camera. It's the same old 8, megapixel shooter, with fixed focus here at the top side, while the back side tells a whole different story. Now people don't usually cover all the sensors we have here.

So I'm going to try to at its core. There are three 12 megapixel shooters. The main one has optical image: stabilization, error, rs, sensor, 24 millimeters, focal distance, f, 1.7 aperture and dual pixel phase detection, autofocus, there's also the 12 megapixel telephoto camera 70 millimeter focal distance and, at the same time, 3x optical zoom and f 2.4, and then the third 12 megapixel camera ultra-wide and um. Well, it should offer you x, more error, sensor and a 124 degree field of view. We have mass lenses here, and we also have some other special sensors.

You can do autofocus, auto exposure up to 20 frames per second. It can do this. Handset can do 60 operations. Calculations per second, it has eye tracking for you, for people and for pets. There's a special 3d.

I time of flight mechanism here so 3d means there should be two sensors for the time of flight, I'm actually thinking. There are these two here which people confuse for a flash, and they have been gone from the Xperia 5 mark ii, okay, so also a RGB IR sensor, which I suppose is this one here. Next to the LED flash you can do: 4k, HDR, video and now we breathe, and we also mentioned that there is a wind filter here and Sony alpha camera technology. Now the interface feels a bit antiquated uh, much like we've seen over the past years. Nothing has changed in this interface, and people aren't exactly digging it because it's pretty slow and sluggish at times, especially during the nighttime and when you're using the AI mode.

So let's actually uh see some of the pictures we've taken here. Okay, so let's see how we can see them and if Sony provides a gallery app or not anyways uh, let's check them out from here. Okay, so going into the library we have quite a few shots, and I'm going to start with those taken during the day. I actually have a lot of shots in many situations, and I'm going to pick these the most relevant of all. There will be a bit odd to see on this very long screen, but I think you'll get the gist of it.

Okay, so I'm very happy with the color calibration. This persists throughout the gallery. My happiness with the colors: this is the main camera shot, and this is the ultra white camera shot. As you can see, the angle is not as wide as that presented by a Samsung phone, which is the widest on the market, pretty good, 3x optical zoom. Nothing to complain about here, even though that's more of a 2019 feature than a 2020 feature, and I like the fact that the colors are well-kept when zooming in this is actually the maximum level of zoom.

When I say maximum, I mean 3x or 5x, but if you go further, you will see some noise here and there by the way the zoom tops out at about 8x, something to remember. I had a bit of struggle to focus on close-ups. You may not see that here, but actually remember trying really hard to create some macros out of the blue. Okay. Speaking of the blue, I'm happy with the way this color.

The sky is colored here and the fact that the ultra white shows don't distort the colors. They keep them, as they should be several more shots of flowers which have excellent textures. I would say pretty good details here, not as high as you'd see on 64 megapixel phones, but pretty good details and shades, something else that I noticed here and again a sample with zoom, okay uh, going to the selfie camera. Now, usually, I've come to be underwhelmed by the Sony, 8 megapixel shooter, but this one is actually pretty okay and keep in mind. It has fixed focus, and I'm actually reasonably happy with the quality of the focus here.

So it focuses enough on your face and enough on the background to get the best out of the two worlds. My face is not out of focus and also the background is not out of focus. So once again you get the best of two worlds. I would say for an 8-megapixel camera, it's okay, but I've seen flagships do much better nowadays, as they should several more shots: flowers, lovely textures of buildings and monuments, even more selfies and truly lovely colors. I also have a pretty graffiti here to show you.

The dynamic range is fine, but it cannot match the one delivered by the Huawei Mate 30 pro p40 pro and mate.40 pro, okay, even more colors here I would say that the colors are pretty pragmatic and realistic, and those are the best attributes about the phone and the lovely graffiti. Is this one here? Okay, so overall people have been criticizing this camera a lot on its auto mode, so don't believe the vloggers or bloggers. I mean it's not the best on the market, but still not the worst on the market, as some people claim it to be. Also, if you trigger the pro mode and know what you're doing you can actually achieve results on par with the galaxy s20 series or the Huawei p40 pro, these were outside shots, and now it's time to check out some indoor shots. I actually went to a kitsch museum there's a kitchen museum in Bucharest, Romania- and you can see it here and before that, had a burger and struggled to properly focus on that burger uh.

Well, at least I got it in this shot, but there are several shots where the image is a bit blurred like this. One here try to get the meat and veggies right so about the kitchen museum. Is this one here? It sums up all that's weird and wrong in Romania, in Bucharest, from those little doors which people sell on the side of the road to paintings and statues of Jesus or some other figures. There are christian kitchens here, there's a Dracula kitsch. Then there are a lot of things to enjoy here now.

I also had with me an Oppo Reno 4 pro, which is a mid-range phone and actually that one was able to handle the situation better. It caught more light and more convincing colors. So there's that I know the images look fine in these pictures, but they would be fine if there was no comparison term. Since I have the opporino4 pro as a comparison term. I know it would be better.

So that's that this has been the daytime capture. If you know what you're doing with the pro mode, you'll definitely be on par with the p40 pro and galaxy s20 ultra, of course, not in zoom. Now, let's talk about the low light capture. Okay, so these are the low light photos that I've taken, and I have to say, I'm not very impressed. I mean they're okay, but the streetlight halos are a bit bigger than they should be, and I'm not exactly blown away by the brightness achieved here.

Nor am I buy the details now uh. I would say this is actually about 50 percent, less impressive than what the Huawei phone can produce. Nowadays, I'm talking about the p40 pro mate 40 pro and even the mate 30 pro can definitely surpass this Xperia handset. I'm not saying these are bad shots. Keep that in mind.

It's the fact that they're, not memorable they're, not extraordinary in any fashion lighting noise, quantity, colors, they're, just okay and that's it, and I've seen even some mid-range phones producing similar results, so definitely not a flagship level performance of 2020, maybe impressive last year, but we need more okay. Now, aside from that, as you can see, it can handle light sources pretty fine, even though some of these slides were a bit overblown in proportion compared to what I've seen on other handsets out there, and I don't exactly feel we are actually using a night mode at any time. Okay, we're done with that definitely below Huawei when it comes to nighttime photo capture. Let's talk about the videos- and I do have quite a few of them: okay, so as usual they're organized in chapters. So let me turn down the volume a bit and, first, let's see the stabilization test, so I am walking around in the center of Bucharest and as you can see, the stabilization is quite fine, working at a pretty fast pace, not losing focus, not noticing any sort of flicker and the quality of the image stays okay.

Now what bummed me out about the experience was the fact that the selfie video was totally underwhelming, especially if you're looking for proper focus details. Clarity, I mean the stabilization, looks okay, but it's just an 8-megapixel camera, and it definitely shows its limitations now excuse the morning hair. Let me just pass that, and here we go. It was also pretty windy day and the contrast feels rather intense in this capture. So I've seen much better on the Galaxy Note 10 last year here we have the focus test, which is okay, but definitely slower than a Samsung or Huawei phone, focusing on an object in the foreground and then on the background takes a bit to focus.

It does the trick, but once again I've seen faster on other phones. I'm not saying it's all bad. There are good things here and let's see those, for example, I would say that the clarity is fine when filming stuff. So this is a scenery. I focused mostly on 4k filming and guess what I found out the standard option of filming in your standard camera application is 4k by 30 frames per second, if you're on 60 frames per second well, you have to use the specialized app didn't know that, so I ended up with 4k 30 frames, so it could have been cooler if 60 frames per second was made available.

Now the sky here is an unnatural, blue, so the same problem we have the galaxy s20 plus so in many ways it's closer to the galaxy s20 plus than the s20 ultra Huawei, p40 pro and other handsets out there, which are well big shots. Okay, and let's see if we have other videos here, uh you get the core of the idea of what we're dealing with here. This time we have more colors. These colors actually look good. If they're artificial, I would say they're pretty well reproduced.

However, when it comes to vegetation and the blue of the sky, they're, unnatural and too saturated for my taste, someday back in the days of the Xperia xz1 Sony used to excel when it came to video. This time not so much and indoors, you also have several shots here in a kitsch museum and, as you can see, there is a flickering here caused by the light sources and there's also some ghosting when you do the quick, panning, okay enough about that uh, not very impressive, as you probably figured out already, and it's time to see how we're doing in the low light video capture we have this sample here, definitely a disappointment. That's for sure there is a poor stabilization here. There's a lot of flicker there's this intermittent uh effect that you can see the colors is unnatural and if you look in the distance you're going to see a lot of noise. Frankly speaking, this is underwhelming for sure, possibly the most underwhelming aspect of the camera.

If the other ones can be corrected with specialized apps, I highly doubt you can get good results with a pro app when it comes to nighttime filming, even though the Xperia 5 was actually one of the best filming nighttime phones in 2019, okay, so we're done with the camera. I am a bit disappointed, but mostly by the software, I feel that we're getting some solid sensors here, which are dragged behind by the AI and by the long time it takes for you to take a shot using the camera. Software and interface still leaves quite a bit to be desired, and if you want to do more things, you got the cinema pro app, which can take you to a whole new level. You got extra features here. If you really want to do your tweaks and projects and options and maybe even turn the frames per second at a higher level.

Okay, so we're now totally done with the camera we're going to talk about the connectivity, I'm going to start with the USB-C port at the bottom. It's USB-C 3.1! So there's that we also have GPS and glass support on this device. BDS and Galileo NFC for your payment needs and 4g and 5g, plus Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi direct DLNA and Bluetooth 5.1. The calls came in loud and clear, and I should also mention that um we did a speed test and let's see how that panned out quite a few screenshots here and the results are quite impressive: on 4g 273 mega per second downloads 54.3 mega per second uploads and on Wi-Fi 332 over 24.8. I would say these are definitely a flagship values.

So there's that on the software front you can basically re-watch our review of the Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 from last year. Nothing has changed. I'm talking about the interface. Of course. This is android 10 with Expedia UI on top, and if you want the multitasking uh, you can use this carousel and there's also the option of split screen, and you can well.

This is not compatible, but this probably is so. This is split screen in a nutshell. For you, the leftmost home screen is dedicated to your news. Feed from Google. The experience sticks pretty close to a stock and standard android experience with the odd application and feature, so we got side sense here, uh and actually so widget for site sense, which may come in handy because I never get its activation right side sense and okay now I can actually press it, and this is what it does.

Usually, you should double tap the side of the phone to trigger it, and I just did you can see a bunch of shortcuts which can come in handy, there's, also the multi-window option, so you can actually preset sets of apps to open two at a time splitting the screen into, so that's one of the purposes of the whole side. Sense, thingy, okay, uh, we're done with that aspect. Now, aside from that, not much else to mention here, the fingerprint scanner on the side is pretty accurate. So this is the wrong finger and this is the right finger and, as you can see it unlocks the device instantly, not much object here. Okay, so, let's see what else we missed.

We have a dark mode here, um we also have um. Let's see the lack of an album app is really bothersome. For me, I was accustomed to Sony's, album application and its editing features. I have to resort to google photos for some reason and speaking of apps, there's cinema pro there's photo pro: there's imaging edge to connect your camera game enhancer for gamers, with quite a few options. I have to say so.

If you go here, you have your recording resolution. You have your well notification options and each app should have its own thing here. Related videos, screenshots and videos functions here. You can set it for a preferred battery life balance performance and do some other controls, high notifications, lock, notification, navigation bar and more turn off our own adaptive, brightness and so forth. So gaming has received a boost this time around and aside from that, there's entertainment, Facebook and Netflix.

There are tools like news and booking. com Amazon shopping, there's Spotify! Here we also have, let's see what else outlook for your business needs and the PlayStation app plus you can connect a dual shock 4 controllers and soon the PlayStation 5 controllers to this handset and control your gaming sessions. I think this is pretty much it as far as the device is concerned. I feel we have covered everything, and now it's time to talk about the verdict. Okay, so I'm going to start, of course, with the pros and cons on the pro side is definitely a handset which you will be able to enjoy when you're, using it in landscape mode.

So it feels pretty enjoyable if you're going for a landscape experience. Now, aside from that, I should also mention that the screen is quite bright and crisp. It's a 4k display which we don't get enough of nowadays, the battery. Well, that's in the cons. So once again, the pros good in landscape, solid performance, CPU, wise quality screen.

We have the pro modes for video capture and photo capture, solid speakers when it comes to volume and bass, especially and of course the same people call them gimmicks. Some people call them normal stuff, ip68, micros, audio jack and fast connectivity, plus the colors, and the clarity of the photos during the daytime were good. Nothing to object here, and the stabilization was quite solid in the video department. Those are pros on the cons I actually mentioned the battery before the battery is a pretty big con. If you ask me, it's a bomber, the video playback time, the charging is also a bummer.

The phone itself is rather slippery, and I was stuck to 4k 30 frames per second filming just because that's the default app in the camera application uh, the selfie camera is poor all around. When I complemented it, I was actually meaning for an 8 megapixel camera. It's good, but overall, it's way, way below what the competition is offering. Aside from that poor low light capture, video and photo, and the AI and camera interface is dragging down the whole experience with its sluggishness. So remember that, however, if you're a pro buyer- and you actually know what to do with an app like this, this may be the phone for you if you're patient enough and know how to deal with all of these options here and know how to work the cinema pro app.

You can actually turn this into a phone on par with the Galaxy S9 ultra hot p40 pro or whatever other device you're aiming for. If you're, not a pro user, well, you may buy something else if you're buying this phone for other purposes like gaming or Netflix consumption in 4k and YouTube consumption you'll be happy with that. But it's a pity where wasting such good camera sensors and Sony alpha technology with a poor software from Sony. So Sony needs to step up the software game to keep up with the hardware game. That's the conclusion here: Xperia one mark ii review out from jsn.

com hope you enjoyed it and made it clear that this is a phone for pro users when it comes to the camera and the average user can enjoy the gaming and the screen in videos. Of course, also. The acoustics bye, bye.

Source : GSMDome