Sony Xperia 1 II review and unboxing: this flagship almost nails it... By Mobile Tech Podcast

Hey folks welcome to another day another unboxing. This is the Xperia one mark ii or one two very complicated from Sony. It is a premium flagship, Experian one. Two here you go, there is some image at the top. I'm going to show you that, but here are some of the features, as you can see: triple 12 megapixels, rear camera, eight megapixels on front a big 4k display, 4 000 William hour battery snapdragon, 865 and water resistance, so um. Those of you who pay attention to me on Twitter and everywhere else will already know that I've actually reviewed this phone for hot hardware.

I'll, put the link in the description below the reason I'm unboxing it after reviewing. It is because I already have one it's right here, but I didn't get a new one. It was a pre-production device, not with the case and the right accessories. This is a retail unit, so I wanted to unbox it. So we have the full experience of a proper unboxing, and then I'll go over the other one.

Let's set up, so I can give you a bit of a mini review. So, let's get started. Let's open this up: okay, there's nothing in here: here's the phone which I'm going to have to tip to get out, and it comes with a bunch of paperwork. So you've got safety. Nobody cares and important information.

Nobody cares! Then we have. This looks like it could be interesting, maybe a little manual action. Ah, startup guy there we go. So let's have a quick look at that. It says one sim card shows you what to do here.

So you have micros and sim support or dual sim support. As you can see for some units, you got the power lock key here which, by the way, has a built-in fingerprint sensor and then tells you how to do a bunch of other stuff. So that's it not too much else in there now I've got a divider. You got a charger here, I'm going to hold it up to see. Ah, conveniently it tells you that it is an 18 watt charger and USB type cpd nice.

So there's an 18 watt charger in the box, then there's a c to c chord c on one end see on the other end and then oh, what's this? Do I see earbuds with a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack wow Sony's, including earbuds in the box? That's nice! I wonder if they're any good, but anyway, who cares it does have headphone jack. Now you know that, let's check out the phone, shall we here it is. It has a screen protector here, as you can see, and some stickers on the back. So I'm not going to remove this because I got another phone right here to show you. So, let's move on to, I guess the review and spec part of this unboxing magic, here's the phone again this time without stickers or screen protection.

This is what it looks like it's a nice phone. It's like a monolith like 2001, a space odyssey. It feels really nice, it's very thin, which is cool. Furthermore, it's very tall because it's a 21 to 9 aspect ratios and those of you astute enough to pay attention here. We'll notice that there's a small forehead and a small chin, very small.

The bezels on the sides are very small, of course, but what's nice is because it has a small bezel top and bottom it has speakers top and bottom for stereo audio, and it has the 8 megapixel front-facing camera and a notification light embedded in here in that edge, which is really, really cool. So you know when you're watching videos, this screen is uninterrupted, with no cutouts or hole punches, and it's 21.9 just perfect for watching film. It's a 4k screen too just kind of incredible and the only drawback is that it doesn't refresh higher than 60 hertz. So for flagship. You know you get a bit of good and a bit of bad, so that's kind of an interesting um kind of middle ground.

I guess, but look this display is absolutely phenomenal. You can see it with your own eyes. Look at how the icons are literally floating on this display, like viewing angles unreal. This is Sony at its best OLED, of course, but here's what's interesting. There's no in-display fingerprint sensor as I imply earlier, the fingerprint sensor is embedded in the power lock key on the right hand.

Side. Now that's good if you're right-handed a lot harder if you're left-handed, but you can always use you, know your middle finger or index or something, so that's the first thing you need to know about this phone now there are some things that are good like the headphone jack and there are some things that are bad. This is a snapdragon 865 phones, so you'd think it would have 5g at least sub 6 5g, and it does. Unfortunately, it has no bands that work in North America or in the US in general. So that means that if you buy this phone in the U.

S. you're stuck with 4g now I was going to say you know, okay, so that's maybe a small compromise. It really isn't a huge deal, but it is because this is a twelve hundred dollar phone, one thousand two hundred dollar flagship in every sense of the way without 5g working in the US. I'm not sure what they were thinking at this price point, that's kind of crazy to me. Obviously, Sony pitches, this phone as a camera, centric experience and the selfie camera is you know it's fine, but it's not anything.

I would write home with I'll show you some photo samples in a minute. Let's talk about the other specs real, quick. So in the back are three cameras. Those are very important because they're pretty cool, but before I get to them, there's a 4 000 William hour battery and surprisingly considering you know, this is a little on the small side for a flagship battery life on this thing was really, really good. When I tested it, so you know, that's good memory is eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage with micros support, it's ufs3 storage.

So it's really fast. Sony has made very few compromises other than this 5g issue and the price which is kind of crazy. There's, really not too much to complain about here. So let's talk about these cameras, you got three cameras in the back. All three of them are 12 megapixels, the main camera, the ultra-wide and the telephoto.

You also have light sensor here that detects color, and then we have a LED flash and if you see very carefully between all these three lenses, there's a timer flight sensor and that's used for autofocus. It's actually pretty much the same thing you see in front of an iPhone with the notch. You know for his face ID. So what's so special about this camera system? Well, there are two things that stand out. The 12 megapixel main sensor is massive, it's huge and to give you some perspective, the pixel size on this is 1.8 microns, so they're massive pixels, 12 million of them f over 1.7, and this is a Sony imx557 which I think is only used by Sony right now. It has is.

Of course, it has dual pixel phase, detect autofocus, so it's very fast at auto, focusing and very good in low light, but, unlike other flagships that have like 48 648 megapixel sensors, the idea behind this 12 megapixel is that it's fast. So what Sony claims you can do, and I tested this it works- is you can do 12 frames per second burst mode, with full, autofocus and auto exposure, so it's great for sports photography or, if you're, trying to photograph a child, that's running towards you, because it'll focus not just on their face it'll focus on their eyes, and it'll focus on a pet's eye as well so animals humans, eyes and faces a 12 frames per second burst, that's kind of bonkers. Now it doesn't have 8k video. It only has 4k video, but other than that I mean that's perfectly okay. It does have a 21 to 9 aspect ratios, video, which is really cool.

Now the ultra-wide is a 12 megapixel as well. It has an f over 2.2 aperture with 1.4 micron pixels, not too bad, and then there is three times: optical zoom telephoto, which has f of a 2.4 aperture and only 0.8 micron pixels. So the telephoto is kind of like the only one here that I think has room for improvement. If anything, but look the reality is this phone takes phenomenal photos. I'll show you some samples in a minute, and you know what you need to take away from this- is that Sony's kind of tried to mimic the alpha experience from their cameras, and they have succeeded because they have two camera apps.

They have a regular normal camera like everybody's used to, and then they have the alpha camera app, which is basically a replica of the user experience you get on an alpha camera, so yeah big deal. I like that, if you like, shooting manual all that it's there, and it's great so very, very nice design, I think it's a beautiful phone but 1200 without 5g and here's the thing about that camera. You know it's kind of cool on paper, and you know the manual controls and that alpha camera interface is great. There's also a video app like a professional cine Alta. They call it, which is the name of Sony's video, professional video cameras and that app is also separate, and it's for video recording, and it has like the Venice, color science and a bunch of other features that we saw on the Xperia one and the Xperia 5 by the way, and all these apps are really nice.

But you know in the end, this phone takes great photos, but it doesn't really beat like an iPhone or Samsung phone, never mind like a Google Pixel or a Huawei flagship right. So it's a bit of a tough sell. You know for that money, especially without 5g. That's kind of my only gripe here, but overall, it's a very solid camera experience. This phone is really fast.

As you can see, you know: here's the feed, you know you can start up a bunch of apps and uh. You know you get a pretty good performance all around here's, the camera app, and you know, then you can just like slide between them. It's all nice and fast and happy yeah. I mean there's nothing to complain about. This is a flagship you know in every way again other than 5g support, which I think is unfortunate.

So let me show you some photos, because that's really what we came here for right, that's really what matters! So I've got some photos here from my camera. App and you'll see they're pretty amazing. So you know this is just me taking photos at the supermarket to kind of get a feel for what things look like. This is a low light shot taken with the cello photo at like a pretty excessive zoom level, like maybe six time or something five times. So it's a little blurry, because it's at night and there's a motion, but I'm managed to capture this deer.

I couldn't really see it with my own eyes at the time check out this photo wow. This is at crater lake in Oregon and look at this. This is a sunset with the telephoto. You can actually see the shadow detail in the rocks down here. There's a lot of information in this photo.

Here's another photo very similar just before the sunset with the main camera and again, the amount of detail here in terms of shadows and stuff is very impressive. But again you know an iPhone and a galaxy would do the same. Here's the same photo now or so before and here's another photo. You can see. This is uh the telephoto, the regular and the ultra-wide and then yes wear your masks.

Folks stay safe out there and then some food photography, a nice close-up shot here. It's pretty clean of some octopus we cooked up, and so here's the selfie camera right as you can see, not that great there's not a lot of detail. This is me and my face, and you know it's soft, even though, like I didn't turn on beauty mode or anything, so yeah uh some more photos on my neighborhood, so here's the telephoto at maximum zoom 9x and then here is the telephoto at 3x, and here is the main camera, and here is the ultra-wide, and you know same here: 9x 3x main ultra-wide micro shot and yeah. Look at this shot. I mean this is a really nice photo taken on the telephoto, and yet you know you're.

You retain a lot of detail and information in the shadows and everything it's a very, very nice photo. So look if you like photography, and you don't expect anything more than an iPhone or galaxy. This phone will deliver that, but give you all this manual control in the manual control app, which is kind of cool right and that's kind of my takeaway here's a low light shot. This doesn't actually have a dedicated night mode, it kind of turns it on automatically and honestly. This is a perfect night shot, and this is an ultra-wide night shot.

It did pretty well at night. This is a zoom night shot, there's a few more low light shots here. Here's a zoom photo at 9x, not too bad and good color balance, as you can see, so there's a zoom photo yeah. So overall, look! This is a good camera and here's the manual camera app. Let me show it to you.

This is what it looks like very alpha. So you can, you know, change things like go to shutter priority or manual mode or auto mode, and then you know if you're in like program mode, you get an eV slider here, and you can actually feel as you're moving this there's actual haptic feedback, which is very cool, and you know, there's a level and all that, and you can go in all these settings and change things. It's very much like an alpha camera and that's awesome. Honestly, you can even lock the controls yeah. So look.

I think Sony's done a good job here, but they missed. The mark is 1200 and no 5g that works in the US is a tough pill to swallow when the big showcase, the cameras is good, but not like outstanding, and so I really hope they can fix that in the next release and everything else so solid, headphone jack is welcome. All that good stuff. You know I forgot to walk you through the edges. So, let's do that real quick you've got a dedicated dual detect camera button that fingerprint sensor slash power, lock key volume rocker on the right hand, side on the top.

You have the headphone jack and secondary microphone on the left side. You got the sim tray, which is cool that you can actually remove your sim tray with your finger by just pulling on it. There are no tools needed for this, so that's actually pretty interesting and then on the bottom. Here you've got the USB type c port primary microphone. That's pretty much the tour! That's my quick Sony! Xperia one mark ii review and unboxing.

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