FIRST, the good news. Earlier this month, The New York Times filed this report:
“Sony, the Japanese electronics maker that has been trying for years to ease its reliance on computers, televisions and mobile phones, is finally seeing the results of its restructuring.
“The company, which has been shifting its focus onto small-scale products, like camera sensors, consoles and video games, reported sharp increases in revenue and net profit in the second quarter.
“Sales of Sony’s PlayStation 4 video-games console and PlayStation VR, a virtual-reality headset, helped drive the strong results. The PlayStation VR, in particular, has been more popular than the company expected, and the Japanese company has become a leader in the premium side of the market.
“That helped bolster net profit, which surged to ¥80.8 billion, or about $732 million, from ¥21.2 billion the year before. Revenues rose 15.2 percent compared to a year ago. Its improving prospects have helped push Sony stock up more than 35 percent this year.
“…the earnings beat analysts’ forecasts and showed encouraging signs for the company beyond its video games efforts.
“Its semiconductor segment increased sales 41 percent, thanks to demand for its image sensors, which are used in mobile devices, while Sony’s home entertainment unit saw improved sales of higher-end televisions.”
True, The New York Times story says nothing about the company’s smartphone division, of course, but Sony’s redoubtable CEO Kazuo Hirai, besides other top executives, has maintained that the company is committed to remaining a part of the smartphone business.
Second, more good news: Sony’s latest smartphone releases underscore that commitment, most notably its brand spanking new flagship, the Xperia XZ Premium.
In late-2015, when just about every smartphone vendor was bragging about the Full HD display of their devices, Sony released a flagship that packed in a 5.5-inch screen four times more pixels than what you’d find in a standard high-definition display. That was the Xperia Z5 Premium with a Quad HD screen, setting a standard, which the competition has since followed.
Now, Sony brings to markets everywhere, including the Philippines, a successor worthy of that standard-setter: the Xperia XZ Premium, which is now available in Sony Centres, Sony Mobile Stores and partner dealers nationwide.
The big-screen twin of the Sony Xperia XZs, the XZ Premium remains true to the handsome angular aesthetics Sony has embraced for its award-winning smartphones, the straight lines clean and unbroken, with only the edges smoothened out to make the phone feel good and solid in the hand. But unlike the metal body of the Z5 Premium, which is fractionally smaller, thinner and lighter than the XZ Premium (154.4 x 75.8 x 7.8 mm vs 156 x 77 x 7.9 mm; 180 g vs 195 g), it’s a glass-on-glass (Corning Gorilla Glass version 5) affair with this latest iteration, the phone’s metal frame concealed within.
The material choice gives the Xperia XZ Premium an impossibly gorgeous glossy sheen, making the phone drool-worthy in a glass showcase. In a glass showcase. In real-world use, however? It would drive the mysophobe to madness in a quick, as the all-glass surface of the XZ Premium attracts fingerprints like bees are to flowers. Heed our advice: if you’re a mysophobe and you’re going to make Sony’s latest flagship your new smartphone, do as we did: order on Lazada.com.ph the Nillkin High Quality Frosted Matte Shield Hard Case Back Cover Shell, which will not only give your XZ Premium extra-protection sans the ugly bulk typical of hard cases, but also resolve the fingerprint issue.
And, yes, we encourage you to make the XZ Premium your smartphone if you’re in the market for a new one. Packing the latest top-tier octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and the Adreno 540 GPU, plus 4GB of RAM, the phone runs with the kind of buttery-smoothness we expect from a flagship of a global brand, the XZ Premium just humming along through intensive memory loads. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Gmail, Planet Romeo and the 4o-plus tabs opened by Twitter on Chrome, we were able to try out Real Racing 3 with gameplay suffering nary a hiccup.
No doubt, the light personalization skin Sony has layered over Android 7.1, or Nougat, with which the XZ Premium ships, helps keep things moving along quite nicely. The company shows admirable restraint in not mucking around too much with the default Android UI—although we do wish it did so with regard to the dual SIM settings.
In Huawei’s personalization layer over Android, we easily switched 4G connections without having to take the extra step of setting one network from 2G/3G to 4G/LTE and the other network, vice-versa. True, this oversight in Sony’s Android personalization isn’t exactly a deal-breaker, but it is an extra cumbersome step.
That said, Sony does throw in plenty of goodies, not the least of which is by way of the new Motion Eye camera—the 19 MP rear-facing camera with tricks no other smartphone can offer.
Sony Philippines President and Managing Director Nobuyoshi Otake said during the launch of Sony’s latest smartphones not too long ago: “We pride ourselves in developing smartphone technologies that empowers the future of communications. At Sony, we stand by our promise of bringing quality smartphones that answer the needs and demands of the Filipino. Today, our most advanced smartphone innovation, the new Motion Eye camera, is here in the country. With [the new flagships], consumers can expect excellent photo and video quality in a beautiful new device that captures movement the human eye can’t normally see.”
What all that means is that the Motion Eye camera of the Xperia XZ Premium—and its twin flagship, the XZs, can capture video clips at 960 frames per second for playback four times slower than any other smartphone. Sony calls this visual trick Super Slow Motion—and to visualize it, recall that scene in The Matrix with Keanu Reeves’s Neo for the first time dodging bullets by dipping forward and backward and to the left and to the right. Neat, eh? Even better: if you save such clip to Google Photos, your family and friends can watch in awe on their laptops or non-Sony Xperia smartphones. Of course, you’d have to provide them the link to the clip.
Besides Super Slow Motion, the imaging muscles of the Xperia XZ Premium includes a technology Sony calls Predictive Capture, which senses movement in front of you and starts to buffer images while you’re preparing to shoot. Which simply means the possibility of coming away with blurry pictures is nil. Needless to say, still and moving images look fabulous on the phone with its Quad HD display—and, no, unlike the Z5 Premium, whose 4K display chops became evident only with ultra-HD content, the XZ Premium does Quad HD all the time. Even mundane tasks look gorgeous.
As with Sony’s previous flagships, the Xperia XZ Premium is water- and dust-resistant, while the fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button, making it easier for users to access the smartphone. Moreover, it has a learning engine that allows the phone to manage battery life incredibly well. In our typical usage, a full charge—yes, the XZ Premium does come with Quick Charge technology—gave us juice for a day until a little before lunch in the next, and we even have LTE always on. Not bad, huh?
There’s plenty more to be said about the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, but we’d be going on forever. This is an excellent smartphone, period. It’s available in Luminous Chrome and Deepsea Black. There’s supposed to be a Bronze Pink variant, but we’re not sure if it’ll come around in these parts.
Learn more at www.sony.com.ph.