Xperia XZ1: Has Sony finally made a good-value flagship smartphone?

I don’t think you need me to tell you that Sony’s smartphones, as of late, are not what you’d call….value for money. In fact, I may have strongly suggested in the past that a lot of their devices are grossly overpriced for the features they offer. So, with every new Sony flagship smartphone, I always have my fingers crossed that they will finally come to their senses.

Well, it’s that time of the year again and we’ve got Sony’s second big flagship smartphone launch in Malaysia. This time, the company has pushed out a phone that looks nearly identical to its predecessor, is priced roughly the same, but has a brand new “first in the world” camera feature.

At this point, you might be wondering “now where have I heard this before?” and you wouldn’t be the only one. But this time, I think things aren’t that simple.

Sony’s new phone is called the Xperia XZ1. This time it’s a proper flagship and not another XZs. In fact, it actually feels like a combination of the XZ Premium and the XZs.

Inside, you’ve got a Snapdragon 835 octa-core 10nm processor mated to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which is about the same kind of hardware you’d find in the XZ Premium from earlier this year. Though, you do get Android Oreo out of the box and that’s great. However, battery capacity takes a hit, going down to 2,700 mAh (down from both XZs and XZ Premium) and you only get a 5.2-inch Full HD panel. However, Sony says that this time the panel supports HDR which is a nice touch.

Accompanying the handset’s new HDR display are a pair of front facing stereo speakers. On the XZs, I found that the stereo speakers weren’t loud enough but it seems Sony may have just fixed that with the XZ1 as I could hear it pretty clearly even on the noisy demo floor.

As you can probably tell from the photos, if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s the way Sony designs their smartphones. To the layman, it’s almost indistinguishable from the phones it succeeds. Sony is trying to turn it into a positive thing by giving it fancy names like “Loop Surface” and calling it a “Timeless Design”, but I’m not convinced.

I’d tell you that the phone looks really dated and that bezels that thick have no place on a 2017 flagship, but at this point it’s like beating a dead horse. At least it has phones like the HTC U11, Xiaomi Mi 6, OnePlus 5 and Nokia 8 to keep it company in this regard.

Still, I can appreciate several design choices Sony has made that makes the XZ1 one of the more satisfying Sony phones I have had the chance to hold. The first is the choice to opt for full-metal body where its entire back plate and the sides are milled from a single block of aluminium then anodised into a gorgeous matte finish. This sheds the cheap-ish feeling you get from the XZs and the seamless sides really go a long way in making this phone feel good in the hand.

The second design choice is to launch with a matte black colour option that I think looks very sexy. In a world full of shiny reflective phones, it’s nice to have a handset that almost seems to absorb light. Unfortunately, it also seems to absorb fingerprints and the unit I had was almost impossible to wipe down. That said, it does have IP68 water resistance so you can just run it under the tap when it gets a little too disgusting. I do that all the time with Samsung’s shiny flagships.

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Over on the camera department, Sony’s new phone has the same 19-megapixel Motion Eye memory stacked camera sensor that made its debut on the Xperia XZs and XZ Premium earlier this year. As far as I can tell, they perform about the same, so no big surprises there. What’s the big new feature then? Well, Sony’s given the camera the ability to take scarily detailed 3D scans of objects and faces.

During the presentation, they showed us a few sample scans and they all looked eerily realistic, so all credit goes to Sony here. Then, they went on to show us an imaginary future where this 3D scanning is used for stuff like holographic communication, 3D virtual/augmented reality gaming and a bunch of other stuff.

The idea is, you scan either yourself or objects, then use the information to create 3D projections and augmented reality messages, among others.

My reaction to that was one of skepticism with a tinge of interest. I’ve learned to not put that much hope into a conceptual reality that feels too good to be true (RIP Project Ara), and this feels like one of those — at least it does in the near future. But then I got a chance to try the feature out for myself and I grew to realise that that imaginary future Sony showed us is probably a lot further down the road than you’d hope.

Sony’s 3D scanning, in theory, is really easy for anyone to pick up and start scanning. It works a little like a panorama photo or Google’s Photo Sphere where you set a start point and follow the guiding dots around your subject until you get a complete scan. There are four self-explanatory scanning modes that let you scan faces, whole heads, food and a free-form scan for objects.

In practice, though, it’s far trickier to get a flawless scan. First, you need to be in a well-lit room with even lighting all around your subject for the best results — or even a non-disfigured result. It also takes quite a lot of practice to properly follow the dots around. Even to Sony people who were supposed to demo the software to us were struggling to get good whole-head scans.

I only managed to get food and a face scan right. The rest of my time was spent disfiguring beautiful models.

Now, I don’t know how practical or useful this feature will end up being, especially considering the limited number of ways you can currently use it. Sony says you can scan faces and attach it to various bodies via an app and use that model to send it as a GIF to your friends or share it on social media. Or, if you’re feeling particularly narcissistic, you can set it as your phone’s wallpaper.

But considering the effort I had to put in — and the time it took — to just get one accurate-looking scan, simply being able to share it as a silly GIF doesn’t seem like a satisfying payoff. Or maybe I’m just terrible at it, so give it a try and take my experience with a grain of salt. In my personal opinion, at its current iteration, I think people will use it a few times for the novelty (or to show off to their friends) and then forget all about it like every other gimmicky flagship “super feature”.

And that’s pretty much the Sony Xperia XZ1 in a nutshell. All things considered, is it worth the RM2,999 price tag? I can’t really say for sure and that’s actually a good thing, at least as far as Sony is concerned because I think they’ve finally made a phone that isn’t just flat out awful value.

Sure, you’ve got phones like the OnePlus 5 (RM2,388), Xiaomi Mi 6 (RM1,899) and Nokia 8 (RM2,299) that have similar specs but are significantly cheaper than the Xperia XZ1. However, with those phones, you lose out on solid flagship features like IP68 water resistance, dual front-facing stereo speakers and a HDR capable display. Perhaps its closest rival is the HTC U11 (RM3,099), but, you do get what I think is a far superior camera, double the storage and more RAM for the RM100 premium.

However, don’t jump to the conclusion that I think the XZ1 is actually a good value smartphone because that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that this is a step in the right direction. It is what I think the Xperia XZs should have been right from the start. Yes, the XZ1 is still expensive, but at least you’re not getting an outdated processor, a lackluster build and a bunch of sub-par features. The XZs was such bad value, in fact, that when I reviewed it, I thought the original XZ was better value because it was RM200 cheaper.

Sony has finally managed to move from making god-awful value smartphones to just making debatably bad value smartphones (believe me, we had a long debate in the office). And if that’s the best I’m getting for now, I’ll take that as a win.