Sony Xperia Z5 Review: Water resistant Android phone meets tough competition

Scorpus

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Sony has managed to consistently produce decent high-end devices for several years now. Last year’s Xperia Z3 was a well-built handset with excellent battery life, while the Z3 Compact was a solid alternative in a smaller form factor. This year Sony has released the Xperia Z5, which brings a collection of updated hardware to the company’s flagship Android device. While technically a successor to the limited-release Xperia Z4, Sony is positioning the Xperia Z5 as a worthy upgrade over the year-old Xperia Z3, or the Xperia Z1 from 2013 for those on two-year release cycles.

In many ways the Xperia Z5 has, on paper, everything you’d want from a high-end smartphone. There’s a 23-megapixel camera on the back with “Hybrid Autofocus”, allegedly allowing it to focus in as quick as 30 milliseconds. There’s also a 5.2-inch 1080p display powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC, giving a mix of performance and energy efficiency. Sony claims two days of battery life from the Z5’s 2,900 mAh battery, which is squashed into a 7.3mm thin water resistant body.

Sony is also keeping up with the competition by including features such as a fingerprint scanner, while retaining the microSD card slot. Unfortunately, there’s no USB Type-C or Android 6.0, so it’s lagging behind the latest Nexus phones in that regard.

Read the complete review.

 
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Can you use it in the shower or low dept diving, as with the z1 compact ? and another important thing, can you host a wifi hotspot on channel 1-13 or only channel 1, as the other sony phones ? the hotspot is kinda important for me, since I use phone as hotspot outside my home. and I need to send it on a clean channel, not just on 1. can you check that if you still got the phone ?
 
Yet again Techspot leave LG totally out of any comparison of display quality - I wonder why? It's not because it might show up their favourite Apple is it? (Apple actually use LG displays I believe.)

And why are all the benchmarks (that can run on Apple) so biased towards Apple? What's going on here? Is Apple scamming the benchmarks or are the benchmarks picked/tuned to favour Apple?
 
Yet again Techspot leave LG totally out of any comparison of display quality - I wonder why? It's not because it might show up their favourite Apple is it? (Apple actually use LG displays I believe.)

And why are all the benchmarks (that can run on Apple) so biased towards Apple? What's going on here? Is Apple scamming the benchmarks or are the benchmarks picked/tuned to favour Apple?
they use samsung :p still ;)
 
Yet again Techspot leave LG totally out of any comparison of display quality - I wonder why? It's not because it might show up their favourite Apple is it? (Apple actually use LG displays I believe.)

And why are all the benchmarks (that can run on Apple) so biased towards Apple? What's going on here? Is Apple scamming the benchmarks or are the benchmarks picked/tuned to favour Apple?

We left out LG because they didn't want to send us a G4 (again) to test. Otherwise it would be in there.

The iPhone 6s is actually faster than most Android devices in regular usage. The benchmarks reflect this
 
Can you use it in the shower or low dept diving, as with the z1 compact ? and another important thing, can you host a wifi hotspot on channel 1-13 or only channel 1, as the other sony phones ? the hotspot is kinda important for me, since I use phone as hotspot outside my home. and I need to send it on a clean channel, not just on 1. can you check that if you still got the phone ?

There is no ability to change the Wi-Fi hotspot band settings. The phone is water resistant in fresh water up to 1.5m
 
There is no ability to change the Wi-Fi hotspot band settings. The phone is water resistant in fresh water up to 1.5m
ok, then sony isnt my choise again. I had z1 compact and saw the hotspot limit. not fun to pay fully for 100Mb lte and not getting any signal when traveling, bc airports and such are hosting on wifi ch 1. and not even able to make hotspot on 5G. nah, ill take the other brands who are more open and more mine ;)
 
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