- Sony just announced their latest flagship phone,
the XZ2, and it kinda feels a little like Sony catching up
to the rest of the manufacturers,
but I mean that in a good way.
It is definitely a much smaller bezel-less device
than we're used to from Sony.
And I have to admit, I like the glass on it,
it does look kinda sexy.
Now Sony was kind enough to give me
a little bit of time with the device
before it was launched,
and so I figured I would try to do
a complete walkthrough for you guys
in that limited amount of time.
Now if you're not familiar with my complete walk-throughs,
basically it's me trying to go through every single feature
of a new device, whether it's a phone or a tablet
or a laptop, whatever, so that anyone that's interested
in maybe buying said device has all of the information
they could possibly need in one video
to make a better decision.
So, lets get started.
So first up, the styling.
The device is made out of this 3D Corning Gorilla Glass 5
on the front, and the back, which Sony says
follows their Ambient Flow Design language,
which give it this almost liquid look,
which I have to agree with and also, kinda like.
And encased in a metal frame.
They also managed to make it complete symmetrical,
including the cameras on the back
and the fingerprint sensor placed
in the middle of the device.
A place that they say is easy to get to,
and in the short time that I had it,
I actually agree with that.
The XZ2 has a 5.7 inch 18 X 9 screen
with, thankfully much smaller bezels at the top
and at the bottom that we're used to from Sony,
like I mentioned.
The resolution is FHD Plus and it is HDR capable.
Not only that, but Sony says it'll also upscale
SDR content from a lot of places to HDR as well.
So in other words, you know how we have like
4K TV's that upscale HD content to the higher resolution
of 4K, this is supposed to take SDR content,
so standard color depth and everything,
and bring it up to the much higher color depth HDR.
The device is IP68 certified and will come in black,
silver, pink, and green.
I love the green.
On the front we have a 5 megapixel camera
and a 19 megapixel rear facing one on the back.
This rear facing one is also capable of shooting
proper 4K HDR 10 Bit in Rec 20/20 video,
thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845
paired with four gigs of ram that's inside the XZ2.
That's what's powering this thing,
which by the way I did a video on,
not too long ago that you can check out here
for more info, on what that 845 means.
Suffice it to say though, that that means
that it can shoot proper HDR,
much higher color bit depth and contrast video.
Something that, actually a lot of $2,000 to $3,000
real cameras can't even do.
Now Sony has also put in their super slow mo
from the last XZ but again, thanks to that 845 in there,
they've managed to bump it up to full 1080p
at 960 frames per second instead of the 720p
at 960 that they had before.
Now keep in mind, though, that this again,
is only for a split second, just like the last device.
The phone has front facing dual stereo speakers
that are capable of high res audio,
and S-Force surround sound.
There's also a built in dac, albeit no headphone jack.
The dac can be used with USB-C devices, however.
Now to complement the high res audio,
Sony added a new vibration engine.
It's basically a much larger motor
that Sony has adapted to utilizing
low frequencies coming out of the audio
automatically, and vibrate accordingly.
Think of it as kind of vibrating along
with the base and kind of adding to that
kind of experience.
If a game has Haptic engine stuff
already built in to it, it'll actually use that
for this vibration motor as well.
Our demo for that was Angry Birds,
in which the vibration motor gave the sensation of
tension on the rubber band of the sling shot,
when it hit into stuff, etc.
Other than that, it gives just
one hell of a vibration notification.
Now that vibration motor, by the way,
can also be turned down, or off,
or whatever you wanna do.
Now on the left side of the device,
we have nothing.
On the right we have our volume rocker,
power button, and a dedicated camera button, yes.
At the top we have our Sim card and microSD card slot,
and speaking of sim cards, the XZ2 supports
gigabit LTE with peak download speeds
of 1.2 gigabits per second using Mimo 4X4, etc.
Again, I have a video on this,
I'll link below for those interested
on how gigabit on LTE and all that fun stuff works.
And it also has a battery that is 3180 milliamps
in size and it is chi charging capable.
Now on the software side, we're running a slightly
skinned version of Android, which is called Xperia,
that I found to be super smooth, actually,
during the demo at least and we have Google Assistant
as our A.I.
That, thanks to the low powered codec from Qualcomm
Sony is using has always on listening,
even if the screen is off and doesn't use any power.
So you can say things like okay google
at any time with the screen off
and it'll bring up your voice assist
and unlike a lot of other Android phones out there.
The camera app has a few added modes
over the stock one, including an AR sticker mode,
which allows you to drop creatures, etc
into your world, creative effect which allows you
to add real time effects to your shots,
Boca, which as you can imagine,
helps with creating the depth of field look
that you can then alter and adjust,
panorama which lets you do panoramic shots, of course.
And sound photo which allows you to take a photo
that also is a short clip of sound attached to it.
We also have a few apps that Sony added to the device.
So we'll go through those really quick.
Quick caveat thought, these were pre-production
devices so what I'm about to show you is
what was on those, it may differ,
depending on your region, etc, etc.
First we have a 3D scanner, which,
while the results were only slightly creepy,
and made me question whether I had a double chin,
I don't feel like I do, but maybe.
They were really accurate and super quick to graph.
You can just move the phone around your head easily,
and it'll map it to a 3D model, that you can then use
for emoji or other novel things like that.
You can even do a couple of passes
to get it to do a better job.
Then we have the Xperia Lounge
and entertainment hub that Sony has.
There's a Sony assistant, which is thankfully
not another Google Assistant competitor,
but more just kind of a knowledge base
for tips and tricks about the device itself.
AVG Protection which is an anti-virus software
that doubles as a battery and storage optimizer.
Xperia News which is a news hub that Sony has.
The PlayStation App, duh.
A highlight app to quickly create movies
from photos on your device, with music, etc.
Sketch, a mobile drawing and photo editing app.
SideView, a remote control app for your TV,
and Primephoto from Amazon.
Now in the settings, they've kept it pretty stock,
but have a few additions that are kinda useful
like Xperia actions that allows you to set actions
to happen, depending on circumstances,
i.e. keep the notification lights off when you go to bed.
They also have their own theme store
in the appearance settings.
Xperia Loops, that is an animated background
to show battery level and other status indications
once you figure out how to read it, that is.
Xperia Assist, which can give you device tips
or notify you about things like missed calls,
and Xperia Intelligence Engine, which attempts to
learn from you and change settings depending
on the situation automatically.
A support section for contacting Sony.
STAMINA mode and Ultra STAMINA mode
for making your battery last longer,
Battery care which notifies you
when to unplug the device and other things
to make your battery last longer,
if you wanna enable that and have it annoy
the crap out of you, that's up to you.
And Smart cleaner, which helps you clear storage
caches, etc.
There you go, pretty much everything
I could figure out while I had a very limited time
with the device.
But let me know what you guys think of the phone
or of these complete walk-throughs.
I think you guys like them,
you seem to like them so I'm still doing them,
but let me know in the comments.
We'd love to hear from you guys.
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Regardless though, as always, thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)