Sony Xperia Z1 In-depth Review a Powerful Water Resistant Android Phone

The Sony Xperia Z1 is a great phone by Sony, particularly useful for people who take a lot of photographs because the camera on this one is actually a lot better than some of the other Android phones in the same range.

The camera on the Xperia Z1 is a 20-megapixel camera that does a very good job. The camera interface is user-friendly and quick to use, with features like Superior Auto mode that automatically detects the type of photograph being taken. For example, it can detect documents, macro, etc. and take great photos.

The camera also takes excellent videos, but there's one minor issue - sometimes the autofocus can be a bit wonky when taking indoor photos in artificial light. However, for static pictures, the 20-megapixel camera is very good.

One thing to note about the camera is that it can only capture photos at 4:3 ratio if you want to take photos with this setting. If you want to go wide screen, the resolution drops to 8 megapixels. This is a bit annoying, but Sony could have easily increased the resolution to 16:9 for better widescreen performance.

The Xperia Z1 also features a great touch screen with 10 multi-touch points that can track without any issues. The touch sensitivity is excellent, and the phone responds quickly and accurately. I tested this with some games and found that the touch response was excellent.

Another feature of the Xperia Z1 is the Sony small apps, which are actually apps that can run over existing apps. For example, you can use them to write notes or move them around on your screen. These apps are great, and you can download many more from the Play Store.

The keyboard on the Xperia Z1 is also very comfortable to type on, with auto-prediction features that make it easy to type quickly and accurately. The keyboard works well in landscape orientation as well.

However, there's one thing that I didn't like about this phone - Sony should have added the option of taking photos in 16:9 ratio at higher resolutions. The current max resolution is 8 megapixels, which can be a bit limiting for those who take photos with widescreen aspect ratios.

Another minor issue is the placement of the speaker on the phone. While playing games, I frequently found that I was blocking the speaker because of its unusual location. The speaker isn't extremely loud either, but it's still acceptable.

Overall, though, the Xperia Z1 is a great Android phone that performs well and has some excellent features like a great camera and touch screen. If you take a lot of photographs or want a high-quality Android phone, the Sony Xperia Z1 is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi there this is ranit from Tech toast.com and I have the Sony Xperia Z1 with me and in this video we're going to do the full in-depth review for this Flagship Android phone by Sony this Xperia Z1 supports some very impressive specs it supports a quad core processor based on the Snapdragon 800 chipset hence it's a very powerful phone and the processor is clogged at 2.2 GHz it has 2 gigs of RAM and the GPU on this is adreno 330 that's a very powerful GPU so in terms of specs raw specs it has some of the best hardware that you can get as of now and before I proceed uh let me give you actually a physical overview of this phone on the top we'll have this 3.5mm headphone jack and uh on this actually there's a flap and this opens we have these flaps because this is a water resistant phone and uh Sony says that you can submerge the phone up to 1 m in water and uh up to 30 minutes and then also nothing will happen to the phone you can add your micro SIM over here and let's close this flap and we have the power on of pattern this is the volume rocker and we have a two stage uh shutter button and we have opening for the lanyard and this is actually the speaker opening for the speaker as you can see it is pretty wide but the uh what do you say location is not that great for example if you're doing particularly gaming uh while you're doing gaming for Racing Games Etc you might hold the phone like this and that tends to block the speaker but but apart from that it's okay I would say it's not the loudest speakers I've seen and we have a opening for a proprietary dog and again here we have two flaps one is for the micro USB slot that'll be used for charging this phone and this is for the micro SD card you can add a Micro SD card up to 64 GB to this phone internal storage is 16 GB that we get with this phone and moving towards the back again we have this glass back and we have the 20.7 map camera with the Sony G lens we have a LED flash uh this we have an N that means it's NFC capable we have Sony and the Xperia branding both the front and the back are glass like the Sony Xperia Z that we have seen the front-facing camera is a 2 map uh shooter and we also have array of sensors here again if you notice we don't have any physical buttons uh on the front part of the screen because the buttons like all other modern Xperia phones are part of the display the back home and the multitasking tray and before I proceeded with the review I want to thank feil Communications for Prov providing this unit for review and India this phone uh MRP is around 44,990 one now coming to the screen uh it has a 5in screen and that's a full HD screen uh the screen actually is a pretty uh improvement over the Sony xeria Z or the Zed L but again um I did notice that in my testing the viewing angles though have been improved they are not among the best if you start tilting the phone uh they tend to uh start fading a little bit the camera is not able to capture it but if you start comparing it with Flagship Android phones from Samsung they definitely have a much better viewing angle the screen quality has improved a lot compared to Prior Xperia phones but still I feel uh Sony has a long way to go if you start comparing with the Samsung or even LG phones that have a IPS display the screen quality is not that great coming to the phone physically holding the phone uh it's decent but again I would say if you compare it with the a standard 5in phone for example this is Samsung Galaxy S4 you will immediately notice that this Xperia Z1 is a tart bigger actually it's a bit taller compared to the Samsung Galaxy S4 and it's a little bit big I mean uh I did find that this chin at the bottom is a tad bigger because we do have these on screen buttons so this chin is a little bit big Sony would it would have been great if the chin was a little bit smaller coming to the weight uh the phone um uh is this is a bit a little bit of a hefty phone it weighs 170 G but I would say Sony did a good job the weight distribution is evenly done so while holding the phone in one hand it does not feel that bulky but because the phone is a little bit big I would say reaching all the paths is a little bit difficult you have to move around a little bit if you have small hands you'll have a problem uh so that's the thing with the physical overview this is the array and Sony has installed actually quite a bit apps on this phone and let me also show you the Android version the good thing is that we have some quick toggles over here and if you go to the settings and go to about the phone out of the box uh we get the Android version 4.2.2 that is jelly be and specifically the model number that is sold in India is the c6902 coming to the internal storage as I told you you have 16 gigs and uh I have installed a lot of apps so right now uh we'll have actually very Less storage uh and you can also add a Micro SD card up to 64 GB uh Sony has installed a lot of apps for example games also like what do you say aspal 7 was pre-installed and a lot of third party apps are pre-installed on this phone but luckily many of those apps can be uninstalled to free up the internal storage now coming to the voice call Quality the voice call Quality that I got with this one is very good actually the LED notification light is over here so if you get a Miss Call Etc it glows here and using the control panel you can also adjust that so Sony has provided a lot of control over that moving to the battery the battery as this phone is a waterproof phone the battery is sealed inside it's a 3,000 mamp battery and I would say it's a much improvement over the Sony Xperia Z or the ZL uh in my tesing the battery was pretty decent I would say and it should last you for one working day without any issues one place where I did notice that the battery tends to drain a little bit more is when you play around with the camera a lot if you take the C shots a lot of camera shots the battery tends to drain a little bit but I would say with normal usage uh the battery should easily last you for one full working day without any issues coming to the ram as I said we have 2 gigs of RAM on this one and uh let me also show you that actually in terms of the performance the phone was very Snappy the Snapdragon 800 chipset is is actually very fast it's very fluid and I'm glad to say that I did not notice any stuttering or lagginess when I was testing this phone so in terms of that it's very good and let me show you the Android system info and as you can see it's showing free Ram is 788 I ran it a couple of times it also went to around 850 uh but I would say the the phone is very responsive and you won't face issues of lag or anything like that I also tried this phone with some heavy games like aspal 7 Real Racing repti GP Etc and it could play all those games without any issues I've actually made a dedicated video regarding the gaming and also the Benchmark so if you're interested in that you can check out this uh gaming video also in benchmarks I got some of the top scores so in terms of raw Hardware uh it is topnotch and you get some of the best hardware as of now now as we are connected to my Wi-Fi network uh let's test the web browser again the good thing is that uh this phone does support both the bands that's 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz uh I've loaded my website tech2b us.com again just notice how smooth the pinch to zoom gesture is it's very smooth no issues and uh let's open up one of the stories because we have a YouTube video here and let's try to play it back hi.com again as you can see if you have no problems it can play videos that are embedded than this web page again I'm zooming in and zooming out also then also as you can see phone is very responsive and I did a test it with lot of web browsing again I had no issues it's very fluid and very powerful phone coming to the media playback also I had some very good experience and this phone does support usb OTG let me I have this usb OTG cable and I have a pen drive I have a video uh on this so let's attach this pen drive and it will glow here and as you can see it's attached and it will also detect here that the USB storage has been detected so let's fire up the what do you say file manager that we have in this one uh we had Astro and I'll open this USB uh disc and let's play back this uh nature uh MP4 video this is a 1080p video and as you can see It'll play it without any issues I tested it with a lot of 720p clipss and even some 1080p clips and I had no problems playing those videos so if you watch a lot of videos also then don't worry uh this phone should run most of them without any issues also I did test it with YouTube uh and I had no problem it can play YouTube videos in HD as this Xperia Z1 is also water resistant so I tested it by pouring water so I'm pouring actually as you can see a bottle of water on this one and actually when the water water is falling the screen uh will act a little bit but don't worry nothing will happen and as you can see I have inverted this full bottle of water and then also this Xperia Z1 is working fine so don't worry if you accidentally drop it in water or water falls you shouldn't have any problems with the Xperia Z1 now coming to the uh camera which is a highlighting point about this uh phone that's a 20 megap camera um the camera actually does a very good job let me show you you the interface I won't get into details regarding the camera because I've already made a dedicated video regarding the camera performance but uh the camera actually does a very good job and it is actually very quick and as you can see we do get the superior auto mode in which it actually autod detects the type of photograph we are taking for example document macro Etc and let's see the snap that we took right now just look at the detail I'm just zooming in and zooming out it has a lot of details so if you take a lot of photos of documents also Etc they come out very good this is the photo that we took right now you look at the detail it's very good so if you interested more regarding the camera you can check out my uh camera review for this phone overall I would say the camera does a very good job the video also it can take as very good but I found that videos when you take indoors in artificial light sometimes the autofocus goes a little bit to Bonkers but for static pictures I would say this 20 megapix camera is very good one thing you need to know is that for taking pictures in this 20 megapixel you have to take the photos in it takes the photos in 4X is to 3 ratio if you want to go wide screen then it goes down to 8 megapixel that's the only Annoying Factor it should it would have been great if the resolution uh for 16 is to9 was a little bit bummed up and uh Sony also did not skimp on any sensors for example multi touch points it has as all 10 multi- touch points that it can track without any issue so that's the max 10 and uh the touch sensitivity is also very good for example and some of the game games uh the touch response was excellent I would say also let me show you the compass app as I told you Sony did not skimp on any sensors so actually everything works on this phone and we also have the Sony uh small apps these are actually apps that can run over existing apps for example let's open my web browser and let's say I have to do some calculation I can do that so these are Sony uh small apps and uh these are great you can write notes stuff you can move them around also like this and actually uh you can download a lot more of these small apps uh from the Play Store let me also show you the uh keyboard This is the messaging app and uh right the message this is the keyboard and the keyboard is pretty wide so but we do get Auto prediction and I found the keyboard to be uh very comfortable and it also works in this uh landscape orientation if you want so what do I feel about the Sony Xperia Z this is a great phone by Sony and particularly it be useful for people who take a lot of photographs because the camera on this one is actually a lot better than some of the other Android phones in the same range um one thing that I did not like about this phone is that Sony should have added the option of taking photos in 16 is to9 ratio at higher resolutions the max is 8 megapix because these days many of the people take snaps uh in wi screen uh so that's a little bit annoying another thing is that as I told you earlier also uh the placement of the speaker uh is actually a weird location and while playing games I frequently found that I was blocking the speaker you can see uh see that in my gaming review I talked about that a lot also I felt that the speaker is not that loud it should have been a lot louder but in terms of raw performance the phone is really fast I hardly face any issues of lag there's no lagginess or anything like that I tried heavy multitasking with this phone everything it rans whatever I threw on this phone it could uh handle it without any issues one thing uh is a little bit of annoyance that I have is the panel that Sony has but though it's a very good panel the color reproduction is actually very good but the viewing angles are simply not that great these are some of the small nitpicking that I experienc but overall I would say the Sony Xperia Z1 is a very good Android phone and particularly if you take a lot of photographs have a serious look at the Sony xeria Z1 so that's it for now for this review if you found it helpful I'll appreciate if you can click the like button thank you this is ranit and I hope to see you in my next videohi there this is ranit from Tech toast.com and I have the Sony Xperia Z1 with me and in this video we're going to do the full in-depth review for this Flagship Android phone by Sony this Xperia Z1 supports some very impressive specs it supports a quad core processor based on the Snapdragon 800 chipset hence it's a very powerful phone and the processor is clogged at 2.2 GHz it has 2 gigs of RAM and the GPU on this is adreno 330 that's a very powerful GPU so in terms of specs raw specs it has some of the best hardware that you can get as of now and before I proceed uh let me give you actually a physical overview of this phone on the top we'll have this 3.5mm headphone jack and uh on this actually there's a flap and this opens we have these flaps because this is a water resistant phone and uh Sony says that you can submerge the phone up to 1 m in water and uh up to 30 minutes and then also nothing will happen to the phone you can add your micro SIM over here and let's close this flap and we have the power on of pattern this is the volume rocker and we have a two stage uh shutter button and we have opening for the lanyard and this is actually the speaker opening for the speaker as you can see it is pretty wide but the uh what do you say location is not that great for example if you're doing particularly gaming uh while you're doing gaming for Racing Games Etc you might hold the phone like this and that tends to block the speaker but but apart from that it's okay I would say it's not the loudest speakers I've seen and we have a opening for a proprietary dog and again here we have two flaps one is for the micro USB slot that'll be used for charging this phone and this is for the micro SD card you can add a Micro SD card up to 64 GB to this phone internal storage is 16 GB that we get with this phone and moving towards the back again we have this glass back and we have the 20.7 map camera with the Sony G lens we have a LED flash uh this we have an N that means it's NFC capable we have Sony and the Xperia branding both the front and the back are glass like the Sony Xperia Z that we have seen the front-facing camera is a 2 map uh shooter and we also have array of sensors here again if you notice we don't have any physical buttons uh on the front part of the screen because the buttons like all other modern Xperia phones are part of the display the back home and the multitasking tray and before I proceeded with the review I want to thank feil Communications for Prov providing this unit for review and India this phone uh MRP is around 44,990 one now coming to the screen uh it has a 5in screen and that's a full HD screen uh the screen actually is a pretty uh improvement over the Sony xeria Z or the Zed L but again um I did notice that in my testing the viewing angles though have been improved they are not among the best if you start tilting the phone uh they tend to uh start fading a little bit the camera is not able to capture it but if you start comparing it with Flagship Android phones from Samsung they definitely have a much better viewing angle the screen quality has improved a lot compared to Prior Xperia phones but still I feel uh Sony has a long way to go if you start comparing with the Samsung or even LG phones that have a IPS display the screen quality is not that great coming to the phone physically holding the phone uh it's decent but again I would say if you compare it with the a standard 5in phone for example this is Samsung Galaxy S4 you will immediately notice that this Xperia Z1 is a tart bigger actually it's a bit taller compared to the Samsung Galaxy S4 and it's a little bit big I mean uh I did find that this chin at the bottom is a tad bigger because we do have these on screen buttons so this chin is a little bit big Sony would it would have been great if the chin was a little bit smaller coming to the weight uh the phone um uh is this is a bit a little bit of a hefty phone it weighs 170 G but I would say Sony did a good job the weight distribution is evenly done so while holding the phone in one hand it does not feel that bulky but because the phone is a little bit big I would say reaching all the paths is a little bit difficult you have to move around a little bit if you have small hands you'll have a problem uh so that's the thing with the physical overview this is the array and Sony has installed actually quite a bit apps on this phone and let me also show you the Android version the good thing is that we have some quick toggles over here and if you go to the settings and go to about the phone out of the box uh we get the Android version 4.2.2 that is jelly be and specifically the model number that is sold in India is the c6902 coming to the internal storage as I told you you have 16 gigs and uh I have installed a lot of apps so right now uh we'll have actually very Less storage uh and you can also add a Micro SD card up to 64 GB uh Sony has installed a lot of apps for example games also like what do you say aspal 7 was pre-installed and a lot of third party apps are pre-installed on this phone but luckily many of those apps can be uninstalled to free up the internal storage now coming to the voice call Quality the voice call Quality that I got with this one is very good actually the LED notification light is over here so if you get a Miss Call Etc it glows here and using the control panel you can also adjust that so Sony has provided a lot of control over that moving to the battery the battery as this phone is a waterproof phone the battery is sealed inside it's a 3,000 mamp battery and I would say it's a much improvement over the Sony Xperia Z or the ZL uh in my tesing the battery was pretty decent I would say and it should last you for one working day without any issues one place where I did notice that the battery tends to drain a little bit more is when you play around with the camera a lot if you take the C shots a lot of camera shots the battery tends to drain a little bit but I would say with normal usage uh the battery should easily last you for one full working day without any issues coming to the ram as I said we have 2 gigs of RAM on this one and uh let me also show you that actually in terms of the performance the phone was very Snappy the Snapdragon 800 chipset is is actually very fast it's very fluid and I'm glad to say that I did not notice any stuttering or lagginess when I was testing this phone so in terms of that it's very good and let me show you the Android system info and as you can see it's showing free Ram is 788 I ran it a couple of times it also went to around 850 uh but I would say the the phone is very responsive and you won't face issues of lag or anything like that I also tried this phone with some heavy games like aspal 7 Real Racing repti GP Etc and it could play all those games without any issues I've actually made a dedicated video regarding the gaming and also the Benchmark so if you're interested in that you can check out this uh gaming video also in benchmarks I got some of the top scores so in terms of raw Hardware uh it is topnotch and you get some of the best hardware as of now now as we are connected to my Wi-Fi network uh let's test the web browser again the good thing is that uh this phone does support both the bands that's 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz uh I've loaded my website tech2b us.com again just notice how smooth the pinch to zoom gesture is it's very smooth no issues and uh let's open up one of the stories because we have a YouTube video here and let's try to play it back hi.com again as you can see if you have no problems it can play videos that are embedded than this web page again I'm zooming in and zooming out also then also as you can see phone is very responsive and I did a test it with lot of web browsing again I had no issues it's very fluid and very powerful phone coming to the media playback also I had some very good experience and this phone does support usb OTG let me I have this usb OTG cable and I have a pen drive I have a video uh on this so let's attach this pen drive and it will glow here and as you can see it's attached and it will also detect here that the USB storage has been detected so let's fire up the what do you say file manager that we have in this one uh we had Astro and I'll open this USB uh disc and let's play back this uh nature uh MP4 video this is a 1080p video and as you can see It'll play it without any issues I tested it with a lot of 720p clipss and even some 1080p clips and I had no problems playing those videos so if you watch a lot of videos also then don't worry uh this phone should run most of them without any issues also I did test it with YouTube uh and I had no problem it can play YouTube videos in HD as this Xperia Z1 is also water resistant so I tested it by pouring water so I'm pouring actually as you can see a bottle of water on this one and actually when the water water is falling the screen uh will act a little bit but don't worry nothing will happen and as you can see I have inverted this full bottle of water and then also this Xperia Z1 is working fine so don't worry if you accidentally drop it in water or water falls you shouldn't have any problems with the Xperia Z1 now coming to the uh camera which is a highlighting point about this uh phone that's a 20 megap camera um the camera actually does a very good job let me show you you the interface I won't get into details regarding the camera because I've already made a dedicated video regarding the camera performance but uh the camera actually does a very good job and it is actually very quick and as you can see we do get the superior auto mode in which it actually autod detects the type of photograph we are taking for example document macro Etc and let's see the snap that we took right now just look at the detail I'm just zooming in and zooming out it has a lot of details so if you take a lot of photos of documents also Etc they come out very good this is the photo that we took right now you look at the detail it's very good so if you interested more regarding the camera you can check out my uh camera review for this phone overall I would say the camera does a very good job the video also it can take as very good but I found that videos when you take indoors in artificial light sometimes the autofocus goes a little bit to Bonkers but for static pictures I would say this 20 megapix camera is very good one thing you need to know is that for taking pictures in this 20 megapixel you have to take the photos in it takes the photos in 4X is to 3 ratio if you want to go wide screen then it goes down to 8 megapixel that's the only Annoying Factor it should it would have been great if the resolution uh for 16 is to9 was a little bit bummed up and uh Sony also did not skimp on any sensors for example multi touch points it has as all 10 multi- touch points that it can track without any issue so that's the max 10 and uh the touch sensitivity is also very good for example and some of the game games uh the touch response was excellent I would say also let me show you the compass app as I told you Sony did not skimp on any sensors so actually everything works on this phone and we also have the Sony uh small apps these are actually apps that can run over existing apps for example let's open my web browser and let's say I have to do some calculation I can do that so these are Sony uh small apps and uh these are great you can write notes stuff you can move them around also like this and actually uh you can download a lot more of these small apps uh from the Play Store let me also show you the uh keyboard This is the messaging app and uh right the message this is the keyboard and the keyboard is pretty wide so but we do get Auto prediction and I found the keyboard to be uh very comfortable and it also works in this uh landscape orientation if you want so what do I feel about the Sony Xperia Z this is a great phone by Sony and particularly it be useful for people who take a lot of photographs because the camera on this one is actually a lot better than some of the other Android phones in the same range um one thing that I did not like about this phone is that Sony should have added the option of taking photos in 16 is to9 ratio at higher resolutions the max is 8 megapix because these days many of the people take snaps uh in wi screen uh so that's a little bit annoying another thing is that as I told you earlier also uh the placement of the speaker uh is actually a weird location and while playing games I frequently found that I was blocking the speaker you can see uh see that in my gaming review I talked about that a lot also I felt that the speaker is not that loud it should have been a lot louder but in terms of raw performance the phone is really fast I hardly face any issues of lag there's no lagginess or anything like that I tried heavy multitasking with this phone everything it rans whatever I threw on this phone it could uh handle it without any issues one thing uh is a little bit of annoyance that I have is the panel that Sony has but though it's a very good panel the color reproduction is actually very good but the viewing angles are simply not that great these are some of the small nitpicking that I experienc but overall I would say the Sony Xperia Z1 is a very good Android phone and particularly if you take a lot of photographs have a serious look at the Sony xeria Z1 so that's it for now for this review if you found it helpful I'll appreciate if you can click the like button thank you this is ranit and I hope to see you in my next video\n"