Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to
win at a price you'll like click now to learn
more welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Sony Experia Z1 let's start with
everything everyone else already told you while we open up the box it has a
quad core 2.2 GHz crate 400 Snapdragon
processor with an adreno 330 GPU and 2 G
of RAM it comes with Android 4.2 which is a little bit older now but there is a
planned 4.4 Upgrade it comes with a micro cable as well as a wall wart
charger some manuals and that's the end of the unboxing portion it has Wireless
AC Bluetooth 4.0 NFC 16 gigs of onboard
storage with expandable micro SD which
is definitely a plus with so many phones not having that it has a good camera
it's a 21 megapixel camera but it doesn't have necessarily the best
performance son he does a lot of process cing on the images there's a lot of
sample shots out there you can go check those out I didn't actually do any and
it has a 3,000 mAh battery which is a
very noticeable upgrade over my daily driver which is the HTC1 on a light day
and a normal day I could go two days and I can definitely make it through a
fairly heavy day usually I'd have about a 40% charge left after a normal day so
that's uh that's awesome cuz I'm used to having to recharge the one every day no
matter what now I've been using the Z1 for about 2 weeks now but but upon first
removing it from the box my initial reaction was man this thing's pretty
heavy it's very solid feeling with a glass front and glass back so it
actually reminds me of the old iPhone 4 where it just it feels like quality in
the hand but I did find it a little bit slippery and my wife said the same thing
although slick didn't have that problem at all with his larger hands it should
also be noted that the haptic feedback is among the best that I've felt it's
not overpowering and you know many implementations feel like the thing's
going to fall apart in your hands that wasn't case for this phone so speaking
of the screen in the front of the phone there's not a whole lot there there's a 2 megapixel 1080p front camera for video
chat there's a speaker up at the very top with a notification LED built into
it the speaker sounds great by the way but I did find the position at the very
top of the phone a little bit awkward cuz I'm more used to putting my ear
right about here and that's it the front buttons are actually completely software
and they are built into the screen like many newer phones on the right side of
the phone we find one of the cheapest Sim trays that I have ever encountered
in my life but the great thing about it is that it does happen to be tooless so
I guess that is definitely a plus we've also got a side lock button which I'm
kind of indifferent to um normally I'm used to a top blck button I didn't find
this was any better or worse and a volume rocker that I see what they were
trying to do it has kind of a curve shape to it so you should be able to
feel where it is but I found it was harder than I guess they were going for
to actually figure out which one I was pressing so it was a lot of trial and
error there's also a two-stage camera button which is really nice to have so
you you can launch the camera anytime from anywhere and you can prime it and
then go just like you can with many point shoot cameras also on that side of
the phone is a wrist strap anchor I really thought this was a nice touch as
well on the left side we've got micro SD expansion up to 64 gigs micro USB yes
these plastic covers are kind of lame but I understand why they're there more
on that later and then finally there is a charging connector for the official
Sony dock on the bottom we find nothing but a speaker Grill and on the top we
find nothing but a 3 and 1 12 mm headphone jack so back to that screen
with the excellent haptic feedback it's 1080p it's 10p Point multitouch as if
you could get 10 fingers on there it's a tri luminos LCD display with X reality
engine and the first thing I did was turn X reality off because I was
watching a movie and I was like this looks terrible it seems to crank the
sharpness up to 200 and for some reason I felt like colors looked worse too but
maybe that was just the color shift from
changing the angle of the phone it was noticeable enough and off AIS viewing
was bad enough that I did notice it dayto day but with that said you still
have very sharp text because it is still a 1080p LCD display and with X reality
turned off video viewing was satisfactory but it's definitely not as
good as something like the HTC1 the Z1 is very fast but what isn't these days I
did find that animations like expanding folders in the app tray felt a little
bit slow at first but I did get used to them and the overall experience is very
smooth the default sound scheme is also soothing and natural especially compared
to Samsung's horrible one I didn't feel the need to change it at all the only
issue I had with the setup for that is that volume all the way down silences
the phone when you use the button on the side versus HTC's implementation where
all the way down is Vibe and you actually have to very intentionally go one up to get to silent with that said
you can hold it down and go directly to Vibe instead of silent so it's just a
matter of being used to it I think for something like that the default screen
timeout was 30 seconds so that is a thing that I changed right away to
minute but this is just part of their very aggressive power savings that does
turn into real world battery life improvements so I can't really fault
them there their power savings scheme also includes location-based Wi-Fi and
limited network connectivity although you can whitelist certain apps when the
screen is powered off the best thing about their power savings is that just
like their find your lost phone feature it harasses you to turn it on I love
that because that's how you get people to actually set things up while the
phone is great as a first phone there were certain things that really irked me
about the setup process so first of all is that account creation for Sony
Entertainment Network is a little bit ridiculous it wants an eight character
password with no repetitions of three of the same in a row mixture of numbers and letters you know what screw off because
I can choose a passphrase that's 25 characters long that doesn't have any of
that stuff and is still a much stronger password than something that does adhere
to that regulation so I'd like to be able to choose my own password I
understand who it's trying to protect but I wish that it would give me the option to just have something longer
their transfer wizard if you have an existing Android phone is also quite
uncompetitive compared to HTC and Motorola the ones that I've used which
are just Wireless and you just install an app this requires a PC or Mac to
complete it's a 25 megabyte application that you have to download that then
wants to run in the background on the PC you need to plug a cable into one phone
then the other it gives no progress indicator and timed out both times that
I tried to use it I mean that felt like a very 2010 experience to me other the
other things that bugged me I guess were the fact that it prompts to like Sony on
Facebook and follow them on Twitter the first time I sign in I think son's a
little bit too grown up for that but I
guess if that's all I have to say negatively about the phone once I was done with setup things got a lot
smoother something that I'm starting to really like is soft buttons so I mean
just this is just an example but when you're typing something and the keyboard
opens up it actually changes what the button looks like to indicate the
functionality this might not be an issue for power users but for someone like my
mother having the button actually indicate what it's going to do so it's a
little down arrow to make the keyboard go away I think that's fantastic and
that's something that hard buttons on the HTC1 doesn't really offer speaking
of the keyboard I didn't really like it the space bar is very small and combined
with the long travel distance between keys because of the large screen I found
it hard to be accurate the great news about Android of course is all I had to
do was install swift key and I'm done
one thing I did like however is that the backspace just speeds up individual
character deletion rather than starting to eat whole work words as you go back
and I did find it a lot easier to control pictures in the messaging app
are actually kind of cool as well you can like draw stuff which was a bit of a
NE experience the two times that I tried it I sent slick a couple of messages but
it seems like again the kind of thing that you'd use twice and then not worry about too much because there are so many
Advanced messaging applications like WhatsApp and BBM and all that kind of
stuff that I I think a lot of people are going to replace that core functionality
but again for people like my mom it's great that they do have a better
messaging app than what used to seeing maybe it's the fact that I come from iOS
as my first smartphone experience but I don't actually use the desktops and
widgets much I tend to access almost everything from the app tray and this
was something that I really liked swiping in from the left on the app tray gives you access to the Play Store as
well as a variety of different ways of sorting the apps that makes it really easy to access your most use maybe it's
a stupid thing but I really enjoyed it they also have a quick settings
implementation that I really liked you swipe down from the top you can
completely configure this it arranges everything in a sensible Manner and it
saved me the trouble of installing power toggles really like it and compared to
something like TouchWiz it's not huge and like bright green looking for
whatever reason and compared to sense it requires fewer clicks to get at your
most frequently used things multitasking on the other hand wasn't a great
experience and I did find that being only being able to see three apps that
were recently accessed on a 1080p screen wasn't really adequate I really like
HTC's implementation here with the nine most recently open applications visible
I did get te on my Moto X review for doing a 5-second
summary of call Quality so I would like to talk about that a little bit guys
call Quality is excellent and there are no complaints I guess that was 5 seconds
again no but seriously the phone app is well laid out and aside from when you're
dialing by um by spelling the person's name not sorting by the version of that
person because I've got some people where I have four numbers for them that you used most recently no complaints
here I did like that being able to have access to my in call controls so my mute
and speaker phone and all that stuff as well as my keypad sometimes but then
there was one more other thing that bothered me a little bit and that was when I'm in the middle of a call and I'm
dialing in you know like options or pound or whatever else it doesn't actually show up so when you're dialing
into something like a conference call and you go oh I entered the wrong Pass
Key you can't actually double check it all right so that was a lot of stuff you just heard about what I liked or didn't
like based on the experience of actually using it as my daily driver but what's
the verdict lonus well it's not that simple you can weigh the pros and cons
and spec sheets all day but the xeria Z1 has one trump card and since my phone is
a loner phone that I have to send back to Sony I'll be finishing on the rest of
this shot in the bathtub while watching YouTube videos on my phone so we're
going to go with a video that's actually by me this is our build guide and we are
definitely definitely in a filled bathtub here
guys see we got lots of water we got lots of water and we are just going to
drop that phone right in the water you can no longer hear the sound uh however
the video playback is most assuredly still running now one thing to note is
that the touchcreen doesn't operate very well underwater but I guess that's
pretty normal so I'm going to go ahead and tell it yeah no it's okay that the
battery is low and we're going to go ahead and drop it back in So basically
guys who is this phone for we're going to hopefully overlay some underwater
footage from the phone of my hairy legs here just to show you guys that it is
indeed working down there but who is it for well it's for people who don't want
to worry about getting wet if you're an outdoorsy person a party goer or just
someone who wants to record videos in the rain then all the other phones are
kind of a nonf factor and you might as well just be only shopping for an xeria
waterproof phone because that's the only one that really comes with that truly
compelling feature like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
it leave a comment if you have any feedback on how we can make our phone
videos better and as always guys don't forget to subscribe
he