step right up folks come and see the amazing Experia Z5 premium featuring an
astonishing 4K screen it's everything
you've ever seen and done a 100 times but now in 4k yes friends 4K is the
future and the future is
now the simitar RGB from Corsair features 17 programmable buttons a
12,000 DPI Optical sensor and a shape designed for comfort and MMO and MOBA
games learn more at the link in the video description all right so I guess that
silly intro bit gives away some of my concluding thoughts on the Z5 premium
but I've got a bit of a routine to run through here so let's get that stuff out
of the way first if you've seen one Sony Z series device you've pretty much seen
them all at this point so the Z5 premium holds not not too many surprises up its
sleeves it's got a blocky shape with an
unadorned back panel save for the camera and flash a micro be charging port with
wrist strap loop on the bottom a dedicated shutter button volume rocker
and lock button with integrated fingerprint sensor on the right a
headphone jack and noise cancellation microphone on the top and finally okay I
guess it does have some surprises a Micro SD expansion slot along with a
dual SIM card tray making this phone a
winner for frequent Travelers who load up a lot of media for trips and have
phone plans in multiple countries or even just people who want to save a few
bucks here and there leveraging cheaper data on one carrier and cheaper voice on
another for example at the front are dual forward-facing speakers a selfie
camera and the main event the 4K screen
but I'll talk more about that later the ergonomics of this phone were a bit of a
mixed bag for me I mean I liked the design of the iPhone 4 a lot and I still
do but one of the reasons that the the like heavy blocky solid feeling metal
and glass design worked so well was that
it was small and therefore easy to handle without dropping and this carried
over quite nicely to my new daily driver the Xperia Z5 compact which I reviewed
quite recently but at the size of the
premium variant I mean we're talking about a 5.5 in display phone here with
substantial forehead and Chin bar areas
it is pretty darn unwieldly a curved back and lighter
construction would likely go a long way towards remedying this for me but there
are some trade-offs there as well to a
man or lady every phone person who touched the Z5 premium or saw me using
it said something along the lines of wow it really lives up to the premium name
and that was without getting to experience the for Cas screen which I
guess leads us pretty well into the screen first things first at this pixel
density we're talking a whopping 800
pixels per inch it's a freaking miracle that Sony managed to get a backlight to
shine through the electronics at all the fact that they also managed to deliver a
bright accurate display to boot is a
freaking Miracle but there's some bad
news about the screen as well in the time that I was using the phone it
actually almost never ran at its 4K
native resolution this is for a couple of reasons number one is that Android
lollipop doesn't have proper 4K support so it'll only switch in a couple of apps
two of which by the way are Sony's own album and video apps but even though
that will be rectified in the future somewhat DPI support is kind of an issue
too problem number two the fact that running at 4K puts unneeded strain on
the phone's processor SA battery life means that even after the Android
marshmallow update Sony will likely leave this limitation in place so there
you go most of the time your 4K display
will be running at 1080p instead something that in the past I would have
like dropped the phone like a hot potato
and said ah run away run away because running LCD displays that anything but
native resolution has traditionally destroyed text sharpness but in the this
case actually it was just fine and I wouldn't have even noticed that it has a
4K display if you didn't tell me in fact 4K content even didn't look materially
different from sharpened 1080p content at this size which raises the entirely
new question of well what is the point then to which I would
reply Android handset makers Sony included just don't know how else to
differentiate from the crowd I mean look at the rest of the specs of the phone 2
gz Snapdragon 810 CPU with adreno 430
GPU 3 GB of RAM AC Wi-Fi NFC FM radio
Quick Charge 2.0 fast charging fingerprint scanner I mean it's got
everything but the kitchen sink and hell if Sony shipped it with one of those it
would just be a great demonstration of the ip68 water and dust protection the
thing would still work I mean that is some fairly standout stuff I mean the
Snapdragon 810 is still a mini furnace that thermal throttle noticeably after
only a few geek bench runs but performance is still well within the
acceptable range and anyway what else is Sony supposed to use and there in lies
the problem no matter what gimmick Android makers throw at their premium
devices they can't differentiate from each other let alone from Apple I mean
it wasn't that long ago that having front-facing speakers made headlines and
if you had a solid camera on an Android device you were going to sell a lot of
units but the Z5 premium has both of these
things the camera which I actually glossed over earlier by the way is a 23
megapixel affair with 4K 30fps video recording slowmo and it performed
admirably in my typical full auto testing of the device but today those
things amount to nothing Android phone
makers have given it everything they've got and people are still buying iPhones
in greater numbers than ever before so
what do they do well they go back to to bigger and better numbers even if it's
actually meaningless like even more meaningless than ever before like we
turned it off 99% of the time
meaningless it's kind of a shame though because from Reading other folks reviews
of the Z5 premium it feels like Sony and
therefore everyone covering the phone got so focused on the 4K display that
they missed that this is also just a really solid device the 3430 milliamp
battery got me comfortably through every day while I was using it and Sony's OS
skin continues to make small evolutionary improvements without
ruining the Android experience which is which is sweet but just not enough to
win me over or to recommend that
especially for the price wow you run out
and buy one and on that subject dbrand
makers of the highquality vinyl skins
that you see on the devices in our phone
reviews now I could spend some time telling you that dbrand is very
affordable they have an expensive shipping around the freaking world their
Skins are high quality and they're cut precisely and they've got a bunch of
different styles but I'm not not going to tell you any of that stuff what I'm
going to tell you today is that dbrand actually has a special exclusive 48 hour
only color it is an orange carbon fiber the same one that you saw in scrapyard
War season 3 on the back of my Mac book that's kind of like an LT orange so you
guys are going to want to check that out at the link in the video description
right below they can put it on a phone they can put it on a console they can
put it on a computer pretty much you name it they'll put it on it unless it's
like your grandmother I don't know why you would
want a vinyl skin on your grandmother I mean I guess it would protect her from
incidental scrapes and scratches and make her look
better maybe there's something to this anyway guys thanks for watching if
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you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top
right corner to check out the video where I show off the update to our 100
plus terabyte actually it's like 20 23 *
6 so yeah so it's well over 120 terab in
its new configuration storage server we
made some changes