Sony Xperia Z1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,649 words · ~13 min read
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more welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Sony Experia Z1 let's start with
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everything everyone else already told you while we open up the box it has a
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quad core 2.2 GHz crate 400 Snapdragon
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processor with an adreno 330 GPU and 2 G
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of RAM it comes with Android 4.2 which is a little bit older now but there is a
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planned 4.4 Upgrade it comes with a micro cable as well as a wall wart
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charger some manuals and that's the end of the unboxing portion it has Wireless
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AC Bluetooth 4.0 NFC 16 gigs of onboard
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storage with expandable micro SD which
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is definitely a plus with so many phones not having that it has a good camera
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it's a 21 megapixel camera but it doesn't have necessarily the best
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performance son he does a lot of process cing on the images there's a lot of
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sample shots out there you can go check those out I didn't actually do any and
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it has a 3,000 mAh battery which is a
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very noticeable upgrade over my daily driver which is the HTC1 on a light day
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and a normal day I could go two days and I can definitely make it through a
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fairly heavy day usually I'd have about a 40% charge left after a normal day so
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that's uh that's awesome cuz I'm used to having to recharge the one every day no
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matter what now I've been using the Z1 for about 2 weeks now but but upon first
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removing it from the box my initial reaction was man this thing's pretty
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heavy it's very solid feeling with a glass front and glass back so it
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actually reminds me of the old iPhone 4 where it just it feels like quality in
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the hand but I did find it a little bit slippery and my wife said the same thing
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although slick didn't have that problem at all with his larger hands it should
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also be noted that the haptic feedback is among the best that I've felt it's
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not overpowering and you know many implementations feel like the thing's
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going to fall apart in your hands that wasn't case for this phone so speaking
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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
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chat there's a speaker up at the very top with a notification LED built into
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it the speaker sounds great by the way but I did find the position at the very
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top of the phone a little bit awkward cuz I'm more used to putting my ear
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right about here and that's it the front buttons are actually completely software
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and they are built into the screen like many newer phones on the right side of
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the phone we find one of the cheapest Sim trays that I have ever encountered
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in my life but the great thing about it is that it does happen to be tooless so
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I guess that is definitely a plus we've also got a side lock button which I'm
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kind of indifferent to um normally I'm used to a top blck button I didn't find
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this was any better or worse and a volume rocker that I see what they were
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trying to do it has kind of a curve shape to it so you should be able to
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feel where it is but I found it was harder than I guess they were going for
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to actually figure out which one I was pressing so it was a lot of trial and
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error there's also a two-stage camera button which is really nice to have so
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you you can launch the camera anytime from anywhere and you can prime it and
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then go just like you can with many point shoot cameras also on that side of
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the phone is a wrist strap anchor I really thought this was a nice touch as
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well on the left side we've got micro SD expansion up to 64 gigs micro USB yes
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these plastic covers are kind of lame but I understand why they're there more
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on that later and then finally there is a charging connector for the official
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Sony dock on the bottom we find nothing but a speaker Grill and on the top we
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find nothing but a 3 and 1 12 mm headphone jack so back to that screen
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with the excellent haptic feedback it's 1080p it's 10p Point multitouch as if
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you could get 10 fingers on there it's a tri luminos LCD display with X reality
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engine and the first thing I did was turn X reality off because I was
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watching a movie and I was like this looks terrible it seems to crank the
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sharpness up to 200 and for some reason I felt like colors looked worse too but
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maybe that was just the color shift from
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changing the angle of the phone it was noticeable enough and off AIS viewing
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was bad enough that I did notice it dayto day but with that said you still
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have very sharp text because it is still a 1080p LCD display and with X reality
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turned off video viewing was satisfactory but it's definitely not as
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good as something like the HTC1 the Z1 is very fast but what isn't these days I
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did find that animations like expanding folders in the app tray felt a little
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bit slow at first but I did get used to them and the overall experience is very
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smooth the default sound scheme is also soothing and natural especially compared
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to Samsung's horrible one I didn't feel the need to change it at all the only
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issue I had with the setup for that is that volume all the way down silences
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the phone when you use the button on the side versus HTC's implementation where
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all the way down is Vibe and you actually have to very intentionally go one up to get to silent with that said
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you can hold it down and go directly to Vibe instead of silent so it's just a
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matter of being used to it I think for something like that the default screen
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timeout was 30 seconds so that is a thing that I changed right away to
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minute but this is just part of their very aggressive power savings that does
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turn into real world battery life improvements so I can't really fault
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them there their power savings scheme also includes location-based Wi-Fi and
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limited network connectivity although you can whitelist certain apps when the
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screen is powered off the best thing about their power savings is that just
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like their find your lost phone feature it harasses you to turn it on I love
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that because that's how you get people to actually set things up while the
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phone is great as a first phone there were certain things that really irked me
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about the setup process so first of all is that account creation for Sony
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Entertainment Network is a little bit ridiculous it wants an eight character
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password with no repetitions of three of the same in a row mixture of numbers and letters you know what screw off because
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I can choose a passphrase that's 25 characters long that doesn't have any of
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that stuff and is still a much stronger password than something that does adhere
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to that regulation so I'd like to be able to choose my own password I
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understand who it's trying to protect but I wish that it would give me the option to just have something longer
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their transfer wizard if you have an existing Android phone is also quite
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uncompetitive compared to HTC and Motorola the ones that I've used which
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are just Wireless and you just install an app this requires a PC or Mac to
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complete it's a 25 megabyte application that you have to download that then
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wants to run in the background on the PC you need to plug a cable into one phone
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then the other it gives no progress indicator and timed out both times that
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I tried to use it I mean that felt like a very 2010 experience to me other the
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other things that bugged me I guess were the fact that it prompts to like Sony on
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Facebook and follow them on Twitter the first time I sign in I think son's a
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little bit too grown up for that but I
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guess if that's all I have to say negatively about the phone once I was done with setup things got a lot
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smoother something that I'm starting to really like is soft buttons so I mean
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just this is just an example but when you're typing something and the keyboard
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opens up it actually changes what the button looks like to indicate the
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functionality this might not be an issue for power users but for someone like my
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mother having the button actually indicate what it's going to do so it's a
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little down arrow to make the keyboard go away I think that's fantastic and
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that's something that hard buttons on the HTC1 doesn't really offer speaking
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of the keyboard I didn't really like it the space bar is very small and combined
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with the long travel distance between keys because of the large screen I found
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it hard to be accurate the great news about Android of course is all I had to
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do was install swift key and I'm done
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one thing I did like however is that the backspace just speeds up individual
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character deletion rather than starting to eat whole work words as you go back
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and I did find it a lot easier to control pictures in the messaging app
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are actually kind of cool as well you can like draw stuff which was a bit of a
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NE experience the two times that I tried it I sent slick a couple of messages but
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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
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Advanced messaging applications like WhatsApp and BBM and all that kind of
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stuff that I I think a lot of people are going to replace that core functionality
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but again for people like my mom it's great that they do have a better
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messaging app than what used to seeing maybe it's the fact that I come from iOS
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as my first smartphone experience but I don't actually use the desktops and
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widgets much I tend to access almost everything from the app tray and this
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was something that I really liked swiping in from the left on the app tray gives you access to the Play Store as
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well as a variety of different ways of sorting the apps that makes it really easy to access your most use maybe it's
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a stupid thing but I really enjoyed it they also have a quick settings
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implementation that I really liked you swipe down from the top you can
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completely configure this it arranges everything in a sensible Manner and it
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saved me the trouble of installing power toggles really like it and compared to
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something like TouchWiz it's not huge and like bright green looking for
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whatever reason and compared to sense it requires fewer clicks to get at your
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most frequently used things multitasking on the other hand wasn't a great
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experience and I did find that being only being able to see three apps that
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were recently accessed on a 1080p screen wasn't really adequate I really like
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HTC's implementation here with the nine most recently open applications visible
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I did get te on my Moto X review for doing a 5-second
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summary of call Quality so I would like to talk about that a little bit guys
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call Quality is excellent and there are no complaints I guess that was 5 seconds
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again no but seriously the phone app is well laid out and aside from when you're
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dialing by um by spelling the person's name not sorting by the version of that
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person because I've got some people where I have four numbers for them that you used most recently no complaints
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here I did like that being able to have access to my in call controls so my mute
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and speaker phone and all that stuff as well as my keypad sometimes but then
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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
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dialing in you know like options or pound or whatever else it doesn't actually show up so when you're dialing
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into something like a conference call and you go oh I entered the wrong Pass
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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
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like based on the experience of actually using it as my daily driver but what's
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the verdict lonus well it's not that simple you can weigh the pros and cons
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and spec sheets all day but the xeria Z1 has one trump card and since my phone is
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a loner phone that I have to send back to Sony I'll be finishing on the rest of
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this shot in the bathtub while watching YouTube videos on my phone so we're
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going to go with a video that's actually by me this is our build guide and we are
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definitely definitely in a filled bathtub here
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guys see we got lots of water we got lots of water and we are just going to
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drop that phone right in the water you can no longer hear the sound uh however
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the video playback is most assuredly still running now one thing to note is
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that the touchcreen doesn't operate very well underwater but I guess that's
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pretty normal so I'm going to go ahead and tell it yeah no it's okay that the
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battery is low and we're going to go ahead and drop it back in So basically
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guys who is this phone for we're going to hopefully overlay some underwater
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footage from the phone of my hairy legs here just to show you guys that it is
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indeed working down there but who is it for well it's for people who don't want
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to worry about getting wet if you're an outdoorsy person a party goer or just
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someone who wants to record videos in the rain then all the other phones are
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kind of a nonf factor and you might as well just be only shopping for an xeria
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waterproof phone because that's the only one that really comes with that truly
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compelling feature like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
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it leave a comment if you have any feedback on how we can make our phone
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videos better and as always guys don't forget to subscribe
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