SONY XZ PREMIUM PORTABLE
While the majority of people will eventually fall in line with the trend toward smartphones without headphone jacks, there are still many of us who enjoy using our phones as portable music players. Anyone not convinced that a smartphone could distinguish itself through its audio capabilities really needs to give LG’s V20 and quad-DAC G6 a listen. If you put a premium on battery life, Motorola’s original Z Play and the 2017 Z2 Play are the two top picks to look at. This is actually one of the aspects in which I find this phone does well, getting a solid day’s use out of its 3,230mAh battery, but it’s still not exceptional. Yes, the Xperia XZ Premium has the best chip of the year so far in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, and yes, it has a Sony’s various Stamina modes, but no, it doesn’t stand out with its battery life. The rectangular shape, the height extended by those big bezels, the slipperiness of the glass on both front and back: nothing about the XZ Premium’s design feels especially friendly to humans. Compare that to the Xperia XZ Premium, which was surely the object of much care and attention too, but was obviously designed to sit on a pedestal rather than in a person’s hands. The S8 wouldn’t come out of Samsung’s labs until it was a perfectly refined, ergonomic slab of technology. The story with the Samsung Galaxy S8’s design this year, apocryphal or not, is that Samsung Mobile chief DJ Koh would take prototypes of the phone and roll them around in his hand feeling for any hard edges or perturbations and have the design team smooth them out.
The true premium cameras of today can be found in the Google Pixel and HTC U11, two pricey phones that I have no hesitation recommending on the strength of their imaging performance alone. What’s the point of 19-megapixel shots if they’re blurry? The slow-motion trick is cute, but its novelty quickly wears off. The camera’s focus is unreliable, and Sony’s penchant for hyper-processing images continues, with its noise reduction actively obliterating detail in shots.
Sony has a whole new camera system this year, dubbed Motion Eye, which is supposed to do fancy stuff like predictive capture (buffering images while the camera app’s open and then reacting to your tap by selecting one of those buffered pics) and super slow-mo (960fps for less than a second), but both of them are gimmicks. Sony will tell you that the XZ Premium has a 5.5-inch 4K display with HDR support, but I’ll tell you that that doesn’t make a tangible difference to everyday use - all smartphone screens are lovely to look at these days, it’s the bezels that are the differentiator now. In this competitive environment, Sony’s vast bezels above and below the screen, which total up to nearly an inch, feel instantly retrograde. Before the year’s through, we’re going to have the Galaxy Note 8, LG V30, and very likely the Google Pixel XL 2 to add to that category. The LG G6, Samsung Galaxy S8, Essential Phone, and even a few upstart Chinese companies all now offer phones with a futuristic look that eliminates almost all the bezel. The hot new thing in 2017 is the ruthless excision of bezels from around the screen.
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