Introduction
Sony's flagships have always been playing off each other in a nice but, after a certain point, rather repetitive way. When Sony decided to pass on QHD-screens, it looked like it had the right reasons to keep up with 1080p for flagship generations on end.
Today, however, the company is finally ready for a jump in screen resolution and it's making that jump with a bang. What better way to stir things up than the first 4K display on a smartphone? Meet the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium.
If your natural inclination is to be wary of lofty model identifiers "Premium" may give the wrong impression. But we guess Sony just had to come up with an original way of calling its phablet flagship without the involvement of any Plus moniker as the competition does.
To be fair, the Z5 Premium does bring enough novelties to the series to deserve its name. The first ever 4K display on a smartphone is surely a catchy headline feature, but we shouldn't also miss the fact that it comes spread over a display that's 5.5-inch in diagonal, a size that was so far missing from Sony's flagship portfolio. It is also available in the signature Chrome paintjob, making its rear a near perfect mirror for possibly some nice selfies with the main camera.
Besides that, you get all the perks that the original Z5 has - the side-mounted fingerprint scanner, the new 23MP camera sensor, the enhanced connectivity, and the more powerful chipset. It's still waterproof too!
Yet, the Xperia Z5 Premium plays it safe where it has to and isn't defying the established design language of the Z series. Instead it refines the familiar dual-glass styling and smartens up the looks with the new mirror rear finish and an improved metal frame. We are quite fond too of the discreet fingerprint reader integrated in the power/lock key on the right.
Display
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is the first smartphone to feature a 4K display or UHD as it's also known. To be more specific it utilizes a 5.5" IPS panel of 2160 x 3840 pixel resolution. The resulting pixel density of 806ppi is well above anything we've seen on a smartphone or even a tablet for that matter.
4K is another name for UHD resolution or 2160 x 3840 pixels. That's an awful lot of pixels - something along the lines of 8.3 million of them. Phones so far had only been able to go as high as 1440 x 2560 pixels (3.7 million pixels). And Sony's own Xperia line has never gone higher than 1080 x 1920 pixels (2 million). So with this phone, we're essentially rocking twice or even four times the usual number of pixels on the screen. An insane jump in resolution, right?
The YouTube app is also allowed to use the screen in its native 4K resolution even though the app settings only offer streaming video resolution of up to 1080p.
Battery life
The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is powered by a beefy 3,430 mAh battery, sealed-in, as expected. It scored an overall endurance rating of 66 hours, which is above average and certainly impressive, having in mind there is a 8M+ pixels on this screen to light up.
The Xperia Z5 Premium definitely did alright in our call and web tests, but it did average on the video test and standby.
An endurance rating of 66 hours is still above average and it means that the Z5 Premium should be more than happy to offer that many hours of our test pattern usage - one hour of browsing, video playback and calls a day respectively and the rest - standby.
Connectivity
Sony is offering the Z5 Premium in both a single SIM and dual SIM variant, just like the Z5. The handset offers quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA support. LTE is enabled and Sony has multiple regional models to make sure the Xperia Z5 will work with the most widespread 4G networks at Cat.6 speeds.
Local connectivity features dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac and Wi-Fi Direct. There is also support for Bluetooth 4.1 with A2DP. Satellite navigation is also a given, with GPS and GLONASS or Beidou (market dependent) support.
The Xperia Z5 Premium also has an FM radio with RDS.
The phone doesn't offer an IR port, but it does come with NFC.
Android Lollipop with Xperia launcher
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium comes with Android Lollipop right out-of-the-box and, even better, the Marshmallow update is already in development. The ROM pre-installed on the Premium is mostly identical to its Z5 sibling in terms of user interface and features.
The Android OS on Z5 Premium runs on 1080p resolution, upscaled to 4K. The native high res mode is available only when viewing images and video - including YouTube. Games and VR apps didn't only started in 1080p resolution.
A 23MP camera with raw potential, but unaccomplished so far
No proper modern day flagship could be truly complete without a powerful camera and the Z5 Premium definitely makes no exception. Sony has decided to equip the whole Z5 family with a new 23MP camera. That means that the latest Premium sibling should offer a pretty comparable photo quality.
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