New Delhi, September 26 – Earlier in the year, Sony released the Xperia Z1 Compact. It was compact and yet packed in powerful high-end hardware. Now, Sony is back with the Z3 compact.
When the Z1 Compact launched, a lot of people compared it to the iPhone 5S because it had rather small 4.3-inch screen. This time too the comparison is with an iPhone, iPhone 6 to be precise. The iPhone has grown bigger and now comes with a 4.7-inch screen. But then so has the Z3 Compact. It now sports a 4.6-inch screen.
In a way, the Z3 Compact is Android’s answer to the iPhone 6. It packs the best of Sony, something which we believe with each generation is getting closer to the best that any smartphone vendor has on offer.
Is it the best compact Android smartphone? Yes, even without a thorough review it is easy to reach this conclusion. But will it be able to match and compete with the iPhone 6? To find out, let’s take a closer look at the device.
Look and feel:
The Xperia Z3 follows the design language that Sony had introduced with the original Xperia Z. It is called ‘Omni-balance Design’ language, which dictates symmetry in all directions and clean lines.
On phones like the Xperia Z it was considered blocky and chubby, but over the last few generations as Sony has refined the design, its phones have become incredibly attractive. This is true of the Xperia Z3 and the Z3 Compact.
With Z3 compact, the borders around screen are minimal. Compared to the Xperia Z1 Compact, on the Z3 Compact there has been a massive reduction in the thickness of the borders around the screen.
In terms of dimensions, both the phones are identical. However Sony has managed to pack in a larger 4.6-inch screen in the newer Compact. The Z1 Compact had a 4.3-inch screen. This also means its screen is nominally smaller than the iPhone 6.
The construction of the phone is top notch. Sandwiched between a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and toughened glass on the back, there is an aluminium frame, which is incredibly sturdy and has premium look and feel.
For the water resistance, Sony has covered the aluminium frame with a layer of frosted plastic. On the white model, this looks fantastic. This also helps in having sturdier flap covers for the various ports. Ports for the microSD card slot, the nano-SIM and USB port are secured. The audio jack is exposed, but internally it is insulated from water.
It is also thinner than its predecessor. At 8.6mm it is almost a millimetre thinner than the Z1 compact. It’s corners are also more rounded which overall makes it a very ergonomic phone to handle. It is quite easy to use with a single hand, because of its ergonomic design. This is high praise, as the same cannot be said about other Sony smartphones.
Screen:
A 4.6-inch screen with 720P resolution may not excite people who go by the specifications, but in terms of usability and performance it is brilliant. This phone has the best 720P screen we have ever seen in a smartphone. With a pixel density of 319PPI, it shows sharp images and text.
The screen is almost as vivid as an AMOLED screen, but without the pitfalls. It has a full RGB strip, with great contrast and brightness levels. The colours may pop out in an exaggerated manner, but they look pleasant. The viewing angles of the phone are great and its legibility under direct sunlight is superb. It simply boasts a great display, despite the low resolution.
Camera:
Sony has retained the 20.7-megapixel image sensor of the Xperia Z1 Compact on the device. So, optical image stabilisation is still absent. That said, now there is a new wide angle G-lens and the Z3 Compact is the only phone in the world besides its sibling, the Z3, to offer an ISO level of 12,500.
In real world usage, the phone captures great shots in daylight, though the photos seem a little overprocessed, meaning they look a little unnatural. In low light, it is possible to get great images without the flash, because the sensor is able to capture a great amount of light.
However, this happens at the cost of speed. In low light the camera takes its sweet time to capture an image so if your subject is moving, chances of blurry shots are quite high.
It also has a tendency to over-expose images because its ISO levels are so extreme. The phone has a very aggressive superior auto mode, which often results in usable, though unnatural images. Due to the high ISO, images shot in low light conditions also tend to have a lot of noise. For macro shots, the camera is very good and captures images with lots of details.
Generally, the camera in the Z3 Compact produces great images. But at the same time, there were occasions when we found it slow and unreliable when locking focus. It also does not have any exposure controls, which means that one cannot tone down the brightness levels of an extremely bright subject like a billboard.
We also feel that one needs to know his way around the camera to make most of the Xperia Z3 camera hardware. It is not very straight forward app, and most people will get better results using an iPhone just because of the software complexity and slow nature of the camera.
In terms of video, the phone is very capable. It shoots digitally stabilised 4K video, with good white balance and colour fidelity. Impressively, the audio capture is also pretty clear.
Software:
The Z3 compact runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat and for the most part, the Sony interface is unobtrusive and a pleasure to use. Yes, it is not stock Android, but it is simple enough and attractive to use. There are a number of custom Sony applications, like, the Play Memories app, the Album app, the Music Player and the PlayStation app.
The phone also has the ability to play 24-bit high-resolution audio. We tested this and this feature worked as advertised. Sony says the PlayStation app allows users to stream their PS4 game on to the phone. This was a hit or miss affair in our usage.
Largely, the Xperia Z3 Compact is bereft of any preloaded apps that slow down the system, though there are few custom Sony apps. Software wise, the Xperia Z3 Compact is one of the cleanest non-Nexus Android smartphones in the market.
Performance:
The phone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset clocked at 2.5GHz working in tandem with 3GB of RAM. This is the same set up that was found on the Xperia Z2, only with a higher clock speed. While these specs are 6 months old, in usage they are more than enough for a top-of-the-line Android smartphone.
It is a screamer in terms of day-to-day performance and you can easily glide through multiple apps without any problems. At one time, we had around 27 apps open and yet there were no signs of lags. Yes, it is this fast. It is almost as if the phone is powered by a Warp drive.
Synthetic benchmarks also point towards the same as the scores in various benchmarks were among the highest we have ever seen on an Android phone. Graphically speaking, the phone managed to pump out realistic graphics on games like RipTide GP 2 and Dead Trigger 2.
Sony has increased the size of the battery on the Z3 Compact to 2,600mAh, which is a minor bump from the Z1 Compact. In our testing, we were pleasantly surprised as the phone lasted us more than a day and a half regularly through the week we tested it.
On an average it lasted anywhere between 20-22 hours. Our testing process included around 2 hours of phone calls, 2 email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, streaming on Google Play Music, lots of photography, watching videos on YouTube, instant messaging via WhatsApp and playing games like Dead Trigger 2.
In tandem with the software based battery stamina mode, we found the phone to have great longevity in terms of battery life. It is easily one of the best Android phone in terms of battery life and vastly superior than the iPhone 5S in this regard. Perhaps, it will also beat the iPhone 6, but that is something we can only comment upon when we test it.
The call quality of the phone was also very good. It was better than the iPhone 5S as on the Vodafone SIM we tested the phone, we had better signals and call quality. The phone also has great sounding speakers, but these are still not as good as the BoomSound speakers of the HTC smartphones.
Should you buy it?
If you are looking for a great compact Android smartphone, then without doubt the Xperia Z3 compact is the best one out there. At Rs 44,990 it offers a brilliant display, a good camera and fantastic battery life. Also, its software is clean and it has an attractive water-resistant design.
The iPhone 6 will definitely have flaunt value, but the Xperia Z3 Compact will almost definitely be cheaper and will be equally if not more functional. If there’s going to be a phone that competes with the iPhone 6 head-on in every respect, then it will be the Xperia Z3 compact. It is that good.
-INDIA TODAY
