Hot Press tries out the new Sony Xperia XZ Premium

The new Sony Xperia XZ had already been tried and tested at the 2017 Mobile World Congress back in March, but the tech team at Hot Press hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to get up close and personal with Sony’s newest piece of kit. So when we got the opportunity to sample the XZ Premium in Portugal, we were pretty damn excited. And with good reason – Sony has unveiled a flagship handset that hints at exciting leaps in technology for the future…

The Xperia XZ Premium boasts a sleek, smooth design, measuring 156 x 77mm and featuring a 5.5 inch screen with 4K HDR display. It also, thankfully, has decided to buck the trend among mobile manufacturers and keep its 3.5mm headphone jack. The screen itself features what Sony calls a “glass loop” surface, meaning that a plate of glass wraps the whole way around the phone, giving it a cool, clean and beautiful finish. It might not be the “borderless” Galaxy 8 which Samsung is bringing out (which frankly sounds like a cracked screen waiting to happen!), but it scrubs up very, very well.

Going beyond the surface, we found a fast operating system (the Xperia uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, one of the fastest in the business, and features 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage), an easy to use interface, and more than a few treats when it comes to the camera functions.

The main headline for the XZ Premium is its unparalleled camera features – it offers a Motion Eye Camera with the much-talked-about “super slow-motion” feature. To prove just how high-quality these new functions really are, Sony brought us to a beach resort by the Portuguese coast to give them a whirl (someone had to do it).

Some of the tests involved recording a boxing-glove-wearing dancer punching through a frame of glass to see if we could capture the glass shattering in slow-motion, or catching the exact moment a stuntman jumps through a polystyrene wall, or videoing a performer banging cymbals covered with coloured powder to see how it disperses. All the kind of eye-catching, attention-grabbing stuff that we’ve come to expect from Sony (remember that Sony Bravia advert with balls bouncing their way through San Francisco?). But how did the innovations really stack up?

Well, as you would expect from a product that’s clearly jumping leaps and bounds ahead of anything else on the market, the good sides far outweigh the bad. The fact that the super slow-mo feature captures 960-frames per second means that, even when recording at a snail’s pace, the video stays breathtakingly clear and defined. The drawback is that you can only record 0.2 seconds at a time – extended to 6 seconds of slow-motion – which means that if you’re not quick with the recording trigger, you end up missing the action. The function also appears to struggle if you’re not in good lighting (there was nothing but sunshine in Portugal, but we’re not sure how it would fare on an overcast day in Dublin).

Overall though, the slow-motion feature aims high and pretty much hits its mark. Sony has the benefit, as they noted, of being able to incorporate technology from their own Cyber Shot DSLRs into their smartphones, meaning that their cameras are the real deal.

And in the Instagram/Boomerang/Snapchat-filtered world we live in, you get the feeling that these features will appeal directly to customers, rather than simply being considered gimmicky add-ons.

That was the opinion of Sony’s Global Marketing Manager, Diana Hernandez, who we got a chance to talk to at the launch.

“The reason we’ve integrated technology from our digital cameras with our smartphones,” said Hernandez, “is because we are seeing, more and more, that people are serious about capturing and sharing videos on their smartphones. We know that there’s a boom of still images on social media, but people are now beginning to play around with visuals; they’re creating and they want to be the first to do something new.

“You see it at least twice a day online – people sharing slow motion photos of a waterfall, a skateboard trick, a duck swimming across a pond, all these types of things. We were thinking that people want to be as creative as possible, so let’s see how we can give them the tools to do that.”

Even if the super slow-motion doesn’t immediately sell you on the XZ Premium, some of the other features may well do it. Take for example, the 19MP high resolution sensor with 19% larger pixels. Aside from the fact that it gave us well-defined images, it also produced some of the best low-light photos that I’ve ever seen on a smartphone.

Add to this the “Predictive Camera” setting, which can shoot up to 4 pictures before you press the shutter button when it detects motion. The idea is to take multiple photos at once, so that when you’re trying to capture the perfect picture of your toddler racing across the room, you can whip out your phone, take the shot, and not have to worry about the photo being blurred. Handily, the predictive camera will take multiple shots in a single second and allow you to pick the best. Yours truly tested this feature by being snapped while bouncing up and down on a trampoline. I can testify that while it does nothing to improve your self-image(!), it does work wonders in terms of capturing a good photo in motion.

The XZ Premium stands up to scrutiny, no doubt about it. Although I didn’t get to fully test how well the phone’s battery life fares against its energy-sapping processor and applications, the large 3230mAh battery size, with “Smart Stamina”, gave me cause for optimism.

Overall, it’s clear that Sony is thinking holistically in terms of improving their phones’ key features. So while they haven’t yet announced the release date for the XZ Premium, the verdict is that this is truly an outstanding flagship phone. It’s fast, easy to use, and will appeal to the photographer/videographer in all of us.