New Xperia, THE SONY XPERIA Z5!

Ahhh, I remember the first time I met my phone, it was a cold night (the aircon was on) and I was getting ready to go to bed. My life felt empty so to entertain myself, I thought I'd watch some Youtube before bed. And because I liked the Xperia Z so much I actually subscribed to the Xperia channel (fanboy alert!). So I was browsing through my subscription feed and there is was, the new Xperia Z1 advert has just gone up, the phone that had a 21mp camera! The whole room lighted up as I played the video (I turned on the lights), I was like, naw man, this deserves to be watched in 720p, so I willingly turned off my wifi and used my mobile data to watch the video, cause my mobile data is faster than my home internet... LIFE (fast forward two weeks later, and I regretted playing back the video 2-3 more times). I told my twin and we excitedly watched the video together (he said "oh" and resumed looking at his phone, I had to force him to watch it with me, shoving my phone in his face a couple of times in the process). And BOOM, if its one thing Sony is good at doing, it was ads, and this one was great for me, really up to my taste. So the Z1 became my favourite and also dream phone.

Here's a list, (haha, I can imagine you guys sighing)

Xperia Sola

The first was the xperia sola, I like clean, sleek, understated, slate like designs which might be boring for some

Xperia Z

Then came the Xperia Z, which was a dream come through cause I've always imagined of a phone that would be all glass!

Xperia Z1

Then the Xperia Z1, which was so awesome with its waterproofing and camera and lowlight performance (fangirling right now)

Xperia Z5

Then came the Z2, which was like ok an upgraded Z1, and the Z3 which yeah ok they came up with a rounder Xperia Z2 and THENNNNN, they came up with THIS!!!! Yeah, I know the design didn't really change much but LOOK AT THAT COLOUR! GOOD GOD I MIGHT JUST BUY THIS FOR THAT COLOUR!!!

So yeah, (don't facepalm at me, you know we all have that moment) sure, the camera was upgraded (21mp to 23mp, what's that like a 2mp bump?) The processor's faster, it has 3gb of RAM instead of 2gb. But let's look at this from an innovative stand point, they made xperia's with purple and gold and even turquoise but let's face it, this has got to be one of the best colours they've come up with! (I'm joking, you should really be able to tell by now). I'm excited for the phone, but I have never thought a phone could look so good with a non-typical colour before! And it has a fingerprint scanner, just dropping that in for ya ;)

I'm not going to talk about the Xperia Z5 Premium, cause it hasn't come out yet but also because I care about you, my fellow readers (my fellow non-existent readers, after reading this post I presume) but lemme just say something, I never thought the colour mirror, would look so appealing no matter how ridiculous the idea of simply touching the phone would leave the phone all grimy and oily.

Xperia Z5 Premium

Dat reflection doe, so good

And thus concludes, my fangirling session, in which you all had to sit and read through, for which I thank you, for you patience, and......

HAVE A GOOD ONE!

Kudo's Sony =)

I've gotten acquainted with Sony smartphones in early 2012 and ever since I've been keeping track of the phones they have released and even the ones they will release. One of the ways I keep track of their phones are by reading up reviews from many many different sites or youtube channels and try to find the opinions different reviewers have on their phones, and also which opinions tally and which do not.

Now, when it came to software, the Sony UI, some were pleased with it saying it greatly resembled vanilla android (the true android UI google made, not the one with custom skins) and others said it was too low on features. It was the same thing with the camera, where some reviewers praised their phones for having excellent cameras, while others said that their cameras lacked in some areas, namely, noise and over sharpening. While these aspects fall under very diverse opinions from different reviewers, there was one aspect everyone seemed to agree on, what aspect you may ask? Well, that Sony phones had TERRIBLE screens

Now don't get me wrong, the screen itself isn't horrible, I mean, it displays colour and such but the screens had terrible viewing angles. I have the Xperia Sola and I can personally agree to this, I slight tilt and the screen's colours start to wash out, contrast also starts to disappear and so does the details of that picture.

Although some reviewers were fine with it, others bashed the phone manufacturer for this shortcoming. Personally, I don't find wide viewing angles to be much of a problem, I think it adds to privacy, I do find it hard to share something I have on my phone, like a picture or an article.

While I do find it rather unnecessary, it does seem to be something people look for, especially in a high-end phone, one of the reasons why the Sony Xperia Z didn't make it to the top ten lists of many reviewers. Sony's claim that the Xperia Z is the BEST of Sony in a smartphone, Sony is well-known for their good displays on their TVs so it begs to wonder why does a smartphone like the Xperia Z have such bad viewing angles. The camera was also under much heated discussion, the camera didn't produce stills and video that matched up to that of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5, two phones that were well-known for their excellence. Another surprising discovery because Sony cameras produce excellent photos. Which brings me down to the topic of this post, congratulating Sony, because they have finally managed to get things right with their most recent addition to their long list of smartphones, the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact.

Sony has finally fitted this phone with an IPS display, which was still surprising, considering this issue was already highlighted during the time of the Sony Xperia S. Before this Sony has opted for a TFT display, which was apparently no match for the Super LCD screens found on the HTC One and Super AMOLED on the Samsung Galaxy S4 (somehow good screens all have SUPER in their name, a subject for further research?)

Well what about the camera, well, firstly, I'd like to applaud Sony for being able to fit the phone with a 20.7 MP camera, and being able to do so without even the slightest camera hump is a feat I'd deem commendable. The Sony phone finally manages to produce stellar shots, although its a hit or miss at most, it is certain that this smartphone camera is certainly capable of producing shots comparable to that of a DSLR.

AND, to top it all off,

The phone is almost as small as the iPhone 5C, making this, the first high end small android smartphone. Being able to fit a better and slightly bigger screen (4.3 inches compared to the 4 inches on the iPhone 5C), they've finally cleared that viewing angles problem, they've also managed to fit a 20.7 MP shooter and a larger battery than the iPhone 5C, yet only a tad bit bigger, as you can see for yourself. AND the phone is waterproof.

Yeap, you heard that right, it's WATERPROOF!

And because of that, I'm so proud of you Sony! =')

So now, SAMSUNG, HTC, I'M LOOKING AT YOU, Samsung, fix that plastic and touchwiz and HTC fix that camera!

I'm expecting a lot from you guys, and maybe something like this from techradar?

Seriously, not a bad idea Samsung! =)

You'd better!

Shed Some Light: Phone Specifications

So my cousins came over for the weekend and some time while we were talking, I mentioned phones and why they were good and other stuff and that's when I found out they don't really know much about what I was talking about. Let alone the in-depth features and specifications I later went on to mentioning. Which brings us to today's post, I shall try my very best to explain them as simple as possible. Just to highlight a few things, I plan to make more "shed some light" because I had to learn about aspects of the phone from scratch and one of the ways I did it was trying to find the simplest explanation for each feature. LET'S GET STARTED~

Here are the phones we will be comparing, the Sony Xperia Sola (because its my phone so I know it well) and the Apple iPhone 5 (because everyone knows about it thanks to advertising)

This image was taken from GSMARENA, you should check them out if you're looking for a phone archive, here

Because I am no expert in this, I'll just tell you enough so you'll be able to read it, and then understand and later make your own judgements. If you're looking for more in-depth explanations on each individual feature, I'm sorry but you'll have to look else where =(

If you go to the GSMArena website and check a phone for its specifications, like what processor it has, how many megapixels does its camera hold and so on, you'd be greeted with something like this

I know, its far from reader friendly

Don't be discouraged, its easy when you know what you're looking for, and that's what we're going to talk about, not every single word that essay-of-a-list is showing you. The features we will be talking about is also usually shown on the box of a phone so it will really help when you're browsing phones.

I had a cousin who was almost cheated in getting a slightly weaker phone for the price of the phone he was originally offered, luckily for him, he saw the phone he was offered had an 8 megapixel camera and the one the shop showed him (which was supposedly supposed to be the same) had a 5 megapixel camera, now the sad part here was, other than the megapixels, the 8 megapixel camera one had a better processor and better everything, in fact. SO IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET CHEATED, READ THIS POST! (shameless self-advertising)

(Not to sound like a broken record or anything but we did kinda get a little off topic here so...) LET'S GET STARTED!

First one I'll walk you through is this

Now don't worry you don't have to look and understand everything, although that would be the best, I've even put a red box there to show you what you should be focusing on (you're welcome ;)

The chipset is what kind of chip its using, this usually means brand and such so you don't really have to consider that, but just in case you're wondering, the really good ones are Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple of course have very good chips, most Samsung devices now have their own processors and such. Some chips are of the same speed and cores but a better chipset would work more efficiently translating to a smoother, faster experience. 

The one you should be paying more attention to are the CPU and GPU. Each standing for Central Processing Unit and Graphics Processing Unit respectively. Although its not always the case, you can initially tell how fast the processor is by two things, the number of cores and the clock speed. Just look at the picture up there, the Sola has a dual core (2 cores) processor that is clocked at 1GHz, and the iPhone has a dual core processor clocked at 1.3GHz. So you can roughly assume that the iPhone would be faster than the Sola. Now I do want to stress on how this is not necessarily true but it is useful to get a rough estimation on how fast the phone would perform. A good example of this is the iPhone 5 has a dual core 1.3GHz processor but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a octa core 1.9 processor (it means it has 8 cores). But they both run smoothly nevertheless. 

How do you imagine cores, well, a good example is imagine the storage of the phone as a library, and the processor with cores are people reading books to operate the system. To operate, they need to learn how to operate the phone by reading. So more cores means you have more people to read and that would make operating the phone much smoother and faster. But how come some phones with less cores can still run smoothly? Well, that comes down to software optimization, take it this way, remember when you're doing assignments and you'll have to look for information, browsing page after page after page just to get suitable information about something, wouldn't it be easier if all that information was just in one single page? It's the same concept, an optimized operating system would be just one book with labels but an operating system that isn't optimized would probably take several books.

The clock speed is how fast the person (core) can read, so logically a faster processor would work faster (duh!).

A graphics processor is a processor made specifically to handle graphic heavy tasks like games. So having a graphics processor would always be better as your games run more smoothly. This does have an impact on your battery life as you're running two different processors.

Now, you know what the processor cores and clock speed mean but what exactly is enough, well, based on the verge I think, the minimum standard for 2013 is a dual core 1GHz processor.

Next is RAM (Random Access Memory),

Dig a little bit into the picture, you see the 512MB RAM under internal, well, as I have explained before the processor works by digging through a library and then reading to operate the phone, now having to dig through the library all the time would be a little too inefficient right? So that's why you have RAM, RAM is the amount of books the people (collectively) can hold, meaning the readers don't have to walk back to the bookshelves to learn to operate something they have just read about. One of the reasons your phone lags is that the RAM is full, and those poor people have to walk back to the bookshelves to return the books. So, evidently, more RAM would save those people from having to go back to return the books, which ALL translates to (the same) a smoother and faster experience.

The 8GB is how much of storage the phone has and the card slot above that, means you can expand the phone's storage via microSD. As you can see, the iPhone's storage cannot be expanded.

The last is Display, other features are pretty easy to understand and those features would also be pointed out to you by those people at the shop who like to follow you around.

Yea, THOSE people

The key things you should look into for a display would be the type of display, like LCD and AMOLED, the size, 3.7 inches, 4.0 inches, and the pixel density. These all sound very "technical" but they're actually very easy to understand once you know what they actually mean.

Don't worry I'll walk you through it, ok, first is LCD and AMOLED, there are other kinds of displays, the subcategories of them actually, but if you know about these two in general, you kinda already get the picture. Both these phones use LED-backlit LCD screens, the only difference is that the iPhone uses an IPS display. LED backlit means, the phone has a layer of white LEDs that is covered by an RGB (red, green, blue) filter, like so

If you look at your display using a microscope, it should look like this,

Looking at the picture above, you'll see three different coloured squares that repeat themselves, red green and blue, those are called subpixels that cover one white LED. These make one pixel, and if you've learned science before, you'll know the human eye senses the red, blue and green in different shades and combinations to form every colour you look at.

So the difference between LCD and AMOLED are, LCD screens use a backlight to produce the three colours, because white light is made up of seven colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and indigo. The subpixels filter out the red, green and blue from that white light to recreate colour. AMOLED screens, however, do not have a backlight, but instead each subpixel is an LED itself.

AMOLED screen pixel arrangement

But because the AMOLED screen uses real LEDs for each colour, they would have to be arranged in this way as LEDs are bigger than filters. What does this mean? An AMOLED display will never be as sharp as an LCD display, because it only has two subpixels per pixel compared to three subpixels on the LCD display.

The reason AMOLED screens are used is because AMOLED screens produce more punchy and vivid colours compared to the realistic colours on the LCD display. That's why Samsung phones have very punchy colours. AMOLED screens also reproduce perfect blacks. Okay, so bottom line is, if you want bright, punchy, deep blacks and vivid colours, go for an AMOLED display, but if you like looking at a more realistic, paper-like display and a sharper screen, go for LCD displays instead.

Also if you're wondering what does IPS means, its a higher quality display that is supposed to have better viewing angles, meaning colours won't fade or shift when the screen is viewed from the side and not head on. SUPERLCD is another higher quality display which is found on the HTC One, both the iPhone and HTC One have great viewing angles and paper-like displays.

The next thing you should consider is the screen size, I'm not sure about smaller hands, but the screen size appreciated by many ranges between 4.3 to 4.7 inches, so if you frequently type on your phone, you should opt for a screen size within that range. There are of course phones with bigger screens, like the 5 inch Xperia Z, Samsung S4 and even bigger screens of the Z Ultra (6.4 inches) and Note (5.7 inches). These would of course be easier to type on but this size does not aid one handed use.

iPhone 5 (4 inch), Samsung S4 (5 inch) and HTC One (4.7 inch)

The last is pixel density, pixel density is the amount of pixels the screen has, the more pixels on the screen, the sharper the images on the screen would look. So if you want to have more information displayed on one page on your phone, a sharper screen would make all the fine details visible on your screen, the fewer the amount of pixels, the less sharp things would look and you won't be able to read small font on webpages without zooming in.

More pixels per inch

More pixels make the image sharper

Like so

Now, Apple has coined Retina Display, and this means that your eyes won't be able to make out each individual pixel anymore. The retina display has a pixel density of 326 ppi (pixels per inch). The rough estimation of pixel density is as follows, WVGA resolution has 200++ ppi, 720p or HD screens have around 300++ ppi, and 1080p or Full HD screens have 400++ppi. Depending on your needs, you should be able to gauge how sharp you want your screen to be based on these numbers.

If you want to browse webpages without having to zoom in all the time, then get a higher resolution screen, but you you just want to handle simple tasks on your phone, a lower density screen wouldn't matter, the same goes for movies and media.

Hopefully this post will help you understand what the specifications on the phone box means now and will help you decide which phone is better without having to read reviews and opinions online. I hope this was helpful and I shall end the post here~