ET review: Sony Xperia X is a good phone but having a bad price

We are used to seeing the Xperia Z series as the premium flagship from Sony. This year, they have introduced the new X series of devices - two of them, Xperia XA and Xperia X, have been launched in India. To be clear, the Xperia X will be the company's new flagship for India. Talking about design, it's not too different from the Xperia Z series - and this is a good thing. It has rounded edges and a 7.9mm unibody metal design. On the right is a power button that doubles up as a fingerprint scanner along with volume key and a dedicated camera shutter button. On the left is the hybrid SlM slot under a flap. The front is covered in 2.5D curved glass for added style. An odd thing is an NFC sticker that comes pre-installed on the top left of the phone -presumably to tell you where the NFC antenna as - thankfully it can be just peeled off. Since it has a 5-inch display, the phone feels balanced in terms of size and weight.

Our biggest complaint with the phone is that Sony has done away wi th water and dust resistance on the X series - a feature we loved on the Xperia Z series and something that set them apart - regardless of the specs. Sony has come a long way in terms of smartphone display quality. At one point (particularly the first generation Xperia Z), screen quality was one of the biggest cons on the flagships. Now, the display is amongst the best when it comes to LCD panels.

The full HD screen on the Xperia X is superb - it has slim bezels, excellent brightness and high contrast thanks to the X-reality display engine combined with Triluminos display technology. In a headto-head comparison, the screen stands neck and neck with any competitors in the same price range - barring the super amoled displays on the Samsung phones that is. Those 2k amoled smartphone screens are the best the world has ever seen. Camera has always been one of the strong points on Xperia phones. With the Xperia X, you get a 23MP sensor with f2.0 and a predictive hybrid autofocus sys tem that Sony says is developed in collaboration with their Alpha range of camera engineers.

However, there is no optical image stabilisation. To its credit, the camera does focus in an instant and has a fast shutter speed but the image quality is not the best in class. Photos taken in daylight have sharp details, vibrant colours, and low noise, but indoors noise starts to become visible. Low light images suffer the worst due to lack of OIS and result in noisy images - something at which competitors like the Samsung S7, LG G5, HTC M10 and even the much cheaper OnePlus 3 is much better at.

The front 13MP camera will suit selfie lovers as it is one of the best front cameras we have seen - good details, natural colours and low visible noise in daylight as well as indoors. Another impressive feature on the Xperia X is its launch to capture speed - from a locked screen you can press and hold the camera shutter key for few seconds to instantly capture a Photo. This feature is great for capturing those split second moments.

Xperia X is amongst the first few phones from Sony to ship with Android 6.0. While the interface is zippy and works great for day-to-day usage, we found the preloaded bloatware apps a turn-off. There is no option to uninstall these apps: you can only disable them, which means they sit there, eating up your internal storage space. Hardware is another issue - you expect a flagship to come with top-of-the-line specifications.

However, the Xperia X runs on a Snapdragon 650 processor with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage - this is exactly the same as the Xiaom i Redmi Note 3 which sells for `11,999. That being said, there was no issue with the performance of the phone - games and apps ran without any issue, but we did see some sluggishness when we tried hardware intensive games. Battery life is 9 am to 5pm on a full charge as expected.

The trouble with the Xperia X is the asking price. Its trying to play ball with flagships from Samsung, HTC, LG and Apple, but doesn't give you the feature set or the hardware to match that high price. Unless you are a die-hard Sony fan, there is nothing that makes the Xperia X a better choice over the Samsung Galaxy S7. With the S7, you get a better display, superior cameras and more powerful hardware. If the Sony was priced at about Rs 20k, we would say it was worth the price.

Source: ET review: Sony Xperia X is a good phone but having a bad price