First 4K Smartphone! (Sony Xperia Z5 Premium)

This is the world’s first 4K smartphone. It’s called the Xperia Z5 Premium and it’s built by Sony who knows a few things about making good smartphones and 4K content so let’s dive into it.

The look of the Premium is instantly recognizable over its Z5 brothers. And it’s the only one that’s still using glass on both the front and back, the look is unmistakably Xperia. But the size of the Premium is larger than the Z5 in basically every single dimension mainly because it has a larger 5.5-inch display compared to the 5.2-inch display on the standard Z5. Though its display comes in at a whooping 2160x3840 resolution, which means Sony was the first brand to first introduce a true 4K display on a mobile phone and its ppi number is incredible. Are you ready for it? The Z5 Premium has 806ppi. Now that’s crazy. But we’ll go back to the specs in just a second because the other specs are also nothing to scuff at.

The Z5 Premium is packed with a Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, plus the Z5 Premium keeps up with the microSD card expansion thanks to the slot on the left side. And due to the severe amount of rubber surrounding the slot, the Z5 also has IP68 rating.

The other big news of the Z5 family is the new 23MP camera. It’s an all-new sensor this year, which means we can see a huge jump at photo quality. I was able to snap a few photos with the Z5 Premium and compared it to the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+, the king of mobile photography right now. So basically, we’re comparing the 16MP photo stills of the Galaxy S6 edge+ to the 23MP photos of the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium. The result is: it’s kind of hard to say.

Visually, the photos of the edge+ looks a little bit better but the situation was a room full of harsh lighting, which never plays very nicely with mobile sensors. But I definitely want to know your thoughts between these two images, which looks better to you? Make sure to leave a comment below with your answer.

And also, if you want to check out my Galaxy S6 edge skin, make sure to head down to the description and check out Slickwraps for the skins on the Galaxy S6 edge+. Or maybe you want to check out next to the OnePlus 2 skin which is absolutely dope. And speaking of the OnePlus 2, it was the only phone I was really able to compare in size which fits very closely. The Z5 Premium and the OnePlus 2 are very close in size. And basically, the height and width are almost exact but the Z5 undercuts the thickness at 7.8mm.

There are some other pieces of great hardware on the Premium this year. The first is the new fingerprint sensor that lives right on the power button on the side. While at first glance it was really hard to see how this could work, it’s actually super accurate and very great to use. Plus, it’s in an ideal place to use. Secondly, the battery is quite large at 3430mAh. While it sounds big, just think about how many pixels this battery has to power plus all the hardware that runs it. But the Z5 Premium has fast charging 2.0 which will get 60% of juice in about 30 minutes of charging.

Over to the software, the Z5 Premium is running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with Sony’s UI on top. While most of the elements come from stock Android, like the app drawer and other things, it’s not the smoothest or most user-friendly UI around. Or that’s how it seemed on the surface. We’ll definitely have to take a deeper look at the software when we get one in house.

Now, I’d like to go back to the display. With 806ppi, you expect this display to look sharp and it’s definitely very sharp. But to my human eye, looking at the Z5 Premium and looking at the Galaxy S6 edge+ or the Galaxy Note 5; they all look exactly the same: really sharp and really crispy. At this point, PPI is a very arbitrary number. I did check out some 4K native content on the Z5 Premium and I did check out some native 4K video on the panel and it did look great. But for comparison, watching native 1440p off a Quad HD display have always looked great. I’m just not sure if more pixels in a phone this size will mean a big difference.

Make sure to stay tuned for our review of the Z5 Premium. That is definitely coming very soon on the channel. Make sure to leave a comment below with your thoughts on the first 4K smartphone. I’m definitely interested in hearing what you have to say. The Z5 Premium is available in three colors: a chrome, black, and gold. It should be available sometime this November.