For some time now, Sony has been mostly absent from the US market. While we’ve seen devices here and there, there have been issues with keeping launches aligned, and for the most part by the time an Xperia phone launches in the US it’s already on the verge of being irrelevant as the 6 month launch cycle of Xperia phones in the past meant that slipping by even a few months resulted in noticeable deltas when comparing US and international models.

With the Xperia X, this all changes. Sony finally appears to be taking the US market seriously again, and I’ve spent the last few days using and testing the Xperia X to see just how it stacks up against the competition. The Xperia X is designed to unify the smartphone lineup to some extent, which makes some kind of sense when even I can’t really keep track of all the Sony smartphones other than the Z line. With the Xperia X Performance, X, XA, and XA Ultra there’s some semblance of sanity to the lineup. The X proper represents the high-end, while the XA line represents the mid-range.

While the astute readers may have noticed that we have tested Xperia phones before, we’ve never done a true review of one. To start reviewing the Xperia X, we can start with the usual spec sheet.

At a high level, the Xperia X is a well-balanced phone due to the 5” display, large camera sensor, but for the most part it’s a decidedly upper-mid-range phone. For the most part it’s pretty much a high-end phone other than the SoC, which is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 650 SoC. For those unfamiliar with this SoC I would refer to our previous coverage on these SoCs for a high level overview. The battery does appear to be on the small side, but given the overall size and display size it’s in line with expectation. At first glance, the only real concern I have is the camera, as Sony lists this camera to have a 24mm equivalent focal length. While I try to keep an open mind with these things, this immediately jumps out as something concerning.

Of course, while spec sheets can give some idea for what to expect, there is a whole ocean of implementation details going from a spec sheet to an actual phone. To start, we can look at the design of the Xperia X, which is clearly an evolution of the Omni-Balance design that was first seen with the original Xperia Z. If you’ve used the Xperia Z3, the Xperia X will probably be quite familiar in feel, but instead of an aluminum frame and glass back, the Xperia X uses a plastic frame and an aluminum back that appears to have a sand-blasted anodized finish. I do have to admit it is a bit disappointing to me that Sony didn’t go all the way with an aluminum unibody design here, but it does feel easier to grip than the rather slippery Xperia Z3.

The plastic frame also has sensible button and port placement, which is good to see as previous Xperia smartphones were profoundly strange in that respect. The microUSB port is on the bottom of the phone, the combined SIM/microSD tray on the left side when viewed from the front, and the power button is placed high enough that if you hold the phone with your right hand your thumb should be approximately in the correct position to easily access it. This power button also doubles as a fingerprint scanner for international units but not US ones, which has been surprisingly fast when it works and has a firm feel unlike the somewhat loose fingerprint scanner on the LG G5. The volume rocker and two-stage camera button are just below the power button, and for the most part I don’t really have any issues with the placement here. The feel of the buttons is solid here and there’s no creep or take-up before the break. The camera button works, but the feel of the first stage isn’t very consistent as if your finger placement varies it won’t feel the same, and the break of the second stage feels a bit springy if you’re used to something like the Lumia 1020’s camera button.

The front of the phone is very much reminiscent of the Xperia Z3, as the dual front-facing speakers have a similar design and Sony continues to use on screen buttons here which does have a fairly noticeable effect on usable screen space, although I’m not really allowed to tear down the phone to see whether this phone places the display driver at the top to allow for capacitive buttons to increase usable screen space.

Overall, the design of the Xperia X is solid. There’s nothing really wrong with it, although the large amount of bezel on the bottom combined with the on screen buttons means that the typing ergonomics feels somewhat similar to the One M9. The plastic frame with all of its seams is a bit disconcerting for a 550 USD phone, but it doesn’t really have a material impact on in-hand feel. Again, I think an all-aluminum unibody would probably make it feel a lot better, but for what it is I don’t have any complaints.

Display

While I never commented publicly on my experiences with the Sony Xperia Z3v, one of my major concerns with that phone was that the color calibration was frankly shocking for such an expensive phone, and in general the display just wasn’t up to par with expectation. In the time since the Xperia Z3v, the smartphone market has only had more competition in this regard, so even an upper mid-range phone like the Xperia X really has very little margin for error here.

Of course, for those that aren’t familiar with display testing, this may seem a bit out of expectation as in general most reviews will generally state that the Xperia phones have had generally acceptable or excellent displays, but our testing here attempts to avoid relying upon subjective color preferences and rather holds all mobile displays to the same industry-wide standard for content creation on the web. To do this, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 along with X-Rite’s i1pro2 spectrophotometer and i1Display Pro for accurate contrast, peak luminance, and color readings of all displays against the sRGB gamut with power 2.2 gamma at 200 nits.

As per usual for our display testing, we can start with our luminance tests, which paint the Xperia X in a fairly positive light. The 5”, 1080p display means that Sony can dedicate more area to actual light transmission rather than control circuitry. The bright backlight and decently high contrast is impressive here, and is actually a great improvement over the rather dim display that I saw on the Z3v. The contrast ratio isn’t anything amazing next to an AMOLED display, but for an LCD it’s quite competitive. Viewing angles subjectively are also quite good with no real visible color shifting other than the purple tint on blacks that occurs due to the dual-domain pixels. The lamination is also executed well on the review unit as the lack of color shifting and good viewing angles makes it look like the display is almost painted onto the glass, although the brightness shifting inherent in LCD will destroy this illusion to some extent.

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Modified Color Balance

Our next test is really where things start to go wrong to some extent, as the Xperia X out of the box simply doesn’t target grayscale well as the hue just isn’t correct with a noticeable deficiency of green and some blue shifting. This can be resolved with the display settings, but in the case of the Xperia X you just get a generic “color balance” slider for each color primary, and the slider is completely arbitrary. Seeing as how most people don’t have access to a few thousand dollars in display testing equipment, I don’t think this is a valid solution for display calibration the same way that Samsung’s Basic mode or HTC’s sRGB mode is. The error here is really almost unacceptable, and it’s obvious that just correcting this green deficiency is enough to make the average error almost imperceivable, so this is concerning to see. My unit could resolve this issue by setting green to 40, but I don’t have nearly enough sample points to determine whether this is reliable.

Moving on to our saturations test, it’s evident that Sony is targeting either a different gamut from sRGB or just using the native gamut of the display here as there’s fairly significant color error across the board. This occurs even with X-Reality and Super Vivid mode disabled, so I suspect the situation is even worse with either of those enabled. This wider gamut is quite noticeable as everything looks rather neon compared to something like the Galaxy S7 or HTC 10 with their calibrated modes. Basically the only color that is represented accurately here is yellow, and everything else suffers from significant oversaturation. Thankfully, the saturation curve is linear here so things aren’t as bad as they might be, but these kinds of things are increasingly hard to justify when Xiaomi is shipping excellently calibrated displays in phones that cost hundreds of dollars less.

In the GMB ColorChecker test, the same sort of pattern plays out. Due to the hue error in grayscale and incorrect gamut target, color accuracy just isn’t up to par with what we see in other smartphones. As a result, anything that requires color accuracy will struggle here, as the display misses gamut and grayscale targets by a noticeable margin. This alone is enough to make me question whether the Xperia X can justify the asking price, although whether color calibration matters is a subjective matter to some extent.

Preliminary Battery Life

Of course, the display doesn’t make a phone, so in the interest of trying to present more information to someone that might be pre-ordering the phone today, I also went ahead and ran some initial battery life tests. Battery life is arguably the most important part of any phone, so we’ve made some serious efforts to improve our testing here even more than before. As discussed in previous articles, our new web browsing test for 2016 brings a new suite of web pages that more realistically represent what people are viewing today, and adds a scrolling component that adds a steady state load to test the display pipeline in addition to CPU governors/schedulers and their ability to react appropriately to these loads. In order to properly test devices in comparable workloads, we attempt to disable all background tasks and target 200 nit display brightness in order to give a good idea for what relative battery life will be for an average user.

Given the 28HPm SoC and 10.09 WHr battery, you might think that the Xperia X would perform horribly on our tests, but in practice the Xperia X is actually an excellent performer in our web browsing tests. Of course, we still need to collect more data to see exactly how it performs, but this test tracks fairly well with experiential battery life as it provides a fairly significant CPU and network load rather than a purely display-bound one.

Storage Performance

One of the other major areas of interest for testing here is storage performance. As we’ve seen in phones like the iPhone 6s, the combination of SoC and storage performance improvements can result in significant, perceivable improvements in user experience. Incidentally, due to a general lack of marketing here it’s fairly easy for most OEMs to cut costs here because most reviewers don’t really remark on it and by the time storage performance actually becomes a concern a few months down the road no one is paying attention other than the users of the device. In order to at least try and test storage performance, we use AndroBench 4 to get a better idea for overall performance, but this is really just a first order approximation and hides an immense amount of information that you would want to properly evaluate storage performance.

However, before I get into results it’s worth covering exactly what settings we’ve chosen for this test, and why as I’ve increasingly seen quite a bit of confusion over how we get the results that we do. By default, Androbench 4 is using relatively ridiculous settings. For example, for sequential reads and writes it uses a 32MB block size when the average sequential read/write is more like 256KB or 512KB. It also sets 8 IO threads by default, which to some extent is unreasonable because such a test setting is really mostly designed to favor storage with a UFS controller and using such aggressive settings can actually have a detrimental effect on eMMC performance due to resource contention issues. In general, it also may not make a lot of sense to implement multithreaded IO in programs as single-threaded IO is going to be simpler to implement and in general more likely to be used in real programs.

Now that we’ve gone over the test conditions, we can look at the actual storage performance, and storage performance is honestly at least slightly disappointing when Xiaomi and other OEMs are shipping significantly faster storage in phones that are hundreds of dollars cheaper. Sony is using Toshiba eMMC of some sort, but I wasn’t able to figure out exactly what it was as the model name isn’t anything that shows up on Google. Of course, it’s possible for a phone to end up being faster than expected despite differences in storage performance, but this sort of cost cutting is concerning when pretty much all of the high-end phones in the market are shipping solutions that are clearly faster regardless of protocol and storage standard.

Initial Thoughts

Overall, the results I’ve seen so far from the Xperia X are concerning. The asking price is well within range of a flagship smartphone, but I’m just not seeing where the phone can justify its asking price so far. I don't really have anything against Sony here, but I'm definitely feeling let down given the praise that I've often seen around Sony phones. The phone is good in some ways, but it's almost unacceptable in others.

To try and explain what I mean, we can start with the display. It's clearly high quality because the display has a fairly impressive gamut for an LCD, and both peak brightness and contrast are quite respectable. Viewing angles are also excellent and the display is laminated quite closely to the cover lens to give the impression that the display is almost painted on the glass. However, the poor calibration really sours the whole experience because just about everything looks wrong on the phone, whether it's logos and UI elements or photos and videos. I'm not sure whether other reviewers just didn't notice or overlooked these issues, but it's a significant issue for me and it's evident to me that this problem has been ongoing for multiple generations now.

Another major concern for me is storage performance, as it appears to be below what we’d expect for a phone of this time and price as well. To some extent I'm willing to give a pass to the HTC 10 for using an eMMC solution because it isn't a clear-cut case of cost-cutting in the hopes that no one would notice, but in the case of the Xperia X it's really quite obvious that performance lags behind the competition. Of course, it'll take some Discomark testing to see just how much of an impact there really is, but this kind of component selection is concerning to some extent.

However, there are some silver linings to be found. In the case of battery life, the Xperia X appears to be noticeably above par, on the order of 10-15%, which just goes to show that battery size cannot be used to approximate battery life when comparing between devices. It's actually quite impressive to see how Sony is getting so much battery life from a relatively small battery, and I suspect that a combination of the Snapdragon 650 and efficient display goes a long way here. Sony definitely deserves credit here for shipping a phone with such high battery efficiency.

Despite such silver linings, I still think it's too early to deliver a definitive verdict on the Xperia X. I like parts of it quite a bit, but other parts are concerning to say the least. To really weigh all of these things and see the balance will require a full review, which should be forthcoming in the near future.