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| The Sony Xperia Z3 |
Overall Experience
The Xperia Z3 is an outstanding phone in pretty much every aspect. Camera, battery, skin, etc. The one drawback is the dropped call issue I had which I'll describe in more detail below.
Build
This phone is rated IP 68, which means that it is dust proof and can be kept under 4.9 ft of fresh water for up to 30 minutes. Although I'm very careful with my phones, this was a huge selling point to me: I could drop it in water and have it survive.
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| Charging with the charging port cover open |
inconvenient not because you have to cover the port before going swimming with your phone, but because you have to cover the port before putting doing anything with the phone. The port cover is very fragile when it's popped out for charging, so leaving the port uncovered is not an option. You have to leave the port covered 24/7 when not charging the phone and pop it open when you want to charge the phone. It's a minor annoyance. Hopefully, the next iteration of the phone will allow you to tuck the port cover into another part of the phone so that you can leave the charging port uncovered unless you plan to get the phone wet.
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| This is where there should be a place to stick the port cover. |
The phone feels expensive and nice, sporting what appears to be a glass back, although the edges are more plasticky. The power/lock button is strangely located in the center of the right side and the volume buttons are unfortunately right below the power button. This means your fingers are not going to be used to the button placement no matter what, unless you had an Xperia Z2, I suppose.
There's a dedicated camera button. Nice! There's a dock port or something on the left side.
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| Why did Sony put the power button there? :( |
Camera
The camera on the Xperia Z3 is excellent. The pictures are crisp and clear, and low light photos aren't too bad, so already it's better than a typical Nexus phone. The shutter for the first shot isn't super fast, although it's quicker on manual mode at maybe a half-second. Repeated shots are super fast once you take the initial shot.
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| Photo taken with the Xperia Z3 |
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| Photo taken with the Xperia Z3 |
Where the camera really shines is the number of modes. Auto is default, but by switching to manual, you can control the resolution and aspect ratio. I didn't notice a difference between 20 MP and 8 MP, though. They have some fun filters like using your front-facing and back-facing cameras simultaneously, timeshifting video, 4K video, and some augmented reality filters.
Display
It's 2014 and all smartphone displays look the same to me. For example, the LG G3 has a QHD screen, giving it a much higher pixel density than this (and all other) phone. But even reviewers (e.g. The Verge) couldn't discern any noticeable advantage from the LG G3's super high-resolution screen. I'm also indifferent about the display technology. This phone is IPS LCD, which means it gets super bright and has excellent color reproduction. It also has great contrast, although that is usually the domain of IPS's competitor Super AMOLED. However, the Galaxy S5, a SAMOLED phone, also has excellent color production in addition to brightness and contrast. What I'm saying is: it doesn't matter what high-end phone you get, the display will look awesome.
The one drawback of the display is that the phone is too big. Technically, it's not the display that's the problem, it's the phone, but big displays mean big phones. With my previous smartphones, from the EVO 3D's 4.96" x 2.56" front face to the Nexus 5's 5.43" x 2.72" face, I always grew accustomed to the ever-increasing size. After two months with this 5.75-inch by 2.83-inch behemoth, I wouldn't mind a smaller phone, even if the display had to shrink to get there. It's only too big by a slight margin; it's not a major drawback. Perhaps I should have gotten the Xperia Z3 Compact.
Battery
The battery is what sells the phone for me. The 3100 mAh battery keeps this phone chugging along for days. Yes, days. I imagine the phone would last about 3 days with light use. I routinely use it heavily in a day only to find it has over 50% battery at night. It conserves battery excellently when not in use, losing less than 10% overnight. So you can use it heavily one day, forget to charge it, and still have it last you the rest of the second day with light-to-medium use.
The phone's Power Management setting is a little inaccurate. It will tell you that it has 5 days left of battery at 100%, but that's only with light-to-no use. However, if you need a phone to last you 5 days (e.g. going camping), this phone can conceivably achieve that, especially when you use one or more of it's power-saving modes (STAMINA Mode, Ultra STAMINA Mode, and Low Battery Mode). I have STAMINA Mode set to turn on when my phone is at 20% battery. It rarely gets used.
Performance
No lag. But it doesn't have Android Lollipop yet, which is reportedly laggy.
Data
All carriers and almost all phones now have LTE. With T-Mobile I often pull 20-30 megabits per second.
Storage
I finally have a phone with external storage again. The Sony Xperia Z3 can use microSD to add up to 128 GB of storage. However, I haven't taken advantage of this yet, and I find the 32 GB internal memory sufficient. This is largely because of cloud services such as Google Music that reduce my need for on-the-phone memory. Still, the microSD slot is nice to have.
Calls
The calling is a bit disappointing. This phone has two excellent features, Wi-Fi Calling and HD Voice, but they don't do much to improve the calling experience.
HD Voice calls are supposed to sound like CD-quality audio as opposed to phones' current radio-quality sound. In order to make HD Voice calls on T-Mobile, both users have to have HD Voice-enabled phones, and both be using T-Mobile. Note: I've noticed the HD Voice icon on some calls to landlines and, in the future, HD Voice will work across different carriers. However, they don't sound much better than regular calls. Which is fine, I suppose, I just hoped for more. (Note: Everyone else seems to disagree with me here)
WiFi Calling might actually be a detriment. The Xperia Z3 has four phone settings: WiFi only, WiFi preferred, cellular preferred and cellular only (WiFi calling disabled). Ideally, WiFi calling makes everything more convenient because you can make calls where you have no phone signal. It also frees up cell phone towers, so other mobile users in the area should experience increased call quality and decreased dropped calls. I also figured audio might sound better over WiFi calls. If I can stream an HD movie over WiFi through Netflix, it should be simple to get CD-quality audio over WiFi. However, the opposite happens. WiFi calls sound tinny and quiet. Another issue is that WiFi calling messes up my text reception. When WiFi was enabled and I was using a 3rd party texting app, I didn't receive some texts until days later. I'm not sure if the problem was the WiFi calling or using the 3rd party app with WiFi calling. When WiFi calling is off, 3rd party texting apps work fine.
I'd like to leave my phone on WiFi preferred. Instead I leave my phone on cellular only mode, unless I'm in an area with no reception and I need to make a call. That aspect of WiFi calling works well.
Another issue: When I first bought the phone I also got a fair amount of dropped calls. My Nexus 5 on the same network (T-Mobile) almost never dropped calls. I got the Xperia Z3 and started dropping calls about once a day. It hasn't happened in a month, though. It may have just been a software issue.
Hopefully, software updates will fix calling, WiFi calling, and HD Voice, and make it possible to make perfect-quality calls from anywhere.
Operating System/Skin
I've preferred stock Android since the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but in the absence of a reasonably-sized 2014 Nexus phone, I was forced to choose a manufacturer-skinned Android phone. This phone has changed my mind on Android skins. I thought that manufacturer skins were pointless after Ice Cream Sandwich, which finally made Android beautiful. But the Sony Xperia Z3 user interface is good. In fact, it's better than stock Android Kit Kat.
Caveats: The Xperia launcher is nothing special. I immediately replaced it with Nova Launcher. The Xperia keyboard is probably worse than stock Android. The texting app is meh. It's disappointing that there is an icon for NFC hogging up space on the notification bar. I have to keep NFC turned off to keep a clean notification bar. Similarly, there is a headphone icon hogging up space in the notification bar whenever headphones are plugged in, simply to tell me that headphones are connected. (Sony thinks I can't tell that there's a long black cord plugged into my phone?)
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| The power button menu |
The notification pull-down allows you to add and remove custom settings like WiFi, auto-rotate and flashlight widget. I especially love the flashlight widget, which wasn't added to the stock Android notification pull-down until Lollipop.
There are also a bunch of Sony and T-Mobile apps like Movie Creator and T-Mobile My Account. Most of these are useless bloatware, but a few have cool features. The Playstation app that gives you the ability to play PS4 games on your phone is probably the most coveted app. However, I don't have a PS4, so I couldn't test it out. As usual, these apps can't be uninstalled, but you can turn off the features--like malware scanning notifications--so that you don't even know they're there.
Conclusion
Initial calling problems notwithstanding, the Sony Xperia Z3 is one of the best Android phones to date, if not the best. The camera, battery life, performance, storage, and skin are best in class. Being waterproof is a killer feature. I imagine only the Xperia Z3 Compact, Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 can match its power and versatility, although the LG G3, and Motorola Moto X (2014) are excellent phones as well.
