Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: Beautiful, expensive, pointless

Sony’s Xperia Z family is growing. Now you don’t need to choose between the brilliant Xperia Z5 or its remarkably capable smaller brother, the Z5 Compact – you can spend a bit extra and get the top-of-the-line Xperia Z5 Premium.

However, why you would remains something of a mystery to me, even after living with the handset for a week.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, and this can be a handy summary of the whole review if you want to save a little time: the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is a very good phone, but it’s no better than the Z5 and only modestly better than the Z5 Compact. All three share the majority of components, from processor to camera technology. The Compact has 1GB of RAM less, due to its 720p screen, but the Z5 Premium costs around £130 more than the Z5, and £200 more than the Z5 Compact. Why? It has a larger 4K screen.

That’s a resolution of 2,160 x 3,840 – giving a total of 8,294,400 pixels spread over a screen measuring 5.5in from corner to corner – and a pixel density of around 806ppi. Why? That’s a very good question, and one that Sony hasn’t convincingly answered, especially since the Z5 Premium stays in 1080p mode for the majority of its usage to save battery life.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: First impressions

Before we get to the innards, though, how is it to hold and look at? That depends on how you get on with big smartphones. At 5.5in, the Xperia Z5 Premium is a monster. In fact, it’s similar in size to the recently reviewed Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, despite having 0.2in less screen real estate, so you probably want to try it in store first, should you feel like taking the plunge.

Ours, as you can see from the photos, arrived bedecked in gaudy gold, which I can’t say would be my first, second or even third choice, but it can also be had in black and chrome, which both look smarter than this. The finish on the Z5 Premium feels quite slippery in the hand, too, although Sony has now taken the step of giving the front and back a small lip, meaning it doesn’t slip and slide when left on a flat surface.

If it wasn’t for the colour, the Z5 Premium would look like a larger Xperia Z5, which, in effect, is what it is. Just like that phone, it has the fingerprint reader on the right-hand edge, the slightly oddly-placed volume rocker near the bottom and a micro-USB charger on the underside: there’s no USB Type-C here, despite the phone’s premium branding. Like its smaller siblings, the Z5 Premium has an IP56/IP68 rating, which means it should withstand some water and dust, but Sony isn’t confident enough to call it waterproof.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: Performance and battery life

The Z5 Premium is – as the name suggests – a premium handset. It’s at the very top of Sony’s collection, even if – screen aside – it’s identical to the Z5. Day-to-day performance is as you’d expect: buttery smooth, with no problems when multitasking or undertaking more complex jobs.

Most Android devices feel like this out of the box, of course, and it’s important to assess how likely the handset is to hold on in the long haul, which is part of the reason why we do benchmarks: to objectively state that handset X is faster than handset Y.

To ensure that any software updates or optimisations by Sony hadn’t changed the Z5 siblings’ scores since their reviews, I dug them out of our hardware drawer and tested them afresh, alongside the Z5 Premium. Here’s what the they say:

To reiterate, the only difference between the specifications of these handsets – display resolution aside – is the memory in the Compact, which has 1GB less, so we can safely put down the slight differences between the top two to margin of error fluctuations.

Those scores put both the Xperia Z5 and Z5 Premium up there with the best of them. For comparison’s sake, the iPhone 6s scores 2,532 in the single-core and 4,417 in the multi-core tests, while the Samsung Galaxy S6 achieved 1,427 and 4,501.

Here’s how the phones performed in the GFXBench tests:

The Z5 Compact differs here because it has a smaller 720p screen, giving it a major boost on Manhattan, as it doesn’t have to draw as many pixels per frame. As you can see from the results, there’s basically nothing between them other than that, as you’d predict from the identical innards.

Perhaps a more critical area of performance is battery life. Xperia smartphones are renowned for their battery life, but as with the other models in the series, that’s partly smoke and mirrors. Sony’s own power settings are rather aggressive out of the box, optimising for when the screen is switched off. That means that, in daily use, you can sometimes go for two days without a charge, but start to use the phone more intensively and battery life will shorten.

When put through our standardised battery test, where such advantages are overruled by screen activity, the Z5 Premium lasted 9hrs 38mins before giving up the ghost. That’s actually below average, and more than an hour shorter than the regular Z5. It’s certainly a long way behind the aging Z3 Compact, which managed over 20 hours when it was put through the same exam.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: That 4k screen

Here it is, the moment you’ve been waiting for: the 4K screen. All 8,294,400 pixels of it… well, in certain apps anyway.

More on that in a moment. First up, how is it as a screen? Well, it’s an IPS LCD number, and first impressions are that the quality is excellent, and the numbers back that up. It hits a maximum brightness of 545cd/m2, which is good, but dimmer than the Z5, which hits 684cd/m2. It also trails the Z5 on percentage of the sRGB gamut covered: 97.6% to the Z5’s 99.4%.

I don’t want to split hairs here, because both are very good scores indeed, but it’s surprising that the premium version of a product should trail the “inferior” model on any metric at all, let alone the screen, which is the one clear difference between the two. Though in its defence, the Z5 Premium does win on two metrics here: the black level is lower (0.36cd/m2 to the Z5’s 0.54cd/m2) and the contrast is greater, weighing in at 1,255:1 compared to the Z5’s 1,078:1.

The key difference between the Z5 and Z5 Premium, however, is the 0.3in of extra screen, and the obscenely high resolution it’s capable of displaying. To put this into perspective, the television in your house likely doesn’t push the same number of pixels the Z5 premium does, unless you’re at the very cutting edge of technology.

Now, on a 40in screen, the more pixels the better, especially as you sit a comfortable distance from a television. For a 5.5in screen to need that many pixels… well, let’s just say I’m not convinced it’s necessary. In short, there comes a point when our eyes can’t tell the difference between pixel densities, unless you’re looking under a microscope. That isn’t most people’s regular use case, I think we can agree.

For a phone held around 10 to 12in from the face, where does that point come? Well, Apple argued it comes at the 300ppi point when it announced the first Retina Display on the iPhone 4. Others say it could be closer to 500ppi, if you have particularly good eyesight. Anything higher, and you’re in “magic beans” territory.

A reminder at this point, the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium delivers an absolute resolution of 806ppi.

So, how does it do? Well, that’s surprisingly hard to test, because there are only two apps that put the screen into 4K mode: Sony’s own Video and Photo apps. Everything else displays in good old 1080p, and even Sony admits that YouTube and Netflix don’t support 4K streaming to mobiles, instead stating they’ll be upscaled to the same level of detail. That’s a wonderful claim, but it’s also conveniently hard to substantiate, given what we know about the human eye.

So, you can watch the bundled 4K videos, which all look rather splendid in their eye-popping, colourful, sharp glory in the Sony app. “This is great,” you think. “I could get into this.” Then you download a free video app, such as MX Player, watch the same video and realise it also looks eye-popping, colourful and sharp, despite the fact it’s locked to 1080p. Video captured in 4K and 1080p has the same impact, and you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference, were it not for the 4K stamp in the video selection menu – a hint that your extra £130 is about to be rewarded, so watch closely.

What I’m trying to say is that you might be able to see a difference – or think you can – but it’s infinitesimally small to the average pair of peepers. There’s certainly not £130’s worth of difference. The only real justification for 4K on a phone screen is virtual reality, when all those extra pixels will create more realistic scenes. But – and this is a big but – you still need the VR apps to support 4K, while Sony has no known plans to create a headset to take advantage.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: Camera

As with almost every other component inside the Xperia Z5 Premium, the camera is the same you’ll find in both the Z5 and Z5 Compact, and that’s no bad thing at all. The Z5 series camera is great.

What you’ve got on the back is a 23-megapixel camera with a 1/2.3in sensor and SteadyShot image stabilisation. Tap anywhere on the screen and the phase detect autofocus will lock on in just 0.03 seconds.

The results are superb, with contrast, colour and detail all exceptionally good, although it does struggle a little in low light. Despite this, as Jon Bray said when reviewing the original Z5, it’s almost as good as the best in the business, with the autoexposure being especially noteworthy.

And, of course, the Z5 Premium shoots in 4K with superb video stabilisation. These can now be watched back in native 4K on your phone without dropping the quality. As outlined above, however, the practical advantages of doing so are far from certain.

Sony Xperia Z5 Premium review: Verdict

The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is a fine phone that you’ll be very happy with. It’s hard to avoid giving it a wholehearted endorsement, except for one vital detail: substantially, it’s no better than the Sony Xperia Z5.

The specifications, the performance, the camera: anything the Z5 Premium can do, the Z5 can also do, except for the 4K selling point, which is really only for those with magic eyes, and offers no real practical advantage. There will be people who tell you they can tell the difference between this and a 1080p 5.5in screen. I think they’re kidding themselves, and even if they’re not, the difference still isn’t worth £130.

There are two scenarios where I’d recommend the Z5 Premium over the Z5: the first is if you have more money than sense. If you’re rich enough that £130 either way doesn’t matter to you, then go nuts: you may as well have the top-of-the-line product. The second is if you find 5.2in too small and want something with a bigger screen, but in that instance I’d still recommend heading to the iPhone 6s Plus, or the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 anyway.

For everyone else, the Sony Xperia Z5 will do just fine. Go buy that, and spend the £130 you saved on a fancy diamond-studded case – at least then people will be able to tell the difference between this and the Z5.

See also: These are the best smartphones money can buy