Sony Xperia Z2 review

Sony Xperia Z2 review: Performance and battery life

The Sony Xperia Z2 is powered by a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU, backed up by an Adreno 330 GPU and 16GB of onboard storage. Unusually, Sony has attempted to give multitasking performance a boost by pairing the 2.3GHz Qualcomm CPU with 3GB of RAM.

In everyday use, it’s a combination that simply flies through Android KitKat 4.4.2, and Sony has milked a little of the Snapdragon 801’s power to add little visual flourishes, such as the twisting waves in the background that ripple as you swipe between homescreens.

It comes as little surprise to find that benchmark performance is broadly very similar to other handsets equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU. We recorded scores of 937 and 2,693 respectively in Geekbench 3’s single- and multi-core benchmarks, just a mite behind the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5, and in the GFXBench T-Rex HD gaming benchmark, the Sony found itself narrowly in the lead, averaging a smooth 29.3fps.

The Xperia Z2’s performance in the SunSpider browser benchmark was disappointing, however. Sony’s handset completed the test in a sluggish 920ms, more than twice the time taken by Samsung’s Galaxy S5. We didn’t note any untoward lag or sluggishness in general browsing, though, and every website we tried was handled without a stutter – we suspect Sony simply has some work to do when it comes to optimising for this test.

Thanks to a huge 3,200mAh battery sealed behind the glass rear panel, the Xperia Z2 has impressive reserves of stamina. Under normal use, including shooting photographs, streaming music and browsing the web, we found we were regularly able to get through a day and a half before needing to break out the mains charger.

Our suite of battery benchmarks told a similar tale. The Xperia Z2’s total estimated runtime of 3hrs 9mins in the GFXBench battery test was some 47 minutes longer than the HTC One M8’s time. Only the Samsung Galaxy S5 does better in this test, lasting 4hrs 24mins, but as it does this by artificially limiting the maximum frame rate, it’s not a fair comparison. In our other tests, the Xperia Z2 showed a clean pair of heels to the competition, with audio playback over 3G depleting the battery at a rate of only 1.89% per hour, and 720p video playback consuming just 5.6% per hour.