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Introduction
Going against the tide is a risky thing to do, whether generally in life, or when it comes to stock investments, in business dealings overall, and even specifically in the mobile world. Sure, there's a chance for a much bigger payoff than if you simply went with the prevailing trends, but you could also end up constantly repeating a pattern that has been proven time and again not to work.
This is where the Xperia XZ3 comes in. Quintessentially a Sony when it comes to its looks, you won't confuse this for a device from any other manufacturer. This company is not afraid to go its own way with smartphone design while surrounded by competing products that all appear to be headed in a different direction. But it's not only design, Sony's way of doing things seems to rely heavily on going against the grain.
In this long-term review, we're trying to ascertain whether Sony's unique strategy has finally paid off. Not in terms of sales, the answer for that is clearly no - but is the XZ3 a great smartphone in spite of the dire numbers? Is this a hidden gem that you'll ignore at your own peril?
We took it for a prolonged spin and used it as our one and only device for an extended period of time, trying to evaluate whether it might serve most people well in day to day use, away from benchmarks, sales numbers, and objective tests. So join us over the next few pages as we explore what the Xperia XZ3 has to offer in 2019.
Design
The Japanese company's products are instantly recognizable when compared to any other manufacturer's. As a theoretical concept, such brand recognition is a dream come true for any business. However, in the case of the Xperia XZ3, you know it's a Sony because of how dated its looks are in today's very fast paced mobile world.
You get bezels, and you get bezels, and everybody gets bezels, top and bottom. Sony wants to woo you with a curved screen so maybe you won't notice the bezels so much, but we're not sure that strategy works. On the plus side, at least there's no notch, and the bottom bezel also houses a speaker, which works in tandem with the earpiece at the top to create a stereo effect.
That's refreshing to see in a world where most manufacturers have settled for downward-facing speakers, and this positioning helps your enjoyment of media on the phone tremendously, because there's less chance of you covering up the speaker while you're holding the phone. On the other hand, the bottom bezel clearly also holds the connectors for the screen, so its existence can't just be blamed on the speaker.
Moving on to the back, things get worse. There's no getting around the fact that the fingerprint sensor is in the wrong position. It's too low and your finger needs to bend in order to reach it every single time. To add insult to injury, the camera lens is actually in the perfect spot to always be confused with the fingerprint scanner when you're trying to unlock the phone. Cue smudges and frustration, which you will suffer from many times each day. In time you might stop trying to use the camera for unlocking, but getting used to avoiding something that's bad doesn't make it any better.
On the other hand, the XZ3 doesn't disappoint in the materials department - this is a glass sandwich. It's also got IP68 water and dust resistance and wireless charging. The build quality is extremely good, as you'd expect from a flagship. The phone feels reassuringly solid and there are unsurprisingly no creaks whatsoever.
It is slippery though, and the bulge and lack of camera bump don't help with that - if you're using the phone without a case, note that it really enjoys randomly falling off couches or beds.
We're very happy that Sony still hasn't gotten rid of the dedicated camera button on the right side, even if the need for it is slightly fading now that most competitors allow you to double press either the power key or the volume down button to launch the camera app.
The power button in the XZ3 is placed too low and it sort of mirrors the situation with the fingerprint sensor on the back - your finger will never naturally rest around the area where it's at, so bending is required to get to it. It seems to be very symmetrically placed at the middle of the right side, but usability once again takes a hit because of Sony's weird priorities. And while we do enjoy symmetric design, this is ruined overall on the right side of the frame because the volume rocker and camera button aren't symmetrically placed away from the power key anyway.
Display
Look, it's a Sony with an OLED! Not only that, but it's curved on both sides too. It's nice to see Sony finally jumping on the OLED bandwagon, because nowadays when you think "flagship smartphone" you kind of assume that's the display technology it employs. So it's all good from that point of view, and the curves add the stylish look that Samsung has been milking for years.
Additionally, if you're a notch hater you will love the fact that the XZ3 hasn't got one. On the other hand, you will have to live with bezels, pretty substantial ones for this day and age both at the top and the bottom. The panel's resolution is ample enough that you won't spot individual pixels at any point, but the 18:9 aspect ratio has quickly been getting old in the mobile world. Even Sony itself seems to have noticed, and so its next flagship already comes with a record-breakingly tall 21:9 screen.
That said, the XZ3's panel is definitely good, and a joy to look at. It's perfectly visible in even the most demanding of lighting conditions, but it will still pale next to a recent iPhone or Samsung flagship. On the other hand, it gets bright enough that you can use the phone even on a sunny day.
The curves aren't everyone's cup of tea, and for understandable reasons that have to do with weird glare coming from them depending on the angle at which you're holding the device. This problem is similar to what you'd encounter on a recent Galaxy S or Note, so in the end it comes down to whether you can live with that just to get the very nice looks that the curved panels make possible.
Palm rejection on the XZ3 is perfect, we've never had an instance of accidental touches being registered while holding the handset, and the way the screen curves into the metal frame means it's really satisfying to swipe from or to either side.
Out of the box the screen is vivid but you can tweak that if you don't necessarily like the default look - we chose to stick with the Standard mode in the Color gamut and contrast setting, because we thought it achieves the best compromise between color accuracy and pop. But if you just need more vivid colors and sharper contrast in your life, you can pick Super-vivid mode which does what it says on the tin.
The custom white point adjustment works in tandem with that to let you achieve the exact degree of warmth or coldness you'd like. The default settings seem to go overboard on making whites bluish, which is definitely a trend in the mobile world right now, but tweaking things to get warmer colors is easy in case you are into that.
Display adjustment settings
Overall this is a very good screen that comes with enough customization options that you probably won't be disappointed no matter what your requirements are. It doesn't feel like it's the best smartphone display out there, but for most people it's probably going to be close enough that it doesn't matter. It also supports HDR video, which is nice to have but still more about future-proofing than anything else. And yet there are more and more HDR video content sources available, so having this certification is definitely becoming more useful with each day that goes by.
The XZ3 has an Always On Display too, which Sony calls Ambient Display. This function paired with the OLED panel means you aren't going to get more than a tiny penalty in battery life, and it is incredibly welcome as it shows you the clock and date at all times, notification icons as they come in, and even album art and artist/track title info when you're playing music.
Ambient display
This is one of the most user-tweakable AOD implementations out there and it works very well.
Software
Sony's interpretation of Android has always been lighter than most. Overall it does have a very similar vibe (and look) to what you can see on a Pixel, but there are subtle differences here and there - as well as a lot of Sony additions.
The notification area looks and behaves the same as Google intended, and the Quick Settings are familiar too if you're coming from a Pixel or Nexus. The Settings menu has pretty much the same paint job, although the colored icons for categories are themselves different. The layout is the same, though, with a single searchable list and no tabs. Sony's moved some things around (and added its very own Xperia Assist entry) but overall the feeling is that this is very close to stock.
Settings menu
The launcher has an app drawer thankfully, but while you can enable swiping up from the bottom of any home screen in order to reach the drawer, the company hasn't gone far enough in mimicking the Pixel launcher because this one scrolls horizontally in the app drawer. That means you can't quickly swipe up and then keep swiping up to find your desired app. It's a minor niggle, this, but it would've aided usability in our view to keep the scrolling direction consistent, especially since the multitasking rolodex vertically scrolls too.
Home screen, app drawer, settings
That brings us to the fact that Sony hasn't gone with the default Android Pie way of doing things here, and instead uses a multitasking menu that seems identical to what Google was offering in Android Oreo. Perhaps this is somehow related to the fact that there's no gesture navigation system on the XZ3 whatsoever. Not Google's weird and rather pointless attempt (since it doesn't actually free up any screen real estate), not something better either. You're just stuck with the familiar (pre-Pie) three navigation buttons sitting in their own bar at the bottom.
We're sorry for repeating this ad nauseam, but here's yet another area in which Sony simply chose to ignore what everyone else has been doing in the Android world in the past year and go another way. Or, differently put, it chose to stubbornly resist change.
The software experience on the XZ3 is very pleasant if you enjoy 'stock' Android, since it looks and works almost exactly like that. If you're coming from a device with a heavier skin like MIUI, EMUI, ColorOS, or FunTouch OS, then an adjustment period may be required, but we assume it won't be very long.
Performance
In day to day use, you may be tempted to keep double-checking on our specs page whether the XZ3 really has a Snapdragon 845 chip at the helm. Don't get us wrong, it performs well, but, as with many other things, it just can't match up to what most of its competitors are able to achieve. As usual, this being a long-term review, we're not discussing synthetic benchmarks here, just the overall feel of using this smartphone all day everyday.
And to put it bluntly, it comes short in this area. Its performance is good, but more on the level you'd expect from an upper-midrange device in 2019 and not a flagship, be it even a few months old. There are stutters everywhere and a persistent lag that brought back bad memories of Samsung flagships prior to 2018. That's what you should expect because that's what you're going to get.
Before you ask, yes our unit is running the absolute latest software version at the time of writing, and yes we have performed a full reset after installing this release and before we started using the XZ3 for an extended period of time for the purposes of this review. Although its security update isn't the latest anymore, Sony has been rather quick to issue these for the XZ3 and its other past flagships too, so at least from this point of view you probably have nothing to worry about.
Smoothness, though, is another matter entirely. Over the past year or so we've gone through quite a bunch of top of the line handsets in our long-term reviews, and there really is no nice way to sugarcoat the fact that when it comes to smoothness, the XZ3 is at the bottom of the pack. It's very far removed from what a new Pixel will offer you out of the box, but it's also lagging behind competing offerings that cost about half as much (the recently long-term reviewed Pocophone F1 and Xiaomi Mi 8 come to mind).
We're once again tempted to rant that Sony should have focused on lag-less, stutter-free, smooth performance all-round for the XZ3 instead of wasting resources on, for example, achieving a camera hump-free back or filling the phone with loads of software gimmicks left and right (more on those in the Frustrations page).
Now, on the other hand, if a Galaxy S8 (or S7, or any generation before that) felt "smooth" to you at any point during its existence, then you'll probably be very satisfied with the XZ3, because it provides a similar experience.
Hitting the multitasking button always results in a lag before the rolodex of running apps comes up, and if you double-tap that button to quickly go to the previously used app you'll find that in more than half of the cases the second tap simply wasn't registered.
Tapping on an app from the multitasking view also results in a half-second lag before it's brought up, and these are just the easiest things to write about when it comes to the consistent stutters we've encountered everywhere throughout the UI.
Bonus round: taps on the keyboard are sometimes (randomly) not registered, so while the display itself looks very nice there may be some issues with the "touch" part of "touchscreen", which may or may not be connected to the palm rejection necessary because of the curved sides of the panel (although the palm rejection itself works very well as we've already described in the Display section).
This is simply a bad user experience in our book, but we could have overlooked it (at least slightly) and not insisted so much upon it if this was a phone that didn't claim to be a proper flagship. The 4GB of RAM in all markets but Taiwan is another baffling move at this price point where you'd expect at least 6GB, then again Google's been doing that too so maybe that makes it okay? On the plus side we haven't found that this negatively influences multitasking in day to day use, at least not more than the aforementioned lags and stutters.
Battery life
A 3,300 mAh cell isn't small, but lately Sony's competitors have been fighting to outdo each other in this department while the Japanese company was having none of that - can you spot a theme at all, with Sony going its own way in spite of market trends? Anyway, battery life on the XZ3 has been good, but far from what we've achieved with competing devices that come with larger cells - which is exactly what we expected.
In our use scenario for long-term reviews we are mostly connected to Wi-Fi in a 12-16 hour day off the charger, but we throw in an hour or two of 4G LTE connectivity as well. Bluetooth is always on and streaming music for an hour or two, location is set to the most accurate option and we use GPS navigation 30 minutes to an hour. With this use we got 5 hours of screen on time pretty consistently each day by the time the battery meter reached 5 to 10%. Our record is 7 hours and 22 minutes from 100% to 5%, as you can see in the screenshot below.
Battery life snapshots
That's definitely not bad, but we wish Sony would just get with the times and use larger batteries in its flagships already. That would ensure that its devices would last a full day on a charge no matter how demanding your personal use scenario may be. While we didn't feel the need to top-up before going to bed, that's because of the specifics of our use - if you go with 4G LTE connectivity for most of the day and move around in areas of weak signal, the numbers will go down compared to ours. The good thing is that you can use a Qi wireless charger to fill up your XZ3 as well as USB-C.
A weird detail is that while the XZ3 supports USB-PD quick charging (the same standard that Google chooses), the charger that comes in the box is not USB Power Delivery compliant. Sony is obviously pulling an Apple in this case, willing to sell you a PD charger separately if you want one.
Camera
Interestingly enough, the camera app on the XZ3 doesn't look like every other camera app out there. There's no swiping left and right between modes, as you may have expected given the mobile world trends these days. Sony's done its own thing but the app is usable, if quirky in some ways. For example if you want to shoot a Portrait Mode selfie the first time, you'll realize that puts you into a slightly different UI, and that's actually because the Portrait Selfie "Mode" is an app of its own.
We're not sure why everything couldn't just be stuck into the same main camera app, but the system does work in spite of its complications. The app is generally fast and reliable, but we did get a freeze or two on occasion, especially when trying to take selfies in Portrait Mode with the Smile Shutter setting activated.
Since the XZ3 doesn't have a second (or third, or fourth) rear camera, you don't get any options for zoomed photos. You can always just crop your shots after taking them, of course, to get closer to your subject. Capturing photos is quick, and the autofocus works well.
Samples
Pictures taken in good lighting conditions turn out very good. They're sharp and detailed, but there is some noise creeping in - and it gets progressively worse as the ambient light goes down. Night time photos are usable at best, although if it's a really low light setting the lack of a dedicated Night Mode on the XZ3 really starts to sting. And also the lack of OIS, which at this point is getting a bit inexcusable.
Sony Xperia XZ3 daytime camera samples
If you're a fan of preserved highlights you may not be entirely satisfied with Sony's Auto mode, so you might have to resort to using HDR, which for some reason you can only find in the Manual mode of the camera app - it's not a toggle in the UI for the Auto mode like in almost every other manufacturer's camera app.
Sony's been using this 19 MP sensor for a while now and it's only with their most recent phones that we see dual camera setups getting mainstream. Dare we suggest even going with a triple setup with both wide and tele lenses alongside the main one?
Sony Xperia XZ3 nighttime camera samples
Selfies come out good when the light is great (or decent), but if you're shooting at night they get really soft and noisy. Portrait Mode for selfies does what it can in software, but since it's just one sensor to work with, expect stray hairs to get blurred as is par for the course.
Sony Xperia XZ3 selfie samples
Overall the XZ3's cameras produce pleasant images, especially in the best of lighting conditions, but the main unit does fall short when there isn't enough light to work with. The lack of OIS hurts when talking about a flagship smartphone released in late 2018, and the main sensor itself is probably due for an update, nevermind the lack of additional cameras to zoom in or fit more in a shot. All of this means that while the XZ3's camera output might not disappoint you, it won't wow you either.
Frustrations, annoyances
We appreciate the fact that you can take out the SIM tray without the need for a dedicated SIM ejection tool, but the act of putting a new SIM card into your XZ3 is a frustrating experience nevertheless. If you start with the phone on, you will have to get through three reboots until you can use it again. It first reboots automatically, with no warning, when you take out the tray. Then it reboots again when you put it back in, after which it tells you that it will reboot again in order to apply some settings that are personalized to your carrier. We still can't wrap our heads around why that may be necessary in 2019. Hopefully you aren't the type to constantly switch SIM cards, in which case this will frustrate you once and then you'll forget all about it.
We're used to seeing more signal bars, both for mobile connectivity as well as for Wi-Fi, on other devices, in the exact same spots, but since the connection quality overall wasn't worse, we assume the fact that the XZ3 seemingly shows 'less' signal is just down to Sony's algorithm for turning raw signal strength numbers into those 'bars'. On this topic, we haven't had any issues with any connectivity whatsoever, be that mobile, Wi-Fi, GPS, or Bluetooth, so this should just serve as a fair warning to not panic if when you get the XZ3 you seem to have less signal. It's probably not true, just a different, more conservative algorithm at work.
We would have liked to see a way to bring down the notification pane either by swiping down anywhere on a home screen (this is an option in many other skins from other manufacturers), or by swiping down on the fingerprint sensor on the back (the way Google does it). This would have helped reduce finger gymnastics somewhat, but it's clearly a feature anyone can easily live without.
A couple of small things: first off, the notification tone while you're on a call is really loud, and this might startle you anytime you hear it. Second, registering on a network in roaming, when you just landed in a new country, can take anywhere between five to ten minutes, which is pretty unusual to see in this day and age.
Gimmicks
This time around, we've covered most of our frustrations within the appropriate sections of the review, because we felt they were such an integral part of the experience that relegating them to this section wouldn't have done them justice. With that in mind, let's now move on to gimmicks, because boy is the XZ3 packed to the brim with those.
We're not talking about duplicate apps here, although you do get some of those - mostly multimedia focused, and most of them opt-in upon setting up the phone for the first time. But in this respect Sony's faring much better than some of its competitors.That said, there are a bunch of features that seem gimmicky at best, especially since a lot of them have their own brand names.
Opt-in bloatware
In no particular order: video image enhancement "powered by X-Reality"? Check. We've seen something like this from some of Sony's competitors, and we appreciate the fact that some people may enjoy using it, but why isn't this just built-in without requiring user interaction (or thought)?
Video image enhancement
"Side sense" predicted app panel that will show up if you double tap the frame in the right spot? Check. We assume Samsung's Edge Display feature has created some envy, but the problem with Sony's is that we had to turn it off because we kept seeing it when we definitely didn't intend to. It looks like simply holding the device can trigger it, even if no actual double tapping on the frame has occurred. So not only is this an obvious gimmick, it's not even tuned very finely.
Side sense
Smart backlight control that will keep the screen on while you're looking at it? Check. We're not saying there aren't literally dozens of people out there that depend on this feature but is it really necessary to pull resources into to develop? Will most XZ3 owners ever turn it on? Maybe, maybe not.
Smart backlight control
DSEE HX and ClearAudio+? Check and check. The former "restores high-range sound" making compressed music files sound like Hi-Res Audio, apparently, which they're not and never will be. So upscaling then. The latter "optimizes sound settings", which is obviously something that just can't be done automatically without needing to turn something on.
S-Force Front Surround? Check. Let's see what the description says about this one: "virtually reproduce realistic surround sound". On a phone's speakers. Okay, at least it's "virtual" now and it doesn't claim to magically create actual surround sound from nothing.
Surround sound for headphones? Check, with three different options for the picky ones who'd rather have "Concert hall" fake surround sound than "Club" fake surround sound. We'd have none of those, thank you!
Automatic optimization for headphones, which "analyzes your headphones and your listening preferences when you play music" to "optimize the sound experience just for you"? Check. It's amazing that we've been able to live this long without such a setting on all of our devices, isn't it?
Dynamic vibration? Check. Because simply hearing things isn't enough, why not add some vibrations into the mix when you're playing media? But wait, not just any vibrations, but ones that are "harmonized" with the media sound. You know, that's probably the first step if you want to be in harmony with the universe. You can enable this when you play a movie, video, or listen to music, and adjust its effect for every media app - which means that if it's on and you're in a media app you'll conveniently have two different sliders pop up when you hit the volume buttons, one for volume and one for this. In what (harmonious, obviously) universe is this not one of those features that you show off to friends once or twice and then forget it ever existed? Or worse still, forget how to turn it off and then constantly get annoyed at the little pop-up that shows up when you start playing anything that reminds you to try the dynamic vibration.
Sound and audio related gimmicks
Smart cleaner which "automatically optimizes storage and memory"? Check. Why is this a thing that has a separate name when Android should be doing that by itself anyway? In our minds the word "cleaner" is associated with overprotective Android interpretations from China, which do everything in their power to ensure that you never ever get to use the full RAM amount your phone comes with (and which is always bragged about in marketing materials, ironically), by constantly killing things in the background. Sony's Smart cleaner doesn't even explicitly tell you what it does, so we suspect this might just be the company's way of getting to claim it has one of those too, even if it isn't actually doing anything special.
Xperia Assist menu with Smart cleaner
The point of this list of gimmicks isn't to say that none of them will ever be useful to anyone. We're sure every single item discussed here has at least a few die hard fans, and that's fine. That said, we can't help but feel that in inventing, developing, and optimizing these features Sony has focused on things that are, at most, nice to have - but definitely not core aspects of the smartphone experience in this day and age.
That wouldn't have been a problem if those core aspects were all perfect or close enough, but some of them are really far from that. So instead of throwing a bunch of gimmicks at the wall, wouldn't the company's time have been better spent just making a phone that works great for all of the main things people expect?
Conclusion
Sony is focusing on being different, but we feel that in a lot of areas its smartphones end up being different just for the sake of it. This focus seems relentless and may have distracted the company from instead paying attention to what most people actually want in a smartphone. Right now, to be a clear success in sales, a device absolutely has to nail the basics. As far as we can tell, those are, in no particular order: a great screen, amazing camera image quality, nice and modern looks, smooth and stutter-free performance, and ample battery life.
The Xperia XZ3 delivers on some of these, but it doesn't really nail all of them. Or at least not to a level comparable with its foremost competitors. On the other hand, it's filled to the brim with gimmicks and needless all-caps trademarks for normal features that other companies put in without going through the trouble of naming them something outlandish like STAMINA, X-Reality, or TRILUMINOS. Sure, the company's definitely toned down its trademark love in recent years - we're thankful that it isn't plastering Walkman or CyberShot logos on its phones anymore, but we can't stop wondering how much time and resources have been spent in this area and could've been put to better use by simply making the XZ3 excel at the basics.
This handset is definitely good, but not a lot more than that. It's ironic that most of its shortcomings aren't huge, and we could've more easily overlooked them if this was a phone that launched costing half as much as it did. For a mid-ranger, it does a lot of things right. For a flagship priced accordingly, it disappoints, always being close to what it should be but never really there.
Sony finally embracing OLED screens like the rest of the industry is definitely welcome, and the cameras are good, but not in league with other top-shelf phones. The battery life is decent, but nowadays we're expecting more.
Performance isn't bad but the constant lag and numerous stutters hinder the experience a lot. With a top of the line SoC inside, there's really no excuse for this. Again and again, we come back to the feeling that Sony should have devoted much more attention to essential aspects like these, instead of making sure you can tap the edge of the frame to get an app shortcut screen.
And then there's the design, which simply looks dated. For a company that insists on sticking with a unique six-month release cycle for its flagships, this is beyond ironic. In terms of looks, the smartphone world has evolved a lot in the past year or so, but Sony hasn't caught up to even the beginning of that. You still get bezels top and bottom - big, impossible to ignore bezels.
The blocky look is more of a personal choice, and it has been getting consistently less blocky in time, but the position of the fingerprint sensor on the back is just inexcusable. That's something that every XZ3 owner will use dozens, if not hundreds of times a day, and every single time you'll get slightly annoyed when you try and use the camera sensor as the fingerprint scanner - because it is the camera that's in the perfect position for that.
The bulging design of the phone's rear does nothing to make it easier to hold, in fact, it's one of the more uncomfortable devices we've played with. Yes, it avoids a camera hump and that's a plus for some, but we feel like the price to pay for this is way too high, considering that the position of the camera where the fingerprint scanner should have been is probably also connected to the insistence of not having a traditional bump.
This is all pretty negative, but don't misunderstand - the XZ3 is a good smartphone, it's just not good enough. Not to properly compete head-on with its respective competitors, and definitely not good enough for the flagship price that was being asked for it for most of its life. With the inevitable price cuts following the announcement of the Xperia 1, the XZ3 is easier to recommend now, but not as a top of the line handset from late 2018. If you look at it as a mid-ranger and don't especially value software snappiness in your phone, it's a good choice.
There's just nothing mind-blowing about it, and we can't help but feel that Sony is intent on basically performing a magic trick with this device, drawing your attention away from the fundamentals and onto nice sounding features and perks that almost anyone can, in fact, live without. Did it work? You will be the judge.
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