Product Review: Sony Xperia Z1 Compact

Sony is the first to deliver a smartphone, which wouldn’t let size get in the way of performance or screen quality. It’s no accident that it’s a compact rather than a mini – the Snapdragon 800-powered beast would be ashamed to share a name with the upper-midrange (at best) wannabes of the competition.

Key features



Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support; 3G with 42Mbps HSPA; 150Mbps LTE

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4.3″ 16M-color 720p capacitive touchscreen Triluminos display (342pixel density); X-Reality engine; shatter proof and scratch-resistant glass

Android OS v4.3 Jelly Bean with custom UI

Quad-core 2.26 GHz Krait 400 CPU, 2 GB RAM, Adreno 330 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset

20.7MP autofocus camera with a 1/2.3″ Exmor RS sensor and F/2.0 Sony G Lens; Info-eye, AR effects

1080p video recording @ 30fps, continuous autofocus and stereo sound; live video streaming to Facebook

2MP front-facing camera, 1080p video recording

IP58 certification, dust- and waterproof

Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA; Wireless TV-out

GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS

16GB of built-in storage; microSD card slot

MHL-enabled microUSB port

Bluetooth v4.0

NFC & ANT+ support

FM radio with RDS

Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

Accelerometer and proximity sensor

Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic

2,300mAh Li-Ion battery

Drawbacks

Weak LED flash

Non-user-replaceable battery

Below average loudspeaker performance (probably due to level of waterproofing)

If the first thing you look for in a smartphone is screen real estate, you might just not find that sort of credentials exciting.

If a huge screen is an absolute must, be it for gaming or video watching, then you are excused if the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact doesn’t get your pulse racing. In all other cases you have no choice, but to admire this Japanese creation.

A smartphone barely bigger than an iPhone 5s, that’s got the latest chipset available in the market, a high-res camera and a screen that, at least on paper, should provide splendid image quality. Compared to the full-size Xperia Z1, the Compact is only some screen resolution and battery juice short.

However, when you think about it, 1080p would’ve been an overkill on a 4.3″ screen, adding to the battery drain rather than the image quality. And with the reduced screen consumption the smaller battery shouldn’t be an issue either – it’s as big as what the Xperia Z offered anyway. All in all, there’s no doubt that the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact has the makings of a winner.

Controls

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact’s layout of controls similar to that of its bigger sibling. You get an RGB notification light on top of the display, alongside the proximity and ambient light sensors and the front-facing camera. The front-facer is a 2.1MP unit, enough resolution for 1080p video. The status LED is hidden inside the earpiece this time around. It’s a bit small and, being inside the recessed earpiece, visibility at an angle is worse. Again, we would have liked to see a large strip below the screen – there’s plenty of unused space there to begin with, and big RGB strips are both attractive and easy to see as previous Xperia designs have demonstrated.

With the area beneath the screen perfectly bare, all the important stuff is on the sides. There is a camera key here, located on the right side, underneath the signature Xperia power key and the volume rocker. Unfortunately, the shutter button, useful as it may be for launching the camera from anywhere, is very tiny and inconvenient.

Display with a right attitude

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact comes with a 4.3″ Triluminous display backed up by the company’s proprietary X-reality engine. On paper, 720p resolution sounds like a serious step down from the full-HD screen of the regular Z1, but at this size it still results in the more than pleasing 342ppi. So the screen is tack-sharp and you wouldn’t really feel any downgrade at all – in fact 1080p would probably have been an overkill at this screen size, and a strain on the battery.

The good news is sharpness is not all the Xperia Z1 Compact display has going for it. It also offers excellent contrast with impressively deep blacks, bringing every image to life. Color accuracy is pretty great too and there’s even a setting for manually tuning the white balance if you aren’t perfectly happy with it.

Battery life

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact packs a 2,300mAh battery – 700mAh smaller than that of its larger sibling, but it also has a far smaller screen of lesser resolution. So how do those balance out?

Quite successfully as it turns out – the Xperia Z1 Compact posted an endurance score of 65h in our dedicated test, faring excellently in the web browsing and video playback tests. It easily bettered the achievement of the full-size Xperia Z1 proving that Sony made the right call going for a 720p screen.

Smooth gallery with great functionality

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact comes with the custom Sony gallery, called Album. Images are organized into groups of thumbnails and sorted by date.  You can resize the image thumbnails, either with a pinch gesture or a sideways swipe. The whole thing is very responsive and hundreds of thumbs fall in and out of differently sized grids in a smooth animation.

There is a second tab here, My Albums, which includes online albums (PlayMemories, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr) along with albums stored on devices in the local network. Alternatively, you can turn the Z1 Compact into a DLNA server and view photos from the device on a computer or compatible TV. Images can be cropped or rotated directly in the gallery. Quick sharing via Picasa, Email apps, Facebook, Bluetooth or MMS is also enabled.

FM radio with RDS and social networking

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact also features an FM Radio aboard complete with RDS support. The app features multiple visualizations and integrates with TrackID to recognize the currently playing song. You can even directly send an “I’m listening to…” post to Facebook. Sony has updated the FM Radio app and as a results it’s now more stable than it was on some recent midrange Xperia smartphones.

The 20.7MP camera

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact camera uses the same custom-built Exmor RS sensor as the big Z1. It’s the highest resolution available on an Android smartphone and matches Lumia 1520 latest 20MP PureView camera (without the optical stabilization though).

As part of the Sony Exmor RS family it’s a backside illuminated (BSI) sensor, plus it has a wide F/2.0 aperture. These are all good things for low-light photography, though the flash is only a small, single LED. The Xperia Z1 Compact uses a wide-angle (27mm) Sony G Lens camera with a Sony BIONZ image processor. Sony has literally equipped the Xperia Z1 Compact with all the latest tech they have on tap, and that’s just the hardware, the Z1 Compact is very impressive on the software end, too.

One thing that immediately makes an impression is how smooth the image is in the viewfinder – it looks like they are using a high refresh rate. The camera interface, however, is a little old-fashioned and confusing at times. It consists of two columns, the right one holds four virtual buttons – a shortcut to the gallery, shutter keys for the camcorder and the still camera, and a shooting mode button. Depending on the shooting mode you’re in, the video shutter key may be replaced by a still/video mode toggle.

The column on the left changes more substantially. Here you get a flash mode toggle, front/back camera toggle and the settings button, which brings out a panel with some settings. These settings will change for the different shooting modes, allowing you to tune more or fewer stuff.

Video recording done in 1080p

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact is capable of capturing 1080p video at 30fps and that’s about it. With the inclusion of the powerful Snapdragon 800 SoC we would’ve liked to see 1080p video recording at 60 fps or even 4K but we guess that’s just too much to ask from Sony at this point. In any case, there aren’t too many 4K screens around yet, so it may not be such a big loss. 1080p is still competitive enough. The camcorder app UI is practically the same as the still camera’s. You can set a timer and fiddle with settings like exposure, metering, focus mode, etc.

For videos the Z1 Compact features a proprietary SteadyShot digital image stabilization, but there’s a price to pay – the field of view (FoV) is reduced (it’s how all digital stabilizations work). The phone is smart enough to detect whether you are shooting hand-held or you have rested it on something stable but you get the reduced FoV either way.

You can also snap stills during video recording but that’s not of much use as you only get 1080p images, you might as well grab a frame from the video. Also note that the image processing is different than still shots. The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact is a reasonably powerful camcorder. It captures 1080p videos at just under 30 frames per second with a good bitrate of 17-18Mbps with stereo sound recording with a bitrate of 128 Kbps and 48 kHz audio sampling rate.

Final words

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact is the first phone to give up the name but rightfully claim the true title of a flagship mini. It took a while too, considering we’ve had “minis” for a couple of generations now. It is, without exaggeration, unique in its category thanks to the powerful chipset, 20.7MP camera and water-resistant body. A lot of the five-or-so-inch flagships can’t even cover two out of three of those. The Z1 Compact is a speed demon (for gamers and power users), it has the looks for daily usage in the city and will brave the rainy outdoors (or just the swimming pool) to take great shots where most cameras would require extra protection. For all those features, the battery life is pretty good too, thanks to its battery being bigger than the average in this size bracket.