The SONY XPERIA 1 ii is Different...

What's up guys, and we've finally got Sony Xperia 1 ii, Xperia one mark two. Just last year, I was praising Sony for going for a more simpler naming convention with the Xperia 1 and they've just gone ahead and made everything confusing again it looks like they're adopting their camera naming convention and having a mark two upgrade, but anyway, Xperia 1 ii. Let's go ahead, check it outsee what it's got to offer.

Design

The usual branding here at the front at the back, we have some of the key features. Now Sony is going against the convention, so they're not doing what everybody else is doing and they've kind of gone for a bit more of a unique approach, and we'll have to see if that's paid off. So inside the box, as well as the device, you get some people work, you get a USB type C to USB type C cable. There's an 18 Watt fast charger which is fast, but nowhere near as fast as a lot of the competition where we've seen 25 Watts, 40 Watts, even up to 65 Watts, but something that we don't see on the competition is a 3.5 millimeter headphone Jack and you'll see here that we've got some 3.5 millimeter earphones included and that is because the Xperia 1 ii does have a 3.5 millimeter Jack making it very, very unique.

Now, moving on if we take a look around the device at the bottom, there is a USB type C input on the right hand side, we've got a volume rocker. We've got a dedicated shutter button, which is quite nice it allow you to use the smartphone in landscape mode and take pictures easily. There's also a power which doubles up as a fingerprint scanner, and it seems to work fine, but it's definitely not as fast as others I've tested, there is a bit of an animation, which, seems to slow things down.

Even the Xperia 1 last year did not have a 3.5 millimeter Jack so Sony have kind of gone back to this and that is very interesting. Now the Xperia 1 ii also has wireless charging. Again, it's not crazy fast, like a lot of the competition. So we've got a metal frame with glass panels on the front and back as expected. This is the black version there is also a white as well as a purple and it's just a plain black color. Sony haven't gone for any gradient finishes or anything like that, that we're seeing on many of the devices right now, but the main thing on the Xperia 1 ii is this display, which is quite different to the punch outs, high refresh rate displays that we're seeing right now.

On the left hand side, we've got a tray which you can actually just pull out like this. And this has space for a SIM card, as well as a micro SDcard, something else, which we don't really see much of these days so you can expand the storage on the Xperia 1 ii, it does already come with 256 gigabytes. So that is already quite a bit of storage, but if you are going to be taking lots of pro video on here, of course, you're going to be needing that storage and having a micro SD card means you can just pop it out on, then pop it in to a laptop or something like that.

Display

 This is a 21 by 9 cinema wide, 4K HDR OLED display and it's 6.5 inches. We've got a 60 Hertz refresh rates, not 120 Hertz or 90Hertz like we're seeing from the competitors. But Sony do have some motion blur reduction technology, which should make things seem smoother. Sony is saying almost like a 90 Hertz display but this is with software, not hardware. And we do have some top on bottom bezels so we've not got a notch or a punch out or anything like that.

 Now in terms of my first impressions of the display, it's very, very sharp thanks for that 4K resolution sharper, then pretty much anything else out there. What's most interesting about this display is that 21 by nine aspect ratio. This is something that we saw on the Xperia 1 last year. What that means is this is very much catered towards watching that 21 by nine content. So if you're watching a lot of movies, most movies do have an aspect ratio of 21 by nine so that is very, very wide and that wide you're not going to be getting any black bars on the top and the bottom, but that does mean when you're watching 16 by nine content, even 18 by nine content, then you will be seeing black bars on the left and the right.

 And one other advantage that you get with a 21 by nine screen is that it's not very wide and it's actually quite comfortable to hold in one hand compared to other devices so let's bring in a few of the devices to do a bit of a size comparison. So the first device we've got here is the Samsung galaxy S20 ultra and you can straight away see that it's quite a bit wider, but you can also see that the bezels are quite a bit smaller. Now, the iPhone 11 pro max, once again, quite a bit wider, but it's also quite a bit shorter because of that taller aspect ratio that we've got on the Xperia 1 ii and finally looking at the Xperia 1 from last year, very, very similar in size because this also does have that 21 by nine aspect ratio, right.

Camera Performance

So that's the display and the size let's not talk about the cameras so upfront we do have an eight megapixel front facing camera is got an F2.2 aperture, but we've got some interesting cameras at the back. So there are four cameras in total with three different focal lens, all of the three different focal lens are at 12 megapixels. So I do like that Sony have just gone with 12 megapixels across the board, rather than going for a crazy high pixel number when realistically speaking, you're still going to be shooting at 12 megapixels anyway, this is something that we see from many of the other competitors.

 The primary camera has an F1.7 aperture it's got around a 24millimeter angle of view, which is pretty wide and it has a 1/1.7 inch sensor size, which is pretty large, but definitely not as large as some of the others like the P40 pro and the S20 Ultra. We then got a telephoto camera, which has an F2.4 aperture and that's got around about a70 millimeter angle of view. Now, a lot of other telephoto cameras, which are around at two times have about a 50 millimeter angle of view this is a little bit more than that so it's almost three times optical zoom, I would say around 2.8 to three times, we then have the ultra-wide camera with an F2.2 aperture and around a 16 millimeter angle of view so in terms of the field of view, that's around 124 degrees.

 And finally we have a 3Dtime of flight sensor, which is going to help with depth information. You can see the Zeiss logo here because Sony do work with Zeiss for their optics and Sony have really been talking about the auto focus capabilities of this smartphone. We do have real time EYE-AF, which is something that we see on a lot of these pro Sony cameras, eye tracking, real time. This is opposed to work with humans as well as animals.

 In addition to that, we do have 20 frames a second burst shooting. So this is I think, the fastest on any smartphone it's really going to be able to capture a lot of moving action just by pressing and holding again, something that we see on a lot of pro cameras that Sony is bringing onto here. Now, in order to be able to take advantage fully of a lot of these camera features, we do have a few pro apps. So for photos, we do have photo pro, which will give you full manual controls over things like your shutter speed, your white balance, even your focus and for video, we do have cinema pro, which once again gives you lots of manual controls, ISO, shutter speed you've got lots of different looks, as well as the frames per second so you can choose the correct frames per second for film making, which is 24 frames a second, if you want, you can choose 25, 30 or even 60 frames a second.

There are also some audio levels here, so you can monitor your audio and things like that and this does look like a very fully fledged cinema app and if you are somebody who's into pro video and pro photography, then this is something that you're going to really appreciate. Now, having said that I'm particularly interest sit in how this will compare to some of the other competition. Having those promotes is amazing, but for the general user, you want to go out there and take some photos and you want the smartphone to do all of that processing for you.

 We've seen the likes of Google who use very simple hardware, but do lots of software processing capture multiple images and combine them to give you some great dynamic range and things like that. And this is something that, I did criticize Sony for last year. Although the pro app was great when it did come to the regular app, it just didn't really holdup against the competition. So let's see this year, whether the Xperia 1 ii is once again going to be a very niche smartphone for pro photographers and videographers or if it's going to be something that's still going to be, very usable for the rest of the public.

Audio Quality

We've got support for high resolution audio, or even high resolution audio wireless with LDAC and we've also got 360 reality audio. So Sony, really putting an emphasis on the audio capabilities of this smartphone, Sony very experienced in the audio sector.

Performance

Now this is powered by the latest and greatest. We do have the QualcommSnapdragon 865 chipsets along with the X55 modem. So 5G is enabled and we've got eight gigabytes of RAM so performance I'm sure it's going to be absolutely fine. Sony also putting an emphasis on gaming. We've got some gaming features on here. And this is also compatible with Sony's dual shock four wireless controller. So you're going to be able to mount this on the controller and play your games on the smartphone via a controller, which may give you quite a bit of a competitive edge for the software. We do have Android 10 with Sony's skin, but honestly speaking I don't mind Sony skin it's very minimal it's almost stock Android.

 We do have some additional features so we've got the 21 by nine multi window feature. And this is going to allow you to take advantage of that very large display. And there's also side sense, which is okay you can tap twice on the side and it's going to bring up some shortcuts to your apps, which for me has always been a bit hit and miss.

So it's a, yeah, here you go. You kind of have to really hit it on the right mark, which I'm not a huge fan of and I don't find myself using too much, but hey, there is a feature that's there. For the battery we do have a 4,000mAh battery, which is quite a bit larger compared to what we had last year I believe it was around 3,300. So I'll see what the battery life is like in day to day usage of course we do have that 4K display so we'll see how well things are optimized.

 For pricing this is going to be retailing for 1100 pounds or $1,200, which is definitely up there with all of the other flagships. And it's going to be really interesting to see if this is going to be a niche product just for a few people or it's really going to be something a bit more mainstream. What do you guys think of the Sony Xperia 1 ii.

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