Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

One oft-cited benefit of the Android ecosystem is its diversity. If you don’t like something that Samsung did to its flagship this year, you can go to another company whose phone you like better without leaving all your Google Play purchases behind.

But a confluence of factors—a slowed rate of hardware improvement, limits on what you can physically fit into a smartphone, general lack of imagination and risk-averseness from OEMs who are making razor-thin profits if they’re making profits at all—means that most flagship phones are frustratingly homogenous. Take a 5-point-something-inch screen and whatever Qualcomm’s latest chip is and squeeze it into a rectangle with the best battery and camera that will fit, and you’ve got yourself a flagship smartphone.

This is perhaps the worst deal for people who want a smaller smartphone that isn’t an older or slower smartphone. Flagships at or near 4.5-inches are essentially nonexistent. This brings us to Sony’s Xperia Z5 Compact, which is finally coming to the US after a few months of availability overseas. While that release approach means it’s not the freshest phone around, it’s still pretty much your only option if you want a phone that is simultaneously fast, small, and modern (at least until that “iPhone 5SE” comes out).

Specs at a glance: Sony Xperia Z5 Compact Screen 1280×720 4.6" (319 ppi) IPS LCD OS Android 5.1.1 Lollipop CPU Eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 (Four 2.0 GHz Cortex-A57 cores and four 1.6 GHz Cortex-A53 cores) RAM 2GB GPU Adreno 430 Storage 32GB with up to 200GB external storage supported via microSD Networking 433Mbps 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS Bands UMTS HSPA+ 850 (Band V), 900 (Band VIII), 1900 (Band II),

2100 (Band I) MHz

GSM GPRS/EDGE 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz

LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 28, 38, 40) Ports Micro USB, 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD card slot Camera 23MP rear camera, 5.1MP front camera Size 5.0" x 2.56" x 0.35" (127 x 65 x 8.9mm) Weight 4.87 ounces (138g) Battery 2700 mAh Starting price $499.99 unlocked Other perks RGB notification LED, NFC, Quick Charge 2.0

Look and feel

Ultimately I came away less thrilled with the way the Z5 Compact looked and felt than I wanted to—it feels like a throwback in both good and bad ways. Ultimately this is probably what its target audience wants, but it didn’t do much for me.

The Z5 Compact is square and brick-shaped, and both the front and back are totally flat glass (the front is normal glossy screen glass and the back is a frosted glass with aluminum detailing, according to Sony). We’re generally pretty negative about glass-backed smartphones around these parts because they double the amount of glass that you can shatter if you drop your phone. The only mitigating factors in the Z5 Compact’s favor are that (1) you are probably less likely to drop a smaller phone and (2) the plastic sides of the phone are pretty thick and may serve as a decent shock-absorbent bumper for the rest of the phone.

The phone is also a bit thicker than some of the larger or older phones I compared it to—the larger Nexus 5 and 5X are both thinner than the Z5 Compact despite being a bit wider, and the old iPhone 5 and 5S design is simultaneously narrower and thinner. The Z5 Compact has thicker bezels around the display than many Android phones have had lately. As phones have expanded in size, OEMs have tried to shrink the bezels to the sides of the display to keep the width of their phones halfway reasonable. Sony hasn’t used any of these tricks on the Z5 Compact, so what you end up with is narrower than many 5-inch phones but not as narrow as it feels like it should be.

It’s not all bad, though. As thick and brick-like as the Z5 Compact is, it still scratches that small-phone itch in a lot of ways. It’s narrower and taller than contemporary flagships, making it much easier to fit in a pocket and better suited for one-handed use. Most crucially, it's shorter than any recent flagship, making it easier to reach anything on the screen with your thumb if you’re holding the phone in one hand. Whether you can reach anywhere on the screen will depend on the size of your hands; I can do it, but you might still have trouble reaching if your hands are smaller. It doesn’t quite reverse the trend toward larger and larger phones we’ve witnessed in the last half-decade (if you’re looking for something iPhone 4S- or iPhone 5-sized, you’ll be disappointed), but the Xperia Compact series at least fights back.

Like most of Sony's phones, the Z5 Compact is also dust and waterproof as long as the port cover on the phone's left side is closed. It can be left in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes and can be used in chlorinated swimming pools as long as you rinse it with fresh water afterwards.

The screen itself is a 720p panel, a resolution that was replaced by 1080p in flagship phones at right around the time 5-inch screens became the norm. At 4.6 inches, 720p works out to a pixel density of 319 PPI, which is more than adequate. The display panel is bright and colors look good, but there is a higher-than-usual amount of brightness shift if you’re looking at it from an angle (which is to say, it’s noticeably dimmer when viewed from above, below, or either side than it is when viewed head-on). The screen’s digitizer is faintly visible, too, which can cause a slight shimmering effect if you’re looking at the phone in bright or outdoor light.

Fans of expandable storage will appreciate the microSD slot hidden underneath a panel next to the nano SIM slot—it can accept cards “up to 200GB” in size, which accounts for expensive high-capacity cards like this one from SanDisk. And there’s a dedicated camera button on the bottom-right edge of the phone, a nifty addition you don’t see much outside of the remains of the Windows Phone ecosystem.

The other buttons are weird. There’s a large power button in the center of the phone, which is a place where my thumb rests sometimes depending on how I’m grabbing the phone. It’s not so sensitive that you’ll automatically press it when your finger is on it, but it’s a risk. And the volume located between the power and camera buttons is small enough that you can easily press the whole thing down at once, which is awkward if you’re reaching blindly into your pocket to turn things up or down.

Software

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The Z5 Compact ships with Android 5.1.1, which is unfortunate given that Marshmallow was released four months ago. Still, this is not quite a dealbreaker. When we review a 6-inch phone that ships with Lollipop, we can point people who want updates to the Nexus line. If you want a 4.6-inch phone that isn’t a bargain-basement dumpster fire, the Z5 Compact is your only game in town. Sony has promised an Android 6.0 update for it, and the company actually updates its phones for quite a while after they’re released, we just don’t know when to expect it.

Sony’s version of Android is relatively lightly skinned—Sony changes a bunch of icons and adds a few things to the multitasking switcher and Quick Settings shade, but most of it will be recognizable to users of the Nexus version of Android.

Some of Sony’s changes are actually pretty nice. Editing the Quick Settings shade in stock Marshmallow involves turning on the System UI Tuner, which is off by default and buried in the Settings even when enabled. It lets you rearrange, add, and remove icons from the Quick Settings and even enable a battery percentage indicator, but it’s not very convenient.

Sony adds a button at the top of the shade that takes you right into a Quick Settings editing mode, one that offers access to a few more settings than Google's does (including screen casting, NFC, data syncing, and others). A battery life percentage indicator is included and enabled by default, which is nice if you’re the kind of person who gets itchy when you can’t see that number (hello).

Sony one-ups Google’s Battery Saver mode with some extra options as well. You’re able to configure exactly what services and apps are enabled and disabled when you need to save battery. Lollipop’s default Battery Saver mode is present if you want it, but it’s buried under “Power Management > Battery Usage” in the Settings.

Of more dubious benefit is the “small apps” feature, accessible on the same screen as the multitasking switcher. This customizable, four-icon dock lets you launch little windowed apps that float over the top of your main app. A handful of Sony and Google apps support the feature out of the box, and Sony provides links to a section of the Google Play Store populated by small apps. As an added bonus, any standard Android widget can be turned into a small app if you want.

The apps that work best are the ones that need to be brought up and dismissed quickly, like the timer or the calculator. For others, it seems like it would be easier to switch to the full app or use the normal widget version instead. I found the Z5 Compact’s screen too small for small apps to really be useful, though I can definitely see how it would be useful on a phablet or tablet.

Many of Sony’s other apps fall into one of two categories, either “mildly entertaining distraction” or “duplicative of Google’s generally superior version of the same app.” The company does at least appear to be updating most of these apps through the Google Play Store rather than system software updates—Android OEMs seem to have gotten the memo about this even if they can’t get new Android updates out in a timely manner. Sony also bundles a few PlayStation apps with the phone, but they’re available for other Android phones through the Google Play Store so it’s not a big selling point for Sony diehards.

The best of Sony’s apps is probably the camera, which isn’t surprising given the company’s experience with cameras and smartphone camera sensors. It gives you several different shooting modes, links to more downloadable shooting modes, and offers full manual control over ISO, exposure, white balance, and a few other things. It won’t shoot in RAW mode, but otherwise it’s a solid app.

For Android enthusiasts, another point in Sony’s favor is that the company is pretty good about posting things for the open source community to work with, including bootloader unlocking guides and how-to posts for building and flashing “stock” AOSP Android to your phone. This also makes it easier for third-party ROM projects like CyanogenMod to get builds up and running on Xperia phones. You do all of this at your own risk, and it shouldn’t be considered a selling point for most “normal” people, but for the technically inclined it’s something to consider.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham