High-end flagships with massive displays are fast becoming the norm, but can the Samsung Galaxy S4 outgun Sony's Xperia Z?
Sony Xperia Z: Key specs and features
The Sony Xperia Z may be a flat rectangle, but what a flat rectangle it is. Clad on front and back by extra-tough Dragontrail glass the phone has a premium feel while looking classy with panelled detailing on the sides and snazzy embedded silver buttons. The Xperia Z is also waterproof and has IP57 certification.
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| Sony Xperia Z |
The screen bezel is very narrow and the edges have a chiselled shape. The display itself is a 5-inch LCD with a 1920x1080 pixel Full HD resolution at 443 pixels-per-inch (ppi). This delivers fantastic brightness and pure whites, while Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine 2 creates punchy colours and OptiContrast technology ensures everything pops.
Watching video on this thing is unreal, it’s rather a lot like glass-less 3D even though there’s not a whiff of 3D tech involved. This is easily one of the best displays around alongside the HTC One.
Power comes from a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor along with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 320 GPU.
While newer chips are starting to take over, this particular model is still a recent one and remains competitive in the current market. It’ll deftly handle Android’s interface and multitasking as well as any apps or games you care to try on the Google Play store.
Samsung Galaxy S4: Key specs and features
The processing power inside Samsung’s Galaxy S4 represents the next wave of mobile hardware as it’s based on ARM’s Cortex-A15 architecture as well as its big.Little technology. It’s the Exynos 5 Octa eight-core chip, which buddies up a 1.6GHz Cortex-A15 quad-core cluster.
| Samsung Galaxy S4 |
This allows the chip to optimise high-end speed against low-end battery efficiency depending on the tasks at hand and should result in quicker performance than its rival as well as longer life on a single charge. Samsung’s setup also sports a PowerVR SGX544MP3 tri-core GPU and 2GB of RAM.
Another key component of prolonging battery life is the new display technology – it’s called Green PHOLED and is up to 33 per cent more efficient than conventional AMOLED at no cost to image quality.
The 5-inch panel has a Full HD 1920x1080 pixel resolution of 441ppi. Visuals are crisp and colourful with great contrast and it’s a neat display for consuming multimedia.
Storage space is reasonably plentiful with options for either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of onboard capacity plus expandability via microSD cards by up to 64GB.
You’ve also got Android 4.2.2, the most up-to-date Android build available with all of its slick optimisation and reliable performance upgrades.
With a 2,600mAh battery, things will keep going for a long time - well - much longer than on the Sony Xperia Z anyway.
Conclusion
The Xperia Z is a brilliant phone and we’ve rarely encountered a display that’s this rich, however, you pay a price for it and not just in monetary terms.
The battery life is not particularly good and the device only has 16GB of onboard storage. There is the option of expanding this by microSD by up to 32GB, but here the Galaxy S4 has an advantage with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal capacity plus card capability up to 64GB.
The Galaxy S4 still offers a fantastic display which is much kinder to your power consumption, but it backs this up with a faster processor which is also not as hard on the battery.
That said, the Xperia Z certainly beats the Galaxy S4 on visual design and build quality.
So, if battery isn’t important to you and you’re looking for a pretty yet portable media viewer with an insane display, the Xperia Z may be for you. Otherwise, for a well-rounded smartphone, the Galaxy S4 seems like a better choice.
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