Sony Xperia Z Ultra

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is a high-end mobile phone from Sony which has been known for its excellent performance and maintaining its abilities many years later. The phone has a good following and no real complaints but many compliments about what a good purchase the phone has been.

Sony Xperia Z Ultra

The phone is an excellent phone looking at the specs alone. With all three networks covered the Sony Xperia Z Ultra covers 2G (GSM 850/900/1800/1900 – all versions) as well as 3G (HSDPA 850/900/1700/1900/2100 – all versions) as well as 4G (LTE band 1(2100), 2(1900), 4(1700/2100), 5(850), 7(2600), 8(900), 17(700) – C6806) and LTE band 1(2100), 2(1900), 3(1800), 4(1700/2100), 5(850), 7(2600), 8(900), 20(800) – C6833.

Being that the phone was released in June 2013 the phone today is still very useful. With speeds on HSPA  at42.2/5.76 Mbps and LTE Cat4 at 150/50 MbSony Xperia Z Ultraps the connection speeds are very good and will last for many years. The phone is truly a good investment. There is also GPRS as well as EDGE.

The size of the phone is a bit bigger than what you might expect at 179.4 x 92.2 x 6.5 mm. Its is about the same size as the Lumia range of phones. It is a bit heavier as well at 212 g but it comes with a non-removable Li-Ion 3050 mAh battery. There is an additional feature with this phone as it has an IP58 certification – dust proof and water resistant over 1.5 meter and 30 minutes. Most mobile phones damaged today tends to be water damage on the insurance claims. This is an excellent feature on this phone.

As the phone is large is does come with an excellent screen size and features an IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. The screen is 6.4 inches (~68.3% screen-to-body ratio) in size which is large and it comes with a very high resolution at 1080 x 1920 pixels with ~344 ppi pixel density. This gives you an excellent screen for graphics and video. The screen is a multitouch screen with up to 10 fingers. The screen also offers Shatter proof glass as well as being a triluminos display which makes the images richer and more vivid. There is also the X-Reality Engine which is an image processing technology to enhance your images and videos. This makes the video and pictures look sharper as well as reduces noise and improves the contrast on the video and pictures.

Compare the picture quality

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is powered by a Quad-core 2.2 GHz Krait 400 which is using either the Qualcomm MSM8274 or the MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 chipset. The video and graphics is powered by an Adreno 330 GPU which is a very powerful combination. All of this is running on the Android OS, v4.2 (Jelly Bean), upgradable to v5.1 (Lollipop) operating system.

The memory in the phone is 16 GB of space with 2 GB RAM. The space can also be increased using the dedicated USB slot which allows expansion to 32GB of space. This might be needed later if you like multimedia options as the phone comes with a 8 MP camera with autofocus as well as the usual high-end features such as geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, HDR and sweep panorama. Note that HDR means that the camera takes 3 different exposures and gives you a blended photo. The video is the same running at an impressive 1080p@30fps. The secondary camera is also very good at 2 MP with video at a yet again impressive 1080p@30fps. Usually the secondary cameras are the cheap low grade cameras but not in this phone.

The ringtones and alert types are the standard vibration; MP3 and WAV ringtones. There is also the usual 3.5mm jack as well as a loudspeaker. Much like other high-end phones there is also an active noise cancellation with dedicated Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic.

Wifi is also available with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band as well as Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and hotspot. Bluetooth also comes with the phone in the form of Bluetooth v4.0, A2DP as well as aptX. The chipset has A-GPS as well as GLONASS built in. There is also NFC as well as a Stereo FM radio and USB port. In true multimedia phone options it also boasts an MHL TV-out ability.

As for sensors there is the accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass. In terms of communications there is SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM as well as Push Email. There is no Java on the phone and it comes with an HTML5 browser. The chipset has the following built in as well being – ANT+ support – DivX/Xvid/MP4/H.264/WMV player and  MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV/Flac player.

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra has above average specs as well as a good battery being a non-removable Li-Ion 3050 mAh battery with up to 790 h (2G) standby time as well as up to 14 h (2G) talk time. For a phone with such high specs, that in itself is as impressive as its design, features and reputation amongst users globally. The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is a very good long term investment.