Sony Xperia X Performance review ~ Tecno Gie

Oh, Sony. The company has tried time and again to craft a smartphone that would find success in the US, and time and again it has fallen short. But when Sony pulled back the curtain on a batch of new Xperia X's at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, I allowed myself to get a little excited. Maybe these were the right phones at the right time, I thought, and maybe a company whose products I otherwise respected would find the foothold it was looking for. After being underwhelmed by the standard Xperia X last month, I still held out hope that the high-end Xperia X Performance would be the phone Sony needed.

Long story short, it's not. Don't get me wrong: It's a serviceable device, and in many ways it's actually very nice. The thing is, a $700 smartphone should be able to deliver some modicum of excitement to the person who owns it; the X Performance mostly just leaves me cold.

Summary

Sony, what are you doing? Though the $700 Xperia X Performance features a flagship-level processor and runs well as a result, Sony apparently didn't feel the need to bring anything new to the table. What we have here is a reasonably good smartphone that lacks soul or ambition, and ultimately costs too much for what it is.

Hardware

Even though the X Performance is the most high-end of the four Xperia phones Sony plans to launch in the US, you wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at it. In fact, do yourself a favor: Don't put an Xperia X Performance down next to a regular Xperia X, because you'd probably never tell them apart. From the 5-inch, IPS LCD display up front to the 23-megapixel camera around back, these two devices are nearly identical. Well, until you spill a drink on them, at least. The X Performance picks up where previous Sony flagships left off with an IP68-rated chassis that helps it shrug off dust and water with ease, even when you stick it under a soda machine and let sticky stuff like Coke fly.Beyond that (and as the name implies) we're basically looking at an Xperia X with a faster quad-core Snapdragon 820. That has its ups and downs, though: The chipset, paired with 3GB of RAM, gives the X Performance flagship-level horsepower, but the phone still suffers from some irritating design quirks. For one, you'd think a modern flagship phone -- one that costs $700, no less -- would have a fingerprint sensor for quick and easy authentication. Nope! The international version has one, but we Americans have to do without. Meanwhile, the placement of the volume buttons beneath the sleep/wake button on the right edge just seems dumb. Unless you're a professional finger contortionist, it's really difficult to hold the X Performance in your right hand and turn the volume down. It might be a mainstay of Sony's "OmniBalance" design language, but that doesn't mean it's not a bad idea.It's not all frustrating, though. The X Performance's fit and finish are lovely, and there's something alluringly ... friendly about its look. There's a physical, two-stage camera button sitting below those tricky volume keys, and it's generally a joy to use. On the other edge is a SIM/microSD card tray you can pull out with just your fingernail, instead of having to rely on a paper clip you had to scrounge for. That tray, by the way, will take memory cards as big as 200GB, which is helpful, since 12GB of the X Performance's 32GB storage allotment is eaten up by system software. Since the X Performance comes with a more powerful processor, it has a bigger battery than the normal X too, if only just. Think: 2,700mAh instead of 2,620mAh.

Display and sound

I liked this 5-inch, 1080p IPS LCD screen when I first saw it on the Xperia X, and my feelings about it haven't changed. It's a generally great panel, capable of bright, vivid colors and deep blacks. We have the one-two punch of Sony's Triluminos display tech and its X-Reality engine to thank for those colors, though you have the option to tweak the screen's white balance and saturation settings if the defaults aren't your speed.

While the screen Sony used hasn't changed, though, the context around that display couldn't be more different. A 1080p panel is fine for an ostensibly mid-range phone like the Xperia X, but some of the most impressive flagships we've seen this year came with Quad HD displays. Remember, this is a phone that costs $700 -- if Sony could squeeze an honest-to-goodness 4K screen into the Z5 Premium, why couldn't it have tried to at least match its competitors with a screen running at 2,560 x 1,440?

By Chris Velazco

Adapted