mobile

This is the most expensive phone I ever bought and I'm pretty satisfied with it, and also the one I have the least amount of gripes with, but it's not perfect unfortunately. My previous phone was the Galaxy S4 which I absolutely loathed from day one (made me wish I never exchanged my Xperia S for it), and the Z3 was a huge jump in quality compared to it.

Things I like a lot about the phone:

• Stereo speakers sound pretty good (and by that I mean you can actually listen to it without wanting to tear your ears off), I actually like to listen to stuff using them, on the S4 and XperiaS the sound quality from speakers was unbearable.


• Screen is nice, compared to S4 it's a bit less saturated but it seems much more neutral and accurate, white is actually white and not yellowish like on the S4, but black depth is obviously not absolute, but still pretty good. I think I prefer this screen to the AMOLED on S4 and AMOLEDs in general.


• The phone is extremely fast and smooth, I'm a smoothness freak and I couldn't stand how laggy the S4 was.


• The waterproofing is nice to have, makes you worry a little less about rain and water spills when using the phone near the shower or stuff like that.


• Battery life is great, it lasts 3x what my S4 used to last. I still can't get a full day when I do extra heavy usage with hours of google maps.


• Camera is pretty good, I don't know why everyone complains about it, it's not the best on the market but it's still in the top 3 best phone cameras available from waht I can tell. I'm more interested in videos on a phone since I have a decent compact camera, and I think the Z3 makes the best videos.


• The phone does not overheat, the S4 was often worryingly hot and it also suffered from CPU throttling that basically cut performance in half.

Things I don't like about the phone:

• I had a dead pixel on the first one I bought, brought it back and got it replaced, I examined the replacement for dead pixels and couldn't find any, too bad 2 weeks later I noticed a dead green subpixel but it was too late to exchange it (as it isn't covered by the store's warranty, previous one was replaced under customer satisfaction program). I absolutely hate dead pixels but this one is near the bottom and harder to notice.


• The device seems extremely fragile and I am getting paranoid after reading a ton of reports from people who had bent phones, cracked glass, failed waterproofing, and all sorts of other breakage. Right now I have one micro scratch on the front glass that I have no idea how it happened, but it's extremely faint and only viewable in a certain angle, at which the touch grid also becomes visible so it's not really a big deal. Other than that I also found a minor scratch on the power button that is noticeable if you look at it closely.


• I don't like the new Lollipop firmware, the colors are especially crappy and there doesn't seem to be any way to customize them properly. I'd like to have dark blue accents but there's no way to do so, and even if I select the blue theme, many accents are orange and I don't like it. I still think the Sony interface was at its best on the XperiaS and the original Z.


• The SCR24 cover is absolutely worthless. I really can't find any positive qualities in it other than the fact that it saves the back glass from scratches. A cheap ass cover with cheap glitchy software. Except it costs 40€.


• Stock keyboard is very nice and fast but I keep running into a glitch while typing in chrome where the stuff I delete using the backspace key keeps coming back. Another glitch that ruins my workflow is the email app which no longer autocompletes addresses in Lollipop and drives me nuts. Hopefully they'll fix these issues.


• It happened twice already, out of nowhere I found my phone pretty much unusable as apps kept crashing all over the place (mostly com.android.phone, "enterprise service" and google play service) and I had to reboot. It happened once on Kitkat and once on Lollipop. On Lollipop I also had a random reboot. Did a factory reset and everything seems fine, but I wonder why these android phones keep having issues after OS updates until you factory reset. I had similar issues with the S4, except much worse (something like 3 reboots per day).


• Lollipop multiuser mode is worthless, since gues users can also mess up your phone and access the SD card. There should be a way to limit usage only to certain apps, disable installing of apps, and stuff like that. I miss the baby mode from the S4, which came in handy when I wanted to let my little sis or someone try out my phone without having to worry about them accessing stuff I don't want them to.


• Another thing I miss from the S4 is dual app multitasking, it was very limited and slowed the already laggy phone to a crawl, but it was great to play youtube in the background or use WhatsApp while doing something else at the same time. SmallApps are nowhere near as useful.


• Soft Keys are awful and they make the screen feel smaller than the one on S4. This is noticeable only in some apps, for example Chrome or certain games that are not optimized to hide soft keys.

Overall I'm satisfied with it but I have major worries the phone will break and sometimes I dust off my S4 when I do something risky such as rollerblading, I can already imagine my Z3 shattering as soon as I fall once (which happens very rarely but is obviously still a risk). Not sure it was worth 565€ but so far it has worked better than any other phone I ever had. The dead pixel is also a cause of minor buyer's remorse every time I notice it.