 Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you'll like. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Sony Xperia Z1. Let's start with everything everyone else already told you while we open up the box. It has a quad-core 2.2GHz Crate 400 Snapdragon processor with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. It comes with Android 4.2, which is a little bit older now, but there is a planned 4.4 upgrade. It comes with a micro cable as well as a wall wart charger, some manuals, and that's the end of the unboxing portion. It has wireless AC, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, 16GB of onboard storage, WIF, expandable micro SD, which is definitely a plus with so many phones not having that. It has a good camera, it's a 21MP camera, but it doesn't have necessarily the best performance. Sony does a lot of processing on the images, there's a lot of sample shots out there, you can go check those out. I didn't actually do any. And it has a 3000mAh battery, which is a very noticeable upgrade over my daily driver, which is the HTC One. On a light day and a normal day, I could go two days and I can definitely make it through a fairly heavy day. Usually I'd have about a 40% charge left after a normal day, so that's awesome, because I'm used to having to recharge the One every day, no matter what. Now I've been using the Z1 for about two weeks now, but upon first removing it from the box, my initial reaction was, man, this thing's pretty heavy. It's very solid feeling with a glass front and glass back, so it actually reminds me of the old iPhone 4, where it just feels like quality in the hand, but I did find it a little bit slippery, and my wife said the same thing, although Slick didn't have that problem at all with his larger hands. It should also be noted that the haptic feedback is among the best that I've felt. It's not overpowering, and you know, many implementations feel like the thing's gonna fall apart in your hands. That wasn't the case for this phone. So speaking of the screen in the front of the phone, there's not a whole lot there. There's a 2 megapixel, 1080p front camera for video chat. There's a speaker up at the very top with a notification LED built into it. The speaker sounds great, by the way, but I did find the position at the very top of the phone. A little bit awkward, because I'm more used to putting my ear right about here, and that's it. The front buttons are actually completely software, and they are built into the screen like many newer phones. On the right side of the phone, we find one of the cheapest SIM trays that I have ever encountered in my life, but the great thing about it is that it does happen to be tool-less, so I guess that is definitely a plus. We've also got a side lock button, which I'm kind of indifferent to. Normally, I'm used to a top lock button. I didn't find this was any better or worse. And a volume rocker that I see what they were trying to do. It has kind of a curved shape to it, so you should be able to feel where it is, but I found it was harder than I guess they were going for to actually figure out which one I was pressing, so it was a lot of trial and error. There's also a two-stage camera button, which is really nice to have, so you can launch the camera anytime from anywhere, and you can prime it and then go, just like you can with many point-and-shoot cameras. Also on that side of the phone is a wrist-wrap anchor. I really thought this was a nice touch as well. On the left side, we've got microSD expansion up to 64 gigs. Micro USB, yes, these plastic covers are kind of lame, but I understand why they're there. More on that later. And then finally, there is a charging connector for the official Sony dock. On the bottom, we find nothing but a speaker grill, and on the top, we find nothing but a 3.5mm headphone jack. So back to that screen with the excellent haptic feedback. It's 1080p. It's 10-point multi-touch, as if you could get 10 fingers on there. It's a tri-luminous LCD display with X-Reality engine, and the first thing I did was turn X-Reality off, because I was watching a movie, and I was like, this looks terrible. It seems to crank the sharpness up to 200, and for some reason, I felt like colors looked worse, too, but maybe that was just the color shift from changing the angle of the phone. It was noticeable enough, and off-axis viewing was bad enough that I did notice it day-to-day, but with that said, you still have very sharp text because it is still a 1080p LCD display, and with X-Reality turned off, video viewing was satisfactory, but it's definitely not as good as something like the HTC One. The Z1 is very fast, but what isn't these days? I did find that animations like expanding folders in the app tray felt a little bit slow at first, but I did get used to them, and the overall experience is very smooth. The default sound scheme is also soothing and natural, especially compared to Samsung's horrible one. I didn't feel the need to change it at all. The only issue I had with the setup for that is that volume all the way down silences the phone when you use the button on the side, versus HTC's implementation where all the way down is Vibe, and you actually have to very intentionally go one up to get to silent. With that said, you can hold it down and go directly to Vibe instead of silent, so it's just a matter of being used to it, I think, for something like that. The default screen timeout was 30 seconds, so that is a thing that I changed right away to a minute, but this is just part of their very aggressive power savings that does turn into real-world battery life improvements, so I can't really fault them there. Their power savings scheme also includes location-based Wi-Fi and limited network connectivity, although you can whitelist certain apps when the screen is powered off. The best thing about their power savings is that just like their find-your-lost-phone feature, it harasses you to turn it on. I love that because that's how you get people to actually set things up. While the phone is great as a first phone, there were certain things that really irked me about the setup process. So first of all is that account creation for Sony Entertainment Network is a little bit ridiculous. It wants an 8-character password with no repetitions of three of the same in a row, a mixture of numbers and letters, you know what, screw off, because I can choose a passphrase that's 25 characters long that doesn't have any of that stuff and is still a much stronger password than something that does adhere to that regulation, so I'd like to be able to choose my own password. I understand who it's trying to protect, but I wish that it would give me the option to just have something longer. Their transfer wizard, if you have an existing Android phone, is also quite uncompetitive. Compared to HTC and Motorola, the ones that I've used, which are just wireless and you just install an app, this requires a PC or Mac to complete. It's a 25-megabyte application that you have to download that then wants to run in the background on the PC. You need to plug a cable into one phone, then the other, it gives no progress indicator and timed out both times that I tried to use it. I mean, that felt like a very 2010 experience to me. The other things that bugged me, I guess, were the fact that it prompts me to like Sony on Facebook and follow them on Twitter the first time I sign in. I think Sony is a little bit too grown up for that, but I guess if that's all I have to say negatively about the phone, once I was done with setup, things got a lot smoother. Something that I'm starting to really like is soft buttons. So, I mean, this is just an example, but when you're typing something and the keyboard opens up, it actually changes what the button looks like to indicate the functionality. This might not be an issue for power users, but for someone like my mother, having the button actually indicate what it's going to do, so it's a little down arrow to make the keyboard go away, I think that's fantastic, and that's something that hard buttons on the HTC One doesn't really offer. Speaking of the keyboard, I didn't really like it. The space bar is very small, and combined with the long travel distance between keys because of the large screen, I found it hard to be accurate. The great news about Android, of course, is all I had to do was install SwiftKey, and I'm done. One thing I did like, however, is that the backspace just speeds up individual character deletion rather than starting to eat whole words as you go back, and I did find it a lot easier to control. Pictures in the messaging app are actually kind of cool as well. You can, like, draw stuff, which was a bit of a neat experience. The two times that I tried it, I sent Slick a couple of messages, but it seems like, again, the kind of thing that you'd use twice and then not worry about too much, there are so many advanced messaging applications like WhatsApp and BBN and all that kind of stuff that I think a lot of people are going to replace that core functionality, but again, for people like my mom, it's great that they do have a better messaging app than what I'm used to seeing. Maybe it's the fact that I come from iOS as my first smartphone experience, but I don't actually use the desktops and widgets much. I tend to access almost everything from the app tray, and this was something that I really liked. Swiping in from the left on the app tray gives you access to the Play Store, as well as a variety of different ways of sorting the apps that makes it really easy to access your most used. Maybe it's a stupid thing, but I really enjoyed it. They also have a quick settings implementation that I really liked. You swipe down from the top, you can completely configure this, it arranges everything in a sensible manner, and it saved me the trouble of installing power toggles. Really like it, and compared to something like TouchWiz, it's not huge and, like, bright green looking for whatever reason, and compared to Sense, it requires fewer clicks to get at your most frequently used things. Multitasking, on the other hand, wasn't a great experience, and I did find that only being able to see three apps that were recently accessed on a 1080p screen wasn't really adequate. I really like HTC's implementation here, with the nine most recently open applications visible. I did get teased on my Moto X review for doing a five-second summary of call quality, so I would like to talk about that a little bit, guys. Call quality is excellent, and there are no complaints. I guess that was five seconds again. No, but seriously, the phone app is well laid out, and aside from when you're dialing by spelling the person's name, not sorting by the version of that person, because I've got some people where I have four numbers for them, that you used most recently, no complaints here. I did like being able to have access to my in-call controls, so my mute and speakerphone and all that stuff, as well as my keypad sometimes, but then there was one more other thing that bothered me a little bit, and that was when I'm in the middle of a call, and I'm dialing in, you know, like, options or pound or whatever else, it doesn't actually show up, so when you're dialing into something like a conference call, and you go, oh, I entered the wrong passkey, you can't actually double-check it. All right, so that was a lot of stuff you just heard about what I liked or didn't like based on the experience of actually using it as my daily driver, but what's the verdict, Linus? Well, it's not that simple. You can weigh the pros and cons and spec sheets all day, but the Xperia Z1 has one trump card, and since my phone is a loaner phone that I have to send back to Sony, I'll be finishing the rest of this shot in the bathtub while watching YouTube videos on my phone, so we're gonna go with a video that's actually by me. This is our build guide, and we are definitely, definitely in a filled bathtub here, guys. See, we got lots of water. We got lots of water, and we are just gonna drop that phone right in the water. You can no longer hear the sound, however, the video playback is most assuredly still running. Now, one thing to note is that the touchscreen doesn't operate very well underwater, but I guess that's pretty normal, so I'm gonna go ahead and tell it, yeah, no, it's okay that the battery's low, and we're gonna go ahead and drop it back in. So, basically, guys, who is this phone for? We're gonna hopefully overlay some underwater footage from the phone of my hairy legs here just to show you guys that it is indeed working down there, but who is it for? Well, it's for people who don't want to worry about getting wet. If you're an outdoorsy person, a party-goer, or just someone who wants to record videos in Lorraine, then all the other phones are kind of a non-factor, and you might as well just be only shopping for an Xperia waterproof phone, because that's the only one that really comes with that truly compelling feature. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you have any feedback on how we can make our phone videos better, and as always, guys, don't forget to subscribe.