 The Sony Xperia Z1 was for me a great concept and an otherwise truly excellent phone, let down by a really crummy TN panel screen. Let's find out if its successor, the Z2, improves enough of the right things to win my coveted the screen doesn't suck and it's otherwise pretty good too award. The Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 drive from Corsair provides SSD like performance and fits comfortably in your pocket. Click now to learn more. Things started off on a high note when I pulled this custom Xperia Z2, more on this later and possibly an exciting surprise, out of its custom box and discovered that Sony has a wireless data transfer wizard now in addition to their older PC based one. Thumbs up. During the setup process you're prompted to create an optional Sony account which handles helping you track down your phone or wipe it if you lose it and then you are dumped onto the home screen where we get our first look at the Z2's preloaded apps. Most of these unfortunately are here to help you buy content from Sony but things do get a little bit better. The second page ships with useful widgets for the camera, gallery and Walkman Music playback app and while there's no shortcut here Sony also includes a rudimentary backup and restore app, something I feel like stock Android is really missing. Onto the product tour and ergonomics. Base specs wise we've got a Snapdragon 801 processor at 2.3 GHz with 3 gigs of RAM, 16 gigs of onboard storage, a 3200 mAh battery, wireless AC and LTE and an aluminum slash glass ID that I find absolutely beautiful. So on the surface compared to the Z1 it's basically now with 30% more GEN but looking past that starting at the front of the phone we find one significant improvement almost immediately. That screen has gotten more than a 0.2 inch upgrade. It's an IPS panel now instead of a TN panel. That means dramatically better viewing angles and colors and you can even change white balance to suit your preference now with software. So I guess that's it. Review over. The Z2 is the Z1 but with the big glaring issue addressed. No no wait. Basically there's other stuff too. Hold on. Also on the front we find a 2.2 megapixel selfie camera and what's this? Front facing speakers. They're loud, they sound good and most importantly they're actually aiming the sound at your ears. Congratulations Sony Xperia Z2 owners. You now get to join the club of cool kids who don't watch videos in a mirror to be able to hear what's going on. On the top we find a mic for active noise cancellation and a waterproof open headset jack. On the left is a sim and charging port slot with that same cheesy cover flap. On the bottom is a wrist strap loop and the main microphone. Then on the right is a covered micro SD slot, the lock button whose side position I find perfect for larger phones like this. A volume rocker and a dedicated camera button. Something I wish that more phones had. Finally on the back is a 20.7 megapixel main camera and one tone flash with a glass backing material that's covered up by this custom skin. Speaking of skins, onto the software. Sony's skin hasn't changed a whole bunch since the last time that I used it. They haven't really altered much from stock Android either but there are a few things I noticed. So first up, messing with the way that Google Now works is not okay. There's no Google Now from the lock screen and this is much more upsetting. Like LG, Sony has added extra crap to the Google Now swipe up. This needs to stop. I don't want to be trying to voice control my phone and end up on a shopping page for recent songs. Changing gears, I'm pleased with the improvements they've made to the keyboard. I'd like to see vertical resizeability like on the LG G3 because I found the space bar's position a little low because of the phone's very small chin bar. But overall the correction was good, the keyboard was responsive and this is the first time doing a phone review I haven't bothered to switch to SwiftKey in quite some time. Highlighting text for copy paste though, in certain places like the Chrome address bar, is now done by double tapping instead of long pressing. I'd probably get used to it if it was everywhere but here in Gmail it's long press instead so that was kind of weird and threw me off. Unlike the Z1 skin which had a nice little quick toggles cluster above your notifications, on the Z2 Sony has moved them to a separate quick setting screen like everyone else and while they can be customized, some key stuff is missing like a flashlight toggle so I needed to install power toggles. Bummer. Multitasking is the same as the old one though so vertical scrolling with only three items visible at a time. They have added a favorites bar which is interesting, it lets you open small apps and widgets has a little mini app. I guess it's kind of neat for quickly checking emails or tweets but I didn't find myself using it much. Speaking of apps, app management within the app tray is still excellent. The app layout and rearranging feel snappier than other devices I've used and the app tray is boss with a search function, a variety of sorting options and a link to the play store available by swiping in from the left. Continuing to dig through the menus and settings, I wasn't too impressed. I did find a super badass glove friendly mode that works even if you have something over your fingers but all in all there's not too much customizability with only bare bones accessibility and some hard of hearing friendly stuff changing wallpapers and the like. There's actually just a single lonely gesture control on the entire phone although it is probably the one that people are most likely to use, this one. Do the answer. Anyway, so then I checked out a sub menu that I rarely venture into and Sony got my attention. Sound enhancement features normally really turn me off and the reverb-y surround presets fall into that category but Sony does have a couple of things in here that are actually worth turning on. Dynamic normalizer increases the volume of quiet stuff and reduces the volume of loud stuff in your media library without appreciably harming audio quality for my time using it. This is great if you have a wide variety of tracks in your music library at different volume levels or if you have a particular YouTuber you like to watch whose video volume is always too low. And then the other one is their equalizer. It's hardly the most comprehensive awesome software EQ ever but it's free and better than nothing which is what most player software has. And now that I've switched from Power Amp to Google Play Music for the subscription service system-wide EQ was really nice to have. Moving on to the camera and the app, low-light performance didn't really blow me away with more noise than I'd like in images taken indoors but coming from the 1M8 having image stabilization even if it's digital was great and being able to zoom thanks to all of them megapixels was nice as well. Dedicated buttons for still and video recording is a feature that should be in every camera app and switching between modes while a little unintuitive if you're not familiar with the locations of their icons is at least fairly fast. Speaking of modes they range from I'd use that all the time like 720p 120fps slow motion with audio and 4k video capture and a neat mode that lets you take a picture first with the subject in focus then with the background in focus and adjust the perceived depth of field to wow I'd use that once for a laugh and otherwise I wish Sony had spent their time working on anything else like info eye which gives you information about like landmarks and wine that you take pictures of and this AR effect that lets you put dinosaurs in your studio fish in your backyard and silly masks on all of your co-workers. Which leads us to the conclusion over six months ago I reviewed the Xperia Z1 from Sony and came away impressed by the phenomenal battery life and better than anything else I'd ever used haptic feedback and all that oops continued here I easily have 35 plus percent battery life left at the end of the day and while I didn't like the screen of the old one that's been fixed along with some other incremental improvements leaving me well sad to say that this will be my last day using the Xperia Z2 as my daily driver phone because it really is a fantastic phone but Linus you might say this was a really positive review of a phone that appears to totally kick and is dust proof and waterproof down to actually being submerged to boot why aren't you gonna keep using it because I'm giving it away. Dbrand generously or Dbrand I actually don't know whatever they generously offered us this custom skinned phone when they saw me decline some requests on Twitter for a video of the Z2 because I couldn't get a review unit with the catch being that they wanted me to give away the custom Linus Tech Tips wrapped phone with a screen protector on it and a matching wrapped box to one lucky viewer so all you need to do is check the link in the video description or click here if you have annotations enabled for the full details on how to win this phone with its one-of-a-kind skin designed by Edzel here at Linus Media Group. So that's it guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you dislike it leave a comment letting us know what you thought of our review of the Z2 what do you think stands out to you about this phone don't leave a comment with to win the phone that's not how it works please click the link everyone gets confused by that as usual we do also have in the video description a link for how to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback when you buy stuff or if you love what we do so much you want to contribute monthly then we have an option for that as well we really appreciate your support thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe