Sony Xperia X Performance Unlocked smartphone, 32GB Black

I had read a LOT of phone reviews before settling on the Xperia X Performance & I feel I chose well.PROS* Camera: Great camera! The colors are incredible & I've found the camera's focus to be excellent. It takes about 2 seconds to fully launch the camera from sleep, which for me is pretty great. Video is excellent as well & while it isn't supported out of the box, there is a way to enable 4K video on this phone. I'm not sure why they chose to disable it, but you can re-enable it & it looks great.* Performance: 3GB of RAM & a Snapdragon 820, it runs great! I've run high-end games, streaming video, browsed media-heavy pages, edited 1K+ row spreadsheets in Google Sheets & MS Excel, all a what I'd consider to be extremely impressive speeds. I've read reviews to the contrary, but this hasn't been my experience.* Design: Aesthetics are 'meh' but the form factor is nice. A bit of a smaller screen/phone than I'm used to. However, I should note I'm 6'2 & 240lbs so my wife has suggested maybe the phone isn't small to everyone. I'm also used to a near phablet screen, so there's that.* Screen: The display is sharp, great colors.* Battery: Battery is middle-of-the-road, I'd say. I don't know if the OS/hardware has some kind of heuristic learning? The first day the battery dropped really fast, even if idle. The more I use it, however, it seems the more that isn't the case. I've had the phone about a week & a day of calls, email & gaming only get me down to about 73%. Idle works really well now too - would be interested toCONS* Cooling: I shot video of my kids playing outside in the pool this weekend. It was about 82 F & I'd only been shooting outside for maybe 5 minutes when the phone gave me a warning the temperature was rising, & if it continued to do so it would auto-shut off. The phone was pretty hot, but I'm not sure how much was the case I have for it vs the environment + video recording. I haven't had any problems recording indoors for long periods of time, so I will try again w/o the case & update my review.* Design: The screen bevels just a little bit. It doesn't hurt the display at all, but I note it as a negative because this could be a problem if you drop it. On the cases I bought, it looks like the glass may bevel enough to stick out more than the case if dropped, which would result in a busted screen.NOTE: I should note that my previous phone was an Alcatel Idol 4. Some of the reviews I had read about the Xperia said that the reviewer thought their phone took better pics, even at a lower resolution. That might be true, results are subjective is my point. I upgraded from a junk phone to this. If you already own an iPhone 6 or something, you may not be as impressed as I have been.

Even if I use a phone - it drains battery.Get off charger at 7am, till 10am used the phone for about 1-1.5 hours. Battery is it 65% already. Not using phone at all till 4pm - battery is at 15%.While driving with Google Maps it uses about 1% of charge every minute.Absolutely worthless - returning the phone.

I want to ammend my rather lukewarm review, after using this phone for a long while, and using another very well reviewed android phone (and my wife's iphone).Sony in general makes excellent Android phones. Sony ususally dots their "i"s and crosses their "t"s when it comes to phone design. In other words, the engineering is usually excellent down to the very small details, with some exceptions on some models.You don't realize this until you start using another manufacturer's phone, and find out some aspect of the phone design irritates you or bugs you and there's nothing to be done about it. I wish I could be more specific, but phones have become so complex and new models come out so often...Sony does have one problem in that they have too many models which don't improve on the previous ones much. Sony phones really depreciate because of this. However, this phone in particular, and Sony phones in general, function very predictably, you can count on them day in and out.Once you get a good Sony Android phone, it is very hard to go back to another manufacturer.I can't do it. I bought a $600 phone (very well reviewed) and I just can't warm up to it, there are small omissions and errors in the user interface and a few other aspects that ruin the phone's functionality. So I'm buying my 4th Sony phone.In this particular model, if you can get it at a good price, do it.-------------------------------------------Compared to a Xperia z3 plus which I have as a backup, it is interesting how this phone (xperia x performance) does not represent much improvement.1) Battery life is no better or even slightly worse than the z3 plus. In other words, battery life is on the bad end of the scale. You will only get 2 day battery life if you barely use the phone. And I am an experienced Android user, so I know how to disable apps, use Marshmallow, etc. etc. Believe me (as Donald Trump says) the battery life on this phone is BAD.2) Display is no better than on the z3 plus. The x performance is much brighter and may be slightly sharper, but at equivalent brightness levels, there is no real difference (the z3 plus has to be turned up higher on the slider to match the brightness of the x performance).HOWEVER, the z3 plus is a 5.2 inch screen whereas the x performance is a 5 inch screen, so in this regard the z3 plus is better. You would think you'd pay a penalty in phone size, but actually the z3 plus is only slightly larger (hxw and this is hardly noticeable) and is actually lighter weight and thinner. Plus the white balance of the x performance had to be adjusted (RGB in the settings).3. Speed. Yes the x performance is perhaps subjectively 10 percent faster but no more. The heating issues of the z3 plus are largely solved and both phones heat up when the camera is used. Perhaps the z3 plus heats up a more, but both have heating issues when using the camera.I can only imagine that the standard xperia x is not even as fast as the z3 plus4. Camera. Both are 20 mp cameras, but the x performance camera has more options and somewhat better image quality.5. Speakers. Here the x performance has much better audio because of the front facing speakers. Voices are especially coherent, with good high frequency reproduction. Vast advantage to the x performance.4. Construction. I never had a problem with all glass construction and the plastic side panels and aluminum back of the x, at least to me, do not represent an improvement.I should have listened to the professional reviews and not bought this phone. I should not have thrown away the box or else I would return it. It is not a bad phone obviously, but is hardly an improvement over a Sony phone which is 2-3 generations old.