Xperia Z3: Crikey, Sony – ANOTHER flagship phondleslab? The decisions that must be going on at Sony’s mobile R&D division are certainly intriguing, if not baffling. Six months after it was launched, the Xperia Z2 has been replaced by the Z3 and barely nine months after it was launched, the Z1 Compact has been replaced by the Z3 Compact (there wasn’t a Z2 Compact, so don’t panic). …
Actually that's nearer 900 Yankee Dollars at current exchange rates - $886.50 to be precise.
Don't worry though, remember that UK prices always include VAT (sales tax) at 20%. The US list price works out at just $738.75. Bargain ;)
And yes, people pay these prices. As others have said, look no further than the iPhone....
A quick glance dug up a sim-free price for the iPhone 6 of 539 quid, or just a tenner less - and that's for the low-end 16gb model.
Either way, there's not going to be many picking one up sim-free; most will pick one up on a contract. And interestingly, another quick glance at carphone warehouse shows that contracts for the iphone 6 are currently trending around a tenner (per month) higher than the equivalent contract for a Z3 (e.g. £43 vs £34.50 for a bare-bones 24-month contract with no up-front costs).
Then too, give it a few months and the Z3'll have come down in price - I wouldn't be surprised if it could be picked up for under £400 after Christmas...
With the arrival of the Xperia Z3, it’s now becoming clearer what Sony’s philosophy is regarding its flagship update programme: incremental changes every six months and evolution rather than revolution.
This is the traditional release cycle for consumer electronics, especially in Japan. Tells us a lot about how commodified the industry has become: caveat emptor, caveat vendor.
I picked up the LG G3 a month or so back - as tempting as the previews of the Z3 were, my contract was up, the S5 didn't look particularly inspiring and I didn't feel like waiting for the Z3 to come out, partly because I'm never keen on buying expensive/high-end kit during the initial launch - I much prefer waiting for the inevitable hardware/software issues to be debugged and patched out.
Speaking of which, the G3's now had 3 software patches, two of which specifically targeted performance and battery life (the third one doesn't seem to have done much other than tinker with the keyboard a wee bit). And even without enabling the "experimental" ART runtime, so far the battery life is pretty impressive; even with fairly heavy use (2-3 hours) a day as an ebook reader and the usual online timewasters such as Facebook, I'm comfortably getting 2-3 days usage on a single charge; it's easily triple what I was getting out of my (admittedly slightly aging) Galaxy S3.
... which is all a long-winded way of saying: were the comments in the article about the G3s battery life based on how well it performs now, or how badly it performed when first released? I know re-testing kit can eat up a huge amount of time, but it'd be nice to get a proper assessment of how the various flagship models compare to each other "now", rather than how things were several software revisions ago - especially since these days, software affects everything from battery life and call quality to camera performance and video quality!
- In Copper. Lovely.
- Battery life is insane. If the Duracell bunny had a phone it would be this. Uses 20% of a charge a day. When your old phone reaches 50%, its shit I need a charger. When I hit 40% I think, might need to charge at the weekend.
- Its so light and thin you worry about dropping it and can barely tell its in your jeans.
- Walkman app is not good, or any other Sony software in my experience.
- If you buy a Shix over this you are in serious need of mental help.
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