One Month With The Sony Xperia 5 IV
Sony Xperia. It’s probably my favourite brand right now simply because of what it provides to someone like me doing YouTube videos and to everyone else by keeping the features we had come to love and expect from our premium smartphones. They’re by no means perfect and they’re not for everyone, but the Mk IV series is definitely the best from Xperia yet.
So as the title alluded to I have been using the Xperia 5 Mk IV for around a month now. I had the 1 Mk IV for a month back in September and absolutely loved it. The 5 series though is the one I’ve used the most and there are some great upgrades over last years Mk III. There are however a few caveats.
There’s a matte finish on the back, wireless charging, a hugely improved front camera and a 5000mah battery. Yeah I still have no idea how they’ve managed to get all of that in a body this compact. And yeah it even has a headphone jack with all of that. This does leave us with one differentiator compared to its bigger brother however and that’s in the camera department. The wide and ultrawide are identical as is the front cam but the telephoto is a traditional fixed focus lens. That’s at 2.5x. So it doesn’t have the fancy true zoom lens of the 1 Mk IV simply because of space constraints. I’m actually really happy Sony went this route as I prefer a telephoto that’s a more suitable focal length for portrait shots, but no doubt some will see this as a downgrade to last years variable zoom lens. You can still get some really lovely shots with the telephoto, even with a little digital zoom in good lighting conditions.
Performance and battery life on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are both solid. Sony drew a lot of criticism when the 1 Mk IV released due to the phone overheating for many. They definitely underestimated just how toasty that 8 Gen 1 can get when you push it. Subsequent updates have helped a lot as has changing the default settings in Videography Pro so that it isn’t using that Seamless Zoom feature straight out of the box. The issue with this in particular is that it has all three rear lenses activated at the same time. It’s especially intensive when recording high resolution and higher frame rate footage like 4k/60fps. When I did my initial testing with the Xperia 1 IV during what was the end of our summer period and at over 20c ambient temperatures, using the Seamless Zoom I could record 5 minutes of 4k/60fps footage. When I turned this off though…nearly 17minutes! Quite the difference. I do wonder if this was something many noticed upon covering the phones initially.
So thermal management is much better, but if you’re playing games on the highest settings you will find it’s a similar story with throttling due to high temperatures. Fortunately Xperia’s Game Enhancer gives you all of the options to customise the responsiveness of the touch input to the refresh rate of the screen. If you know what you’re doing you can manage it well enough. I do love whacking the settings up on Pokémon GO though. It feels better to play than any other phone I’ve used, and before this I was using the Galaxy Fold 4 with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1! I did a stream the other day playing League of Legends: Wild Rift with my buddy Mitch (check out our new venture over at Mobile Gamer Tech btw) and I had the Xperia 5 IV plugged into a capture card, playing the game on balanced settings which was super smooth, no issues for nearly ninety minutes and I only lost 29% of the battery. Very impressed! And I had all sorts of issues with the Galaxy Fold 4 doing the same thing two weeks previous to that.
The build quality is excellent. It feels more solid than previous 5 series. Haptics are much improved, even more so than the 1 IV weirdly. The screen is responsive and bright, the fingerprint reader is the best implementation of the feature out there still and I’m enjoying being back on an Xperia camera system. Haven’t done that much in the way of photography yet but as always it’s a capable system and produces lovely natural shots. It’s always great having a physical shutter button too. Then there’s that headphone jack, which I’m finding super useful to use with my IEM’s and for recording video by plugging in the Rode Wireless GO. Having a MicroSD card slot to easily offload all of that footage is the icing on the cake.
One negative for me right now which isn’t something really in Sony’s control but there’s not much in the way of 3rd party accessories in regards to cases and screen protectors. The only well known case I could get was from Spigen and their Rugged Armour range, which is the same case I had for the 1 IV. It’s a great case but I really wish there were more options. I bought a glass screen protector from a random brand. Sad to see Spigen didn’t have one like they did for the 1 IV as it was sublime. With this one I found the touch responsiveness to be affected quite badly so had to remove it.
The biggest issue with the phone early on was that it wasn’t keeping apps open in the background. RAM management seemed to be super aggressive and the phone would start to get super janky when switching between apps as they would constantly need to re-open. This also coincided with another bug that would cause they refresh rate of the phone to drop to 60hz. This could be rectified by going into the display settings and toggling 120hz off then back on. Alternatively restarting the phone did the same. Fortunately just over a week into owning the phone Sony pushed an update that seems to have fixed most of the issues. It has introduced an occasional hard lock up and restart but now the phone is mostly great so I can excuse it for the time being.
Honestly there’s not a lot more Sony could have done to make this a better phone. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 coupled with Sony’s lack of a good thermal solution is definitely the main drawback with the phone but Sony as ever are uncompromising on their vision. I’m even more excited to see what they deliver in 2023 with the Mk V series.
