Performance: Powerful Yet Meaty

Unlike near smaller-sized Android devices out at that place, Sony hasn't held back on the hardware in this flagship compact handset. We're looking at a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974-AA SoC with a two.15 GHz quad-core Krait 400 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 450 MHz, 32-chip dual-channel LPDDR3 memory controller with 12.8 GB/south of bandwidth, a Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP clocked at 600 MHz, plus integrated connectivity options.

It'southward interesting to note that the MSM8974-AA's CPU has been downclocked 11 MHz from the maximum clock speed of ii.26 GHz to 2.15 GHz. This shouldn't affect performance greatly, and is likely due to thermal restraints; the Z1 Compact tin can get quite warm when the SoC is existence fully utilized, so this slight downclock may stop the drinking glass from fracturing in farthermost circumstances, for example.

The connectivity options integrated into the Snapdragon 800 include Category 4 LTE (bands i, two, 3, 4, v, seven, 8, 20), HSPA+ (at 850, 900, 1700, 1900 and 2100 MHz frequencies), quad-band GSM, Bluetooth iv.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/1000/due north/ac on both 2.four GHz and 5 GHz bands, plus IZAT Gen8B GPS+GLONASS. A separate bit facilitates NFC interconnectivity.

Other major specifications include 2 GB of RAM and sixteen GB of internal storage. Out of the box, xi.79 GB is available to use, indicating approximately 4 GB of storage is reserved for the device'due south firmware. Usually 12 GB of user storage isn't all that much if you desire to use information technology for more than than just apps, merely the Xperia Z1 Meaty does have a microSD menu slot, allowing y'all to expand the storage by up to 64 GB.

General performance from the Xperia Z1 Compact is as skilful every bit whatsoever flagship Android smartphone that I've used in the past few months. The operating system with its lite-on OEM skin is fast to navigate and fluid to use, and the powerful quad-core CPU is more capable of manipulating web pages with ease. Chrome and Android have also evolved to the state where you can really take 100 tabs opened in the browser and yet employ it without any slowdown.

Gaming on the Xperia Z1 Meaty is an interesting proposition, because the Adreno 330 GPU but has to return to a 720p display, every bit opposed to the 1080p panels it usually is paired with; a total pixel count that'south 55% lower means ameliorate performance in games. With that said, the Adreno 330 is typically more than fast plenty for 1080p gaming, so it has no trouble maintaining a steady lx frames per 2d at 720p.

Like the Xperia Z1 before it, the Xperia Z1 Meaty cheats in one of the benchmarks we run on the device: Vellamo. By cheating, I hateful there is specific lawmaking within the system software that detects when Vellamo is running, and forces the CPU to run at its maximum clock speed of 2.15 GHz regardless of the load on the system. This type of behaviour is dodgy and tin bear upon the results nosotros get from our benchmarks, which effort to replicate real-world situations.

In our CPU benchmarks, ii of which are run in the stock browser, the Xperia Z1 Compact falls inside the bracket of Snapdragon 800 devices I've reviewed in the past. The 11 MHz downclocking doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on performance at all, which isn't surprising considering information technology's merely 5% lower than other devices.

When examining GPU performance, in offscreen tests the Z1 Compact performs as expected compared to other devices with Adreno 330 GPUs. Notwithstanding when the resolution is taken into account, the Z1 Meaty understandably outperforms 1080p devices like the Xperia Z1. In GFXBench's T-Rex Hard disk benchmark, the Z1 Compact's onscreen operation is 45% higher with a 55% lower resolution.

During my time with the Sony Xperia Z1 Meaty I found no issues with LTE operation, NFC connectivity or Bluetooth. Wi-Fi 802.11n performance on the 2.4 GHz band was adequate likewise, although testing on 5 GHz gave a few dropout issues. The device too features 802.11ac if y'all have a router that supports the latest Wi-Fi spec.