Superb battery life, 4k video and a new take on a classic sony design. There’S a lot going on with Sony’s Xperia XA2. Last year’s Xperia XA1 was a great mid-range phone, but now we have the XA2 which tries to improve on in almost every way. The Xperia XA2 brings a style familiar to Sony fans. This model has the signature rounded sides and squared off corners along with minimal side bezels. Just as before the top and bottom edges are flat. You can even stand the phone up on a table if you want to. It is a bit heavier and thicker than last year’s model, partly due to the phone’s larger battery pack. It’s a bit chubby but actually feels pretty comfortable in the hand. A metal frame gives the phone a bit of a premium feel, but the curved backside is plastic. The matte material doesn’t feel cheap, though it does take some effort to clean. One thing that is missing is waterproofing. We do miss having it on Sony‘s mid-range phones.
The fingerprint reader is placed on the back instead of Sony’s usual spot on the side. It’s fast, accurate and even functional for users, though, we did notice a slight delay when waking up your phone. At the bottom are a USB C port and a single speaker. It’s loud and really nice sounding, there is a 3.5-millimeter jack too. Sony hasn’t switched to Apple’s trends just yet. Sound output is good through the headphones.
The Sony Xperia XA2 comes with 32 gigs of storage as standard and it is expandable with a memory card and as we’ve come to appreciate from Sony, there’s a dedicated two-step button that activates the autofocus and camera. The Sony Xperia XA2 has a 5.2 inch IPS LCD display, with a 4h D resolution higher resolution higher than last year’s model. The display brings the same good brightness maxing at over 530 minutes. The blacks and contrasts are good too, for an LCD sunlight. Legibility is just average, though colors aren’t too accurate and run a little bit on the cool side, there are options to make them super vivid in settings.
Sony users should feel right at home with the Xperia UI. Not much has changed and most of the changes are under the hood. As usual, the swept down gesture shows a screen of the apps you use most along with app recommendations and a search bar apps are always stored in an app drawer. We appreciate the multimedia ones that Sony has pre-installed and a bunch of themes and wallpapers are available to customize. The look of your home Green inside the XA2. Sony has gone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630, stepping up from the media tech chipsets of the past, together with three gigs of RAM. It performs great, it holds its own against the mid-range competition in benchmarks and stays cool even with heavy use, and everything is smooth with no stutter when opening and closing apps. This processor is also good for battery life and with a larger 3300 milliamp-hour battery, battery life is great. It earned an endurance rating of 92 hours and a proprietary tests.
When the battery is low, we can charge back up quickly thanks to quick charge 3.0. The Xperia, XA2 brings the same main camera setup that we saw last year, a 23 megapixel F 2.0 single shooter with phase detection autofocus. It also now brings more features previously seen in Sony flagships when shooting with the default superior auto mode. The XA2 does a nice job at adjusting itself to different scenes. Daylight shots look good with a lot of fine detail and decent dynamic range. There is a touch of corner softness, but it’s hardly noticeable in low-light images. Look soft as the noise reduction reduces the level of detail. You can go for longer shutter speeds. if you have a tripod, this way low-light images look a lot nicer.
The XA2’s selfie camera is 8 megapixels too, and it is missing the autofocus at the XA1. The selfies are a bit soft and the captured level of detail leaves more to be desired, but you do have the option for a wide 120-degree field of view, so you can fit all of your friends into the shot. 4K videos have good contrast and accurate colors, decent dynamic range, and electronic stabilization detail is perhaps a bit average, but these videos are still a huge upgrade over last year’s, so with the Xperia XA2, Sony has brought a lot of positive changes with this phone, including the sharper High-Res screen much better battery life, Android Oreo, and 4k video. We do wish we could say the same about the selfie camera which has actually been downgraded from last year. But if selfies aren’t your biggest priority, the XA2 still makes for an excellent upper mid-range phone.
