Toader
Master Member
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 2,754
- Reaction score
- 368
I hope the new update will improve all the faults.I am back from my trip in New York, and here's a short summary of my user experience so far:
1. Battery life is GOOD.
Using the phone as my main camera for half the trip, I still had around >40% battery life by 7pm (fully charged at 100% from 10am). If I happened to return to the hotel, I could just do a quick charge and be out again till 2 to 3am. I never ever had to use the portable battery charger in my bag, and I felt confident shooting photos AND videos without the fear of the battery dying on me.
2. Phone gets really hot in the sun when shooting photos and videos.
I experienced extremely hot weather (real feel 32 to 37 degrees) with really strong sun on a couple of days, and the phone got hot very quickly especially when I was shooting 120fps video, which is expected. The camera shuts down about a minute into the recording. I had to let it cool for at least 30 seconds before restarting the camera app. This only happened when it was around 12 to 2pm and the sun was intensely bright. Throughout my 9-day trip I would say the overheating issue only happened less than 10 times.
3. The dangerous "screen stuck" bug
As some of you may have seen my post last week, my phone hanged THREE TIMES one day when using the camera. I had to restart the phone manually by pressing down the volume down and screen lock buttons, and even it's a trial and error process as the phone doesn't restart immediately. On the three occasions, it took five minutes and an hour to restart. On the second instance that it hanged, the signal bands also got corrupted and I was unable to connect to phone, data and wifi networks until I reset the connection settings.
Fortunately this has never happened since, but it gave me so much anxiety that day. Doesn't help that New York doesn't have a Sony Store any more so I probably wasn't able to get help if I couldn't restart my phone.
4. Other slightly annoying bugs
- The Gallery app is SUPER BUGGY. Photos that are taken with the Basic camera mode sometimes do not appear in the gallery and it takes a minute for it to refresh. I'm perplexed that a flagship camera phone has such a clunky and honestly embarrassing photo management app - it even prompts you to PAY for the upgraded version from time to time.
- When sharing a photo from Gallery to Lightroom Mobile, sometimes the photo isn't imported and you have to repeat the Share process again.
- Fingerprint reader sometimes cannot read my thumb, especially after I've washed my hands / come out of the shower.
- Colour layout of the app drawer and apps like Instagram gets slightly corrupted when switching between apps/tabs. For example, if you are using dark mode on Instagram, switching between apps or windows could cause the top of the Instagram app to become white.
- When using Google Maps in New York, sometimes it says the accuracy is low and prompts me to calibrate again by using the camera to detect my surroundings. Not sure if it was a phone problem or network issue (I was on Mint Mobile which uses T-Mobile, will recommend getting a SIM card there as I tried using M1 data passport on the first day and it was incredibly slow.)
5. Camera is EXCELLENT.
Will give more details when I post samples, but all in all as a photographer I am impressed with it.
Looks very promising as stated by Zackbucks.