Newsletter
Sony is promoting their trio of devices announced at this year’s IFA in Berlin, Xperia Z3, Xperia Z3 Compact and Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact, via their official webpage. Under the title “3+3+3 things you didn’t know the Xperia Z3 series could do…” Japan-based giant explains all kinds of features that these devices posses in order to persuade you to buy the phone. All three of these devices are extremely powerful and boast Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 chips along with water and dust proofing along with a slew of other goodies. Let’s see what Sony has to say.
First thing they mention is NFC. “We were NFC before it was cool”, Sony’s devices feature NFC since 2012 and their Xperia S smartphone. Sony goes on and promotes its headphones, says these devices can recognize Sony’s headset if you’re using it and that the device will automatically optimize sound for the headphones. All you have to do is access Settings – Sound – Audio Settings – Headphones and that’s it. Pause when capturing video is yet another interesting feature. You don’t have to stop the video when you’re recording, you can simply pause it and continue where you left off. This is quite useful if you don’t want to do some post processing (stitching files together) or something like that and you just have to pause when recording for some reason.
Moving on to the next three features… screen recording, well this is neat. You could do that on Android devices only if they ran certain ROMS or if they’re rooted, but in Xperia Z3 line of devices you can do that out of the box, without any tinkering what so ever. You can do that by long pressing the power button and hitting “Record Screen” when offer, the phone will then start recording whatever you’re doing on your screen. This feature can really come in handy. Regular screenshots are here as well, as in basically any Android device. Sony also mentions quick settings (Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact only). You can access this feature with a two-finger swipe down and from there you can drag and drop what setting you want directly into the tray and load them into the full settings app. This gives you control over your settings, personalization is always good. Battery life is another feature this Japanese company is trying to promote. Sony says that the Xperia Z3 will last up to two days on a single charge and if you turn “Stamina Mode”, it will last even longer than that (if you want to take Sony’s word on it of course). This mode will of course limit phone’s functions as any other extreme battery saver.
The last three functions the mentioned are… smart screen rotation, this basically determines how the screen should be rotated based on the way you’re holding your device and allegedly prevents unwanted rotations. I have no idea how accurate is this feature, but it’s there. Gestures are also here, gestures like double tap to wake and turning device on its face to mute the incoming call while brining the phone to your ear will answer it. These are just some of gesture features packed into the software. The last, but not the least, is unlock with SmartWear. This of course means that you can take advantage of additional features if you own and use Sony’s SmartWear products such as SmartBand and SmartBand Talk. The device will basically unlock if you bring either of those close to it. This feature works with basically any of Sony’s bluetooth accessories. Settings – Security – Screen lock – Bluetooth unlock, this is where you can set up this feature, simply locate your device, press “Continue” and then press the power key… that’s it.