Sony Xperia Z1 Ultra review

Remember the time I got tired of using a 4 inch screen phones and decided to sell one of them? No? Well I did and I put it up for sell on Mudah and it got snapped up within hours. Who doesn’t want a perfectly good second hand 64GB iphone 5 on the cheap right? There I was, content with using one phone only.

Not. Ha ha.



You know I’ve got to have another backup phone since my iPhone can’t last the whole day without charging. So I looked around for my next smartphone, it’ll be an Android with at least 5" screen. After much research and reading reviews, I was set on Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 2 phone. It has a 5.5” screen, 16GB ROM and the design is quite nice. However as fate would have it, I decided to look around Mudah first before purchasing the Redmi Note. That’s when I caught my eye on the Sony Xperia Z1 Ultra, a massive 6.3” smartphone. Although second hand, it still looks good and the big screen is a major plus point. So I found one guy in Shah Alam wanting to sell his Xperia Z1 Ultra, we met up and before long I was a proud owner of a Sony Z1 Ultra. Or is it?



First impression: the screen was really huge. It barely fit my jeans pocket and I definitely need to use both hands to operate it. It has an SD card slot which curiously can support only up to 32GB. The first thing I did was attempt to root the phone so that I can move apps to the memory card. Unfortunately it seems that I don’t have much talent in rooting Android phones so after like a dozen tries I still didn’t manage to root the damn phone. So I gave up and resigned myself to use the standard Sony Xperia UI which is far from the best UI you can get for Android.



As I said the screen is huge so watching movies or video clips on the Z1 Ultra is a real pleasure. What else is good about the Z1? Hmm that’s about it. So why did I sell of the phone 3 days later? It’s the terrible camera. As you can see from the sample photos, terrible doesn’t even began to describe the pictures. When I first tested the phone, it was inside a restaurant and the lighting wasn’t that bright so I thought that’s why the pictures looked weird. However when I continued to use the phone’s camera for the next few days I came to the realisation that it’s not the low light, the Z1 just simply take shitty pictures. Either that or the unit that I bought already has a damaged camera module. I’m suspecting the latter.

A sight for sore eyes

Whatever it is I couldn’t bear the thought of using a smartphone with a wonky camera hence why I put it up for sale in less than 36 hours after I bought. To the poor fella that bought the Z1 Ultra, I’m sorry that you had to live with that crappy camera. If he’s wise, he’d sell it off just as quickly as I did. A few days later I ultimately bought the Redmi Note 2 phone. It’s a wonderful phone, miles better than the Z1 Ultra. So that’s the story how I bought and sold a phone within 36 hours. Do yourself a favor next time you plan to buy a secondhand phone - test the camera properly and thoroughly. Don’t make the same mistake as I have.