What is the Sony Xperia XA2?
The Sony Xperia XA2 is a mid-price Android phone. It’s more affordable than value giants like the Honor 9 and OnePlus 5T, but more expensive than budget classics like the Moto G5.
Specs-wise it falls between these two categories, but is ultimately much closer to the lower tier. Like other Sony phones, it doesn’t set any new standards in terms of the sheer amount of phone you get per pound or dollar.
However, it’s a solid option whose camera performs better than some in daylight conditions.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Design
The Sony Xperia XA2 looks quite a lot like other Xperia phones. However, it’s not a straight refresh of the Sony Xperia XA1 from last year.
This phone is thicker and heavier. And now 18:9 screen phones are starting to appear at lower prices, like the Huawei P Smart, the thin borders to the left and right of the display no loner stand out.
If you considered a Sony Xperia last time you upgraded your phone, you probably know whether you like Sony’s styling or not. Its phones are slick—looking moody rectangles. Bigger Sony phones often get called monolithic, but the more pocket-friendly Xperia XA2 simply seems a little heavy for the first day. Then you’ll probably forget all about it. It’s pretty pocket and hand friendly.
Its construction is also different to the top-end Xperias. Its sides are metal, the standard choice, but the back is plastic rather than glass or metal. Some of you may not mind: plastic doesn’t shatter, and doesn’t tend to show wear as readily as painted or coated aluminium. But it does mark the XA2 out as a lower-end model.
Other frills you miss out include water resistance — the XA2 has no official rating — and stereo speakers. Some Xperias use the call driver to act as a second speaker, but this one just has a driver on the bottom edge. Play games and the audio comes at you in plain mono, and clearly from one side.
That said, sound quality is fine. It’s not too thin, and manages to compete with the sound of a shower, as you’re in it.
The fingerprint scanner is good too. It sits on the back, and indented circle, and is reasonably fast and very reliable. Storage is only the norm for the price, 32GB, but this is a Sony phone, not a deliberatly disruptive Honor or Xiaomi.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Screen
One of the Sony Xperia XA2’s main upgrades over the XA1 is screen resolution. It’s a 1080p display, the last was 720p. However, if Sony tried to sell a 720p phone for £299 in 2018, it’d get laughed out of Carphone Warehouse. Metaphorically.
Sony gives you a great choice of screen characters. With no display optimisation at all, the Xperia XA2 looks very calm and natural, very “sRGB”, for the screen nerds out there. Most of you will find this mode a little low energy, though.
There are also Standard and Vivid modes, and Vivid gets you much closer to the highly saturated style of your average £500-800 phone. I often turn my nose up at screens with too-strong colour, but Sony always seems to pull it off well.
Typical of Sony, the Xperia XA2’s screen tone is one the cool side, every-so-slightly blue-ish, but you can alter this with colour temperature controls.
This isn’t a super-fancy screen. It’s not an OLED, doesn’t have ultra-high pixel density or a curved panel, but the Xperia XA2 display doesn’t actually look that far off that of a more expensive phone, quality-wise.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Software
The Sony Xperia XA2 runs Android 8.0. Sony’s custom interface sits on top of this, and it looks just as it does in other Xperias.
Like the hardware design, it’s quite grown-up and slick-looking. However, it’s actually quite different from most other recent Androids.
Your average new Android has a vertical-scrolling apps menu like a Google Pixel 2. The Sony Xperia XA2 has pages. You flick through them with right-to-left swipes. I’ve been using the phone for a couple of weeks at this point. I’m used to it.
However, switching back to the HTC U11+ just earlier today, I do prefer the vertical style at this point. There’s simply less gestures involved for the same result.
The interface comes with a bunch of pleasant wallpapers, and you can use themes to customise the Xperia XA2’s look further. As with other phone themes, the quality is hit and miss.
Sony has added more apps than some here, but the only ones you might call bloat are the Kobo ebook reader and AVG virus protection. The others are Sony’s classic media apps. And criticising them too much feels like telling a professional violinist that string instruments are a bit rubbish. Sony has used these as a defining part of its Android experience, well, forever.
You get a decent gallery app, a slick music player, a local video player and an app called Video & TV Sideview, which lets you play content stored on your home network. None of these are a reason to buy the Xperia XA2, but all are decent.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Performance
For the first week the Sony Xperia XA2 seemed very fast. In the last few days I’ve noticed the odd blip though. There’s the occasional pause switching between apps. Of course, some of this will be down to the apps themselves. The only pause I’ve found annoying is the camera app load time.
You want the camera to load up near-instantly so you can take spur of the moment shots. But the Xperia XA2 can take around three seconds to get you to the point of being able to hit the shutter button: not really good enough.
General performance of the Sony Xperia XA2 is good, though. Occasional blip aside, it’s responsive, smooth and apps are usually quick to load.
The phone has a Snapdragon 630 chipset, a newer version of the CPU used by the Moto G5S Plus. It has eight Cortex-A53 cores, nothing too special, but Qualcomm has put a fairly punchy Adreno 508 graphics chipset into this processor.
It’s nowhere near the performance of the top-end phones, but significantly outperforms many other phones in the sub-£300 range.
High-end games like Asphalt 8 run very well, with perceptibly better frame rates than most in the class. Well, if you pay close attention anyway.
It makes me wish Sony had made the leap to an 18:9 screen with this phone, though. Games that use involved on-screen controls just feel (and look) better with a wider screen, because there’s just more room for your fingers.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Camera
The Sony Xperia XA2 has roughly the same rear camera setup as the Xperia XA1. There’s a single 23-megapixel camera on the back, with a large 1/2.3-inch sensor.
One early criticism to get out of the way is one I mentioned earlier: the camera app is slow to load. Thankfully, there’s not the same annoying lag between taking shots. It’s slower to shoot than a Samsung Galaxy S8, but it is responsive enough.
Open up day-lit shots on your laptop and they’ll generally look very sharp and punchy, much more so than most “affordable” phones with 13-megapixel sensors. Apart from the final 10% to the extreme left and right of the image anyway. Like previous high-res Xperias, there’s quite serious loss of sharpness towards the edge of the frame. It’s likely the result of a just-OK lens matched with a relatively large sensor.
Get close-up with your images and you’ll see they don’t have the sharpness or integrity of a true high-end setup either. The Moto G5 Plus’s larger pixel 12-megapixel sensor will beat it in some conditions. However, at the price I’m pretty happy with most of the results.
Just don’t expect too much at night. The Sony Xperia XA2 makes most night scenes, apart from the very darkest, look clear and bright enough. But aggressive image processing smoothes-out almost all fine detail in order to make the images look clean.
As with the daylight shots, they can look good before you zoom in. But do so and there’s just not much there. Some shots also have the “plastic” look of an overprocessed image too.
This “softer” look is actually seen throughout the Xperia XA2’s processing, but in daylight this is a positive. Most older Xperias produce images that look weirdly stressed and oversharpened close-up, where the XA2’s look processing style is more relaxed, and more natural as a result.
It hasn’t changed my mind on what you should look for in a phone camera, though. As of 2018, 12-megapixel phone cameras are still the best, especially if they have optical image stabilisation. The Xperia XA2 does not.
The phone also has an issue with exposure metering when you choose a focal point rather than just hitting the shutter button. It judges brightness based on the spot in the scene you touch, which often results in very overexposed skies, as you can see in some of these sample images.
On the video side, the Xperia XA2 can shoot at up to 4K resolution.
Around the front, there’s an 8-megapixel camera. Its lens is so wide there are separate modes for group and lone selfies. However, as all this does is to crop into the view, you still end up with some slight lens distortion of close-up selfies. This isn’t flattering, particularly if, like me, your nose is already on the larger side.
Selfie image quality is OK, but little more than that. I’ve seen 8MP selfie cameras that look great in almost all conditions, but the Xperia XA2’s images start to look low on detail and flat with indoors lighting.
Sony Xperia XA2 — Battery Life
After seeing the Sony Xperia XA2 had a thicker frame and a 3300mAh battery, my main hope for the phone was it would last for ages between charges. I was after a repeat of the stamina of the BlackBerry Motion or Motorola Moto X Play.
The Sony Xperia XA2’s stamina is decent, but in my experience at least, not on-par with these battery giants.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and this often killed the stamina of high-end phones in 2016 and 2017. The Sony Xperia XA2 holds up reasonably well, but I’ve found it disappointingly easy to run down by bedtime without hammering the phone too hard.
For my use, I’m still fairly happy with how long the Xperia XA2 lasts. If a phone can take some abuse without needing a 7pm top-up, it’s doing OK. However, I’ve also used phones with around this battery capacity that have lasted longer, getting me comfortably into the second day even with an audio streaming addiction in tow.
Sony also does not appear to supply a true fast charger with the XA2, just a standard 5V, 2A one. The phone still charges fairly quickly with this, but at £300 a proper fast charger (which the XA2 appears to support via Qualcomm Quick Charge) would be nice.
Should I buy the Sony Xperia XA2?
The Sony Xperia XA2 is a solid phone with a couple of minor disappointments, but nothing that sinks its reputation. Battery life is good, but not quite as good as we hoped. And, like recent Xperia flagships, it’s just not as dynamic as some of its recent rivals.
Where’s the 18:9 screen? And why is it this chunky when phones with similar battery capacity are much more slender?
To be honest we’re not that bothered about the Xperia XA2’s slight thickness issue. The phone feels and looks pretty good. Its main issue is strong competition and, typical for Sony’s lower mid-range phones, it’s only slightly competitive on price.
The Moto G5, G5S and their Plus variants (yes there are too many right now) are better value. The Huawei P Smart has a worse camera, but its slimmer 18:9 aspect design feels much more “now”. And such screens aren’t just a gimmick, we promise.
All that said, if you aren’t put off by our criticisms, don’t be put off a purchase. This is a perfectly solid, “nice” phone we’ve enjoyed using.
Verdict
It’s not the most dynamic phone in its class but a solid option for those who like Sony’s style
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