Sony Xperia Z1 vs Samsung Galaxy Note 3: A comparison

New Delhi: What do you consider when buying a high-end premium phone from a top-end manufacturer? Is it the screen size, the display resolution, the raw processing power, app ecosystem, battery size or its overall looks? Surveys suggest that an overall smooth experience contributes the most when consumers go for a purchase. India TV Tech dig in deep to compare two high-end smartphones, the Galaxy Note 3 phablet and the Xperia Z1 smartphone. When launched in 2011, the first generation Galaxy Note phablet looked comically large and two generations later, it still is. Though the third generation is not the world's largest, it still has a 5.70-inch display that gives it the title of being a huge smartphone. The Note 3 has roughly the same size as the Note 2, with bezels being trimmed down to allow for that extra 0.2 diagonal inches of screen. It is also substantially lighter and thinner, at 168 grams, down from 182. I won't call it one-handed phone, but it is easier to use in this way than any previous Galaxy Note device, because of certain design improvements.On the other hand, Sony Xperia Z1 is a super-charged refresh of the Sony Xperia Z offering a super-sized 5-inch HD screen. At a first glance, the Xperia Z1 gives the impression that it has got it all. The edging at Z1 now has a very slight curve which the company is designed to make the phone solid. The Sony Xperia Z1 exhibits a higher-quality finish than before. The tablet has a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel display, with 441ppi (pixels per inch) density, which means that when it comes to things like browsing the internet, you can make out fine details without the need to continuously zoom in and out.Let us go in details:Design and buildSony Xperia Z1The Z1 features some crucial yet minor differences as compared to the previous Z smartphone. The Z1 has the same glass front and back but now uses a two tone aluminium frame to join the two together. The Z1 is 8.5mm thick and weighs 169g. The Z1 comes with Sony's clever 'OmniBalance' design that evenly spreads its weight across the whole smartphone so that it always feels 'in the hand.' The Z1 has rounded edges and offers smooth surfaces on all sides. The phone features tempered glass covered by shatterproof film on front and back. In terms of position of ports, the wireless charging port, microSD, and micro USB ports remain on the left side of the body. One the back there is front camera lens, sensors and a notification LED along with Sony branding. While a 3.5 mm audio jack is placed at the top part of the phone, the bottom end has the speakers with a large speaker mesh. On the right, the phone sports the microSIM slot, smaller on/off button and the volume rocker, now joined by a dedicated camera button. The left has the magnetic dock connector right in the center and above it are the micro SD and micro USB slot. The same spine sports Sony's signature machined aluminum power button and volume rocker.The phone is held together by a sturdy silver-coloured aluminium frame that adds to the phone's weight. Since the Z1 is water and dust resistant phone, all ports and slots are covered with fibreglass flaps to protect the phone. This means it can survive being fully submerged in more than 1m of water for more than 30 minutes.Samsung Galaxy Note 3The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 looks a lot similar to the first-generation Note than the Note II, which was more curved. Essentially the Note 3 is plastic but on the back the company has given it a textured finish to make it look like leather and this also offers the much needed grip. The good part is that you can remove the plastic cover to access the Note 3's sizable 3,200mAh battery as well as the microSD slot which is cleverly stacked on top of the microSIM port. But somehow, the company managed to make the Galaxy Note 3 slightly smaller than its predecessor, measuring 151.2 x 79.2 x 8.3 mm. Thanks to a more manageable weight (168g) the device is certainly the most manageable Note smartphone to date. The giant size of the smartphone means that you need to constantly reshuffle it up and down your palm to reach out for the volume rocker and power/lock keys located towards the top on the left and right sides of the handset.The front of the phone is dominated by its 5.7-inch Full-HD Super AMOLED display. On the whole the company has kept the bezels narrow on the left and right sides. The sensors, front camera, notification light and earpiece grill are placed above the Note 3's screen. While the power button sits on the right, the left side has the volume rocker. A 3.5mm headset jack and Infrared receiver are placed on the top and a new USB 3.0 port sits at the bottom along with a small speaker grill and the slot for the S-Pen stylus.DisplaySony Xperia Z1 The Z1 comes with a 5-inch, 1080p (441-ppi) LCD display that you are most likely to fall in love with. The display is enhanced by Sony's proprietary X-Reality Engine and is built on the OptiContrast design (it eliminates the air gap between the glass and the screen, which reduces glare). With Z1, Sony also seeks to distinguish itself from both the competition and its predecessors. Trickling down from the Bravia HDTV unit, the Z1 benefits from a Triluminos display, augmented with X-Reality for mobile image and video processing. There's even an Intelligent Super Resolution technology that tries to fill in missing pixels in lower-resolution video.Some improvements in Z1 includes the 'Triluminous' display technology that Sony plonks into its high-end TVs, which apparently improves colour and brightness. While that's mostly marketing nonsense, there's no denying that it's a great screen.However, despite all this, the Z1's display is a letdown as the smartphone is said to suffer from poor viewing angles and faded blacks, or amazing sharpness. The Xperia Z1's screen looks fantastic when viewed head-on, but like so many Sony phones, tilting the device in any direction will quickly distort the colors. However, holding the phone directly in front of you, will give you bright whites, good colors, and near pitch blacks. Sony's “X Reality for Mobile” software also kicks into action when viewing movies and photos, boosting contrast and reducing visible noise. Still, seeing the Z1 sitting side by side with Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 really puts the Sony phone to shame.Samsung Galaxy Note 3The Galaxy Note 3 comes with a full-HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels packing 386 pixels per inch. Like Galaxy S4, the Galaxy Note 3 uses a PenTile ‘diamond' display, which means that the sub-pixels are arranged into a diamond shape. It could be a problem with a smartphone with a lower-resolution screen, but but here the 386 ppi pixel density is high enough to make it a non-issue. This is a super-sharp screen despite being oversized. Just like the Galaxy S4, Samsung offers the Note 3 with an Adapt Display, which optimises colours as per the ambient light conditions. You can choose between four manual modes (Dynamic, Standard, Professional Photo and Movie) and automatic modes if you select the Adapt Display option. The phone also offers the option to adjust the screen tone automatically to conserve battery power.Overall, the Note 3's display is best among the Note series. The screen renders clear and sharp text and images, along with vibrant colours. Browsing the web is also a pleasant experience. And as is the case with any good OLED-type screen, contrast and black levels are excellent in the Galaxy Note 3. The most striking point of the Galaxy Note 3's screen, is the digitiser layer. You can't see it, but makes the S Pen stylus work. It provides the capacitive screen with greater sensitivity and precision: the harder you press the stylus, the thicker your “ink.” CameraSony Xperia Z1 The camera resolution in Z1 has improved from an already impressive 13 megapixels to an astounding 20.7 megapixels. The sensor size too has been increased to 1/2.3-inch, which is bigger than the sensors you'd typically find inside smartphones. The larger the sensor, the more light can be taken in, which should help give overall better clarity, particularly in lower-light scenarios. The Z1 uses a wide-angle (27mm) Sony G Lens camera with a bright F/2.0 aperture and a BIONZ image processor. The result: the Z1 produces excellent quality images. The Xperia Z1 images show "good overall exposure, excellent detail preservation outdoors, pleasant colors and low noise levels in all situations". The Z1 also performs well when using its flash. On the downside, the Z1 may produce slight color shading and excessive exposure times in low light under 20 lux (that causes motion blur). In video mode the Xperia Z1 also displays a good overall performance.The Z1 can take some stunning close-up shots — and shoot in 20MP with enough lighting and you'll capture an incredible amount of detail.On the software end, the Xperia Z1 comes with lots of new features, including manual controls and social features like the ability to live-stream video to Facebook. The camera app lets you toggle the flash options (fill, auto, and red-eye reduction) on and off, and activate more advanced features like the smile-detection tool, burst mode, geotagging, and the auto-upload feature, with the latter wanting to dump copies of your pics to Sony's own PlayMemories Online cloud server. Sony has further added an Apps toggle to the camera, which houses the photo effect tools, manual mode, timeshift burst mode, panorama stitcher, its Info-eye augmented reality search tool and more.While manual mode lets users select their own white balance options and choose from some present scenes when recording video, the augmented reality comedy features lets you add a variety of computer generated scenes pop up atop the image. Galaxy Note 3The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has a 13-megapixel camera with a single-LED flash. Specs-wise it is similar to the Galaxy S4, with an f/2.2 lens and a 1/3.2-inch sensor, resulting in tiny sensor pixels of 1.1 microns. In testing, the camera can quickly focus and fire. It takes good outdoor shots but dark areas sometimes lack detail. In indoors, the focus was soft, and the noise was kept under control well. The front-facing camera takes bright selfies that are of decent quality. Samsung has cut the dedicated Night mode out of the Note 3. Instead, it relies simply on the Auto mode for low-light shots. The Note 3 also performs better than the S4 in creating depth of field effects. The Note 3 is very similar in use to that of the Galaxy S4. It is easy to use and is designed to operate with just the one thumb. The Note 3 camera is set to full auto, meaning you only need to pick the subject of your shot. There's no physical camera button on the phone, but fast focusing and virtually zero shutter lag means that you can really enjoy the photography on the go. Aside from Auto, in total you'll see 12 photo modes. They are: Drama Shot, Beauty Face, Sports and Golf modes, as well as HDR (High Dynamic Range), Panorama, Sports, Surround shot and Live effect. Among them the best are Rich Tone (an HDR mode), Panorama and Sport. HDR merges multiple exposures types to bring out more detail in your snaps, perfect if the lighting conditions are poor, or if you're shooting a scene with overcast clouds; Panorama is self-explanatory, shooting a wide view of your surroundings; and Sport keeps the shutter speed quicker than it would be in Auto mode, making fast-moving objects appear sharp. There are some less useful modes, too, like Beauty Face and Drama Shot, which don't seem to accomplish much.Beauty Face softens faces to get rid of wrinkles and spots – it's a bit odd. Drama takes multiple exposures and merges them, to let you get multiple instances of one moving object in a single picture. Eraser takes multiple exposures too, but with the aim of removing moving objects from a scene. The weirdest of the lot is Golf, which is designed precisely to capture a multi-exposure shot of a golf swing.On the video, both the front and rear cameras record smooth, sharp 1080p footage at 30 frames per second, and the rear camera's stabilization and detail look really good.Processor/PerformanceThe Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is powered by Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa 5420 processor which is basically a set of two quad-core processors- a 1.9GHz Cortex A15 quad-core processor and a 1.3GHz Cortex A7 quad-core processor that work together to optimise the processing power. It comes equipped with 3GB RAM onboard, and a Mali T628 MP6 chip for processing graphics. With Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, the navigation is smooth with no signs of any lag. Users can easily launch apps, play games, scrol web pages and switch between apps. Besides the default browser the Galaxy Note 3 comes with Chrome. On the other hand, the Z1 joins the Sony Xperia Z Ultra and the LG G2 in getting a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor clocked at 2.2GHZ with Areno 330 graphics. It's accompanied by 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (12GB available to use) and can be expanded by a further 64GB via microSD. This makes the Z1 a seriously powerful smartphone. It comfortably runs Real Racing 3, and graphics look polished on the full HD display. Likewise, streaming HD content is handled with ease. Browsing the web and swiping through homescreens show no signs of lag or a delayed response.Strikingly, a couple of benchmark apps measuring the overall performance of each device – Quadrant, AnTuTu, and Vellamo Metal, throw up striking results. All figures meant the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is one of the top performers overall. But the LG G2 and the Sony Xperia Z1 are well capable of reaching similar results.On Quadrant, the Note 3 revealed a score of 22,270 with Sony Xperia Z1 at 20,277. On AnTuTu, the Note 3 came out with a score of 31,543 as against Z1's score of 30,838. Similarly, on Vellamo Metal, the Note 3 scored 1214 while the Z1 has a score of 1115. Thus, it comes out that both the smartphone run neck to neck in terms of performance. On GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex HD Offscreen, used to measure graphics performance, the Note 3 delivered a result of 23 while the Z1 scored 21. Similarly, on GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex HD Offscreen, the Note 3 delivered a result of 26 while the Z1 delivered a score of 23. Software and AppsGalaxy Note 3The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, and uses a custom UI very similar to that seen in the Galaxy S4. It's called TouchWiz. The Galaxy Note 3 comes with a bunch of additional apps. Overall, the interface of Note 3 is bright and colourful. You can also mute the Samsung style a little with your own wallpaper and widgets. The Note 3 comes with Multi-view option, which makes working on two apps at the same time. This will enable your multi-view bar on the left side of the screen, and now you'll be able to multi-task like never before. If you don't like the multi-window bar on the left side of the screen, click and hold the pull-out arrow and drag it around; the bar will become detached and let you move it around. However, it only works with select apps, not every single one you've downloaded from the Google Play app store. Thus, you can chat with friends using ChatON while reading emails, scan through two websites at once, have a book/video open while browsing the webIt also offers a new Magazine screen which can be launched by simply flipping the Home screen towards the top. The Note 3 takes a cue from HTC's BlinkFeed notifications screen and allows users to read News across categories, personal content and social network feeds on the Home screen in a magazine like format. Further, the Note 3 comes with 'one-handed operation' settings allowing users to position not just the keypad and in-call buttons, calculator and screen unlock pattern on the left or right side, as per their convenience, but also shrink the entire interface to one's liking by an awkward left and right swipe gesture.Besides touchscreen, the Note 3 also responds to fingers lingering above the screen, gestures in the air, palm swipes across the surface of the display and even senses your eyes looking at the screen.The Galaxy Note 3 comes with a bunch of additional apps, packed into a pair of Samsung folders in the apps menu. Some of them include: S Health (A basic fitness tracker that lets you log what you eat; WatchOn (a TV guide app that also lets you control your TV and various home entertainment boxes using the IR transmitter); S Translator (A solid translation app); S Voice (Samsung's Siri alternative) and Knox (a hardcore security solution).Sony Xperia Z1The Z1 comes with Android 4.2.2, but still Sony has completely redesigned every single aspect of the experience to make it altogether different from the stock Android experience. All of Android's key features remain. The lock screen lets you drag a finger up the display to unlock the phone, and by dragging left and right on the clock display, quick access to a suite of lock screen widgets can be gained. These new lock widgets let you open the camera with one drag, or scroll to a Google Now widget, an email widget, your Google+ posts and more.Overall the user interface is nice, a little more intuitive as compared to the vanilla Android models like the Nexus 4.Inside, the app drawer, you get Google's glorious Maps app, with the Z1 managing to get a GPS lock within seconds of leaving the house and thinking about going to a place. You also get the Gmail tool, the YouTube app, Google+ and imaging spin-off G+ Photos for auto-uploading of your snaps to Google's social network, and its own media suite of Play Music, Play Books, Play Movies and Play Magazines.While Play Music supports paid radio streaming of music, Play Books and Magazines both have a huge archive of titles. Similarly, Play Movies recently added support for buying TV shows.Other than the above mentioned apps, Sony also offers its Socialife app is an attempt at making a Flipboard clone, a sort of feed aggregator. Similarly, Sony has also put its own combined shop and deals portal on the Xperia Z1, which it calls the Xperia Lounge. At the same time Sony is also offering its TV SideView app, which is a TV listings guide.Moreover, Sony's PlayStation Mobile app gives you the option to pay money for random indie titles you've never heard of. You also have the option of geo-tag your images, which allows the Z1 to display them on a nice, spinning 3D globe. The Z1 also offers six of the mini notes apps which offers quick access to an Active Clip tool for capturing and editing an image of whatever's on your display. Plus there's a floating Notes widget, timer, calculator, miniature browser tile and audio recorder is also there.Battery and connectivityThe Xperia Z1 comes with a 3,000mAh capacity battery, which is similar to the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. Sony also gives you access to its power management tools that include Stamina mode to disable data when the screen is off and a low battery mode to conserve power when you have reached critical battery life levels. On full charge and in general use playing games, browsing the web, and using Twitter and Facebook, the battery can last through a day. Further, you can actually get a around a day and a half of proper use, if you are not using it excessively. Connectivity-wise, the Xperia Z1 will feature the normal connectivity modes including Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G and Bluetooth.On the other hand, the Galaxy Note 3 comes with a 3,200mAh battery, in order to compensate for the larger, higher-resolution screen. There is a Power Saving mode that'll help to get the maximum running time out of your mobile. In terms of connectivity, you get NFC, 4G, Bluetooth 4.0, and IR transmitter and MHL. Samsung also offers a few apps that try to make better use of the lesser-used connections. Samsung Link is a Wi-Fi-based connectivity app that lets you speak to other Samsung Link devices. Group Play uses NFC to let you share music with other Samsung phones. There's also a Wi-Fi Direct sharing option within the Gallery – Wi-Fi Direct uses a Wi-Fi signal, but doesn't require internet connectivity.Music and sound qualityOn the audio front, Xperia Z1 only has a single loudspeaker. The overall audio quality is reasonable and the volume settings mean you can get things quite loud. For music and watching video, the speaker is loud but lacks richness when the volume is cranked up.The Note 3 has pretty decent level of audio quality. Voices pop with authority thanks to its strong volume but it also gets cranked up when it's placed at the loudest setting. PricingGalaxy Note 3, which was launched for Rs 49,900 in September end, is now being sold through Samsung's official e-store for Rs 47,900.Sony's latest flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z1 is now available on eBay India for just Rs 37,397 as a part of its festive season promotional offer. The Sony Xperia Z1 was launched a fortnight ago for Rs 44,990.VerdictAt the end of the day, it is hard to say which is the best smartphone – the Note 3 phablet or the Z1 smartphone? On the whole, the two handsets are mostly equal in what they do. Despite wide-spread popularity of the Note 3, I must say the Z1 is a tough competitor that can give the Note 3 a run for its money in almost all categories. Sure, the Z1 is bulky, but it is a bit smaller and more compact than the Note 3. The Z1 is much more comfortable to hold and operate, and has a camera that produces excellent (if not earth-shattering) images. Adding a camera button makes having a waterproof design more useful now that you can actually take pictures and shoot video underwater. Also, Sony Xperia Z1 has 109.52 per cent more standby time than Samsung Galaxy Note 3.On the other hand, the Galaxy Note 3 is a big screen phablet that packs the latest hardware, a brilliant full-HD screen, better build quality and a smart stylus that is good for multitasking. So if you're looking for a big screen high-end smartphone and want the best hardware and software option, the Note 3 is a good choice.In the end, I agree that consumer have their own preferences and tastes, but going through the detailed comparative review, I would prefer to go with the Z1 as it gives me the best the Sony has to offer.