Sony Xperia Z Ultra in India now !

         

Taking the phablet race to an all new level, Sony has now launched a smartphone with a 6.4-inch screen. 

Priced at Rs 46,990, the device has got a full HD Triluminos display for immersive viewing experience. 

Display

Sony Xperia Z Ultra has a huge 6.4-inch display, bigger than any other smartphone in the world (tablets with calling function not counted).

The TFT screen of the phone has Sony’s Triluminos and X-Reality technologies and full HD resolution (1920x1080p). While these terms may not mean much, what we observed in the phone was that colours and contrast are much better in the Xperia Z Ultra phablet compared to the washed out feel of Xperia Z smartphone.

This is certainly a welcome change as display is the key strength of the device. However, it still does not match the levels of HTC One and top-end Lumia smartphones.

Design

Sony’s latest handset, the Xperia Z Ultra looks quite similar to the Xperia Z smartphone, albeit there is huge difference in size. The Japanese manufacturer claims that it offer 30% more screen real estate than the current flagship phone, even with the thin profile.

One look and you can tell that the two phones belong to the same family. But at 6.5mm, Xperia Z Ultra looks much sleeker and better designed than its older sibling. Overall, we give a thumbs-up to the effort Sony gave to its design.

Coming to ruggedness, the new Xperia Z Ultra boasts of being resistant to water as well as dust, like other recent Sony phones. Its earphone jack remains uncovered, suggesting it has some waterproof coating.

software

The Xperia Z Ultra runs on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean), with a customized UI that makes full use of the humongous screen size.

While the home screen options are similar to the one in the custom Android skin we have seen in previous Sony phones, the menu layout is a little different. The on-screen keys (Home, Back and Task Switcher) are now smaller than other handsets by the manufacturer, giving you more space to enjoy movies, games etc (as if that’s needed on a device this big).

While you are on the first page of the app menu, a swipe to the left will bring to you several options like Most Used and Downloaded apps etc. You also get apps like Sony Music and Sony Liv TV, so you can view or download content over the internet on this smartphone.

Processing power

This phablet has Qualcomm’s latest and most powerful chipset under the hood, Snapdragon 800. The quad-core processor is clocked at 2.2GHz and we expect it to beat all benchmark results when we do a full review. What we saw during our hands-on was that the device can switch between tasks seamlessly, without even a single hiccup even when we purposely opened too many apps and moved between them.

Xperia Z Ultra has the Adreno 330 GPU and delivers excellent graphics, as we saw while playing videos and games.

Media and entertainment

A phone with display as big as 6.4-inch is excellent for media consumption and we can testify that despite spending very small amount of time with the Xperia Z Ultra. This phablet made video playback and gaming an awesome experience for us and we felt it could replace a 7-inch tablet any day. However, pocketing such a device would be a pain (more on that coming up).

Stylus support

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra supports stylus input, though it does not come with one out of the box. You can also use pens and pencils to write on this phablet without damaging it, as we did during the hands-on. It works without hitches and is, obviously, simple to use.

This feature can be applied for writing notes (as Sony showed in the demo) and handwriting during messages. However, we are not really big fans of styluses and don’t see it being used very much.

Conclusion

Sony Xperia Z Ultra has a lot of things going for it, such as an excellent display, powerful processor, big battery (3,050mAh), unique apps etc. However, we feel that the huge screen of the phone, which is its biggest strength, is also its biggest weakness.

While Indians have shown a great appetite for big screen phones, they have not taken well to mammoths like Samsung Galaxy Mega phones, Huawei Ascend Mate and even the cheaper Karbonn A30. Therefore, we do not see Sony Xperia Z Ultra scoring too high in terms of sales, especially when a market price of Rs 44,990 is taken into account.

Source - Time of India (TOI)

HE CHANGED THE SOUND OF MUSIC

The experience of being at a concert is something else; it totally beats listening to your favourite song on your iPod. But, this statement doesn’t just have to do with the atmosphere and the rush of rocking it out with your idols; it has to do with a more subtle aspect. The difference is the ‘missing information’ in recorded music. Though for a regular listener, the song, when played on a music player, may sound complete in terms of duration, for a keen listener it is not the case in terms of impact.

Amar G. Bose, the maverick researcher who recently passed away, was one such keen listener — an audiophile who wanted to recreate the magic of live concerts at home. He chose research and teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to accomplish his goal. Bose started the Bose Corporation in 1964 with the agenda of ‘Better sound through research”. Nearly 50 years after its inception, the corporation does deliver better sound through research.

Bose discovered a technique to recreate the wide space reflection that is inevitable in concerts, the reason live music sounds as brilliant as it does. In a concert, very little sound reaches the listener directly — a large portion of the sound is reflected and hence gives a rich quality when it superimposes with the direct rays of sound.

When we listen to music even with the 7.1 channel surround speakers at home, this feature is missing. Bose incorporated this technique in the corporation’s flagship stereo product Bose 901.

First released in 1968, Bose 901 is still running strong in its sixth edition. These stereo speakers use proprietary signal processing from Bose Corporation to render the concert-like effect, using only two speakers and an equaliser. The direct/reflecting technology in the Bose speakers as it is claimed in the product specification “brings the warmth, power and excitement of a concert hall to your home”.

Another important contribution that Bose made to acoustics has been noise cancellation headphones. It started with applications in avionics for pilots. Today, consumers seek noise cancellation earphones and headphones for an unfettered sound experience while on the move.

Loss of information

All recorded music, either while recording or digitisation, end up losing information. The loss of information happens when some of the tones are excluded when recording. Tones are the various frequencies an audio signal consists of.

The note C has its bass tone at 130.813 Hz, the middle C is at 261.626 Hz, vocal C at 523.251 Hz and soprano C at 1046.502 Hz, and it can have overtones appearing at higher multiple frequencies, which carry some portion of the energy.

In the process of recording, some of the higher tones are filtered out, for reasons such as data compression. The commonly used MP3 is a format that employs this lossy compression.

In the last couple of decades, with the reducing cost of digital storage, formats such as the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) are gaining popularity. These lossless formats consist of almost all the component frequencies and when played with the right audio systems can reproduce the live effect with high fidelity. A lossless version of Beethoven Fifth Symphony can be about 150 MB, whereas the MP3 version could be around 20 MB. When a listener is keen on getting the best out of the entire spectrum, uses FLAC on a good audio system, he/she is qualified to be an audiophile

The human perception

Unlike other audiophile audio systems, Bose manufactures equipment that give importance to human perception, and not simply the circuit parameters.

In his landmark paper, Bose elucidated that the metric to measure the performance of audio system need not be circuit parameters such as attenuation or gain in power levels at different frequencies, or the number of channels. He believed, and Bose Corporation still believes, that sound perception by the human mind is the best metric. Bose’s research-oriented approach of making perception of sound the metric tried to broadly cater to users by analyzing ‘psycho acoustics’.

Much like Freud’s work on psychoanalysis drew flak, Bose’s approach of incorporating psycho acoustic non-parameters has been criticized by audiophiles for decades.

With all the accolades and criticism, one fact remains: Bose brought state-of-the-art research into audio systems, leaving behind a legacy of equipment that fills the whole spectrum.

Source: THE HINDU