Category:
Model:
xa1 ultra
Manufacturer's Website:
https://www.sonymobile.com/ca-en/products/phones/xperia-xa1-ultra/
Short Description:
High performance budget phone
Physical Description:
Dementions: 164.9mm x 79.2mm x 8.06mm,
Weight: 188 G
Materials: aluminum, glass.
Colours: black, white.
Operating system: Android 7.0.
Screen: 6 inch diagonal 1920x1080 HD resolution.
Cameras: reer 23 gb, front 16 gb,
ports: usb c bottom panel, 3.5 mm headphone top panel,
Physical buttons: volume rocker, power, shutter right panel.
Card slots: nanosim, 256 gb micro sd left panel.
In the box: handset, usbc cable, wall adapter, warrantee and quick start.
Processor: MediaTek MT6757 2.3GHz (Octa Core, 64-bit)
Ram: 4gb,
Storage: 32 gb.
Special features: SmartAmp and ClearAudio+.
Speakers: one mono bottom panel.
Accessibility Features:
Stock accessibility features.
Experience:
See comments for full review.
Comments
Accessibility... good. Everything else... bad.
Remember the popular sony xperia pro gingerbread phone? Fond memories of the xperia pro and the x10 mini induced me to pick this up on an impulse. I had been woffling over a new phone and on paper the xperia ua1 ultra is a high performance phone for a great price. I was also sold by the special amp and sound output since I'm coming from a phone with full stereo sound and didn't really want to give that up. On the accessibility front, things are OK. All the stock features are present and accounted for. The capacitive buttons work great. The xperia launcher is fully accessible, though somewhat crippled by not having actions implemented. The system keyboard is swift key. Swift key is fully accessible and infinitely configurable. After three frustrating days, I had gotten the feel of swift key and had tweaked it's settings out the way I like. Most of the xperia apps found here are photo and video editing apps. talkback accessibility is dubious here, but magnification users might love it. Sony has to leave the accessibility suite in, but they don't seem to do anything special in apps, such as announcing information about faces. I think that would be a nice touch as this is clearly a picture phone. The special audio hardware is a crushing disappointment. It's really loud. So, if you need quantity over quality to compensate for hearing loss, this is a good phone for you. It's pretty clear. The hardware prevents sound from clipping or distorting, but compresses hard at high volumes, leading to a kind of swoosh in the audio. It was OK for sports and audio books, but my music sounded extremely plain. So, this is an accessibility review, and the phone is pretty accessible all things considered, but it's going back to the store. Issue 1: the xperia launcher is astonishingly slow with talkback enabled. Solution: install google now and get snappy. Issue 2: swift key does funky things when bluetooth keyboards are plugged in. Solution: I do believe this can be tweaked in swift key settings. Issue 3: along with the sony software, this phone comes bloated with amazon shopping, AVG, Facebook, and Spotify as root system apps. Even if you enjoy and use some of these apps, I believe they should be optional. The entire google office suite is also root installed. I don't see the need. Solution: stripe an sd card into your phones storage and add space. Issue 4: This device has an app from sony called What's New, which delivers an advertisement for a paid app or game to your lock screen once a day. Sony locked access to it's notifications in system settings. It will play a sound through your loud speaker no matter whether you want it to or not. In class? ...meeting? ...Funeral? Tough bananas boys and girls. Solution: This forum post shows how to disable it from within the app. I haven't been able to make the solution work with talkback, and I don't have time to wait for some one to do it for me. So long xperia. You were a pretty nice piece of hardware. It's too bad your software was so clumsy. I think this one might be really good for some one who likes to tweak because the hardware is so powerful, but I don't think it's for the beginner.