In regards to ‘Tablets’ and ‘Smartphones’ the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua along with the Xperia Z4 tablet were the only devices Sony had at the MWC this year in Barcelona. The Sony Xperia Z4 handset and the Z4 compact didn’t make an expected appearance and thus impact at the Mobile World Congress 2015 despite rumours beforehand that they would be revealed. Usually Sony release and upgrade their Xperia range every six months so not seeing a Sony Xperia Z4 smartphone at the MWC is an almost unexpected move on behalf of Sony yet could have been predicted by those with hindsight. Time has ticked it’s now June and the Sony Xperia Z3+ has been announced and the Xperia M4 Aqua is now released. Here are our first impressions of this latter little sea monster device which we will soon be unboxing and reviewing ‘hands on’ very soon!
Sony have chosen to focus on dominating the entry level mid-range standard pocket of the market with the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. The M4 is for the sensible consumer that wants a durable good looking smartphone on a budget. If your clumsy or have a nonchalant approach to urgency and have dropped your phone, lets just say in water (incidently I once did this once with my ancient Samsung Galaxy Tocco Lite) then Sony’s new Xperia M4 Aqua would be a wise choice for you. Not just this and I guess other people might be embarrassed to say, but I know from experience with my Z2 how convenient it is to answer the phone fresh from the shower! I can’t take my iPad 2 into the bath with me, so cross-referencing this with the new Sony Xperia Z4 tablet (don’t lose me now) is a winner!
As we should now commonly expect from Sony and with the devices’ name the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua is IP68-certified (which if you also didn’t already magically know by now) means it’s both waterproof and dust resistant and you can leave or take it under water to a depth of 1.5 meters for just up to 30 minutes once more it comes with an affordable price. Maybe not as pleasing to the eye but conveniently so; Sony opted to leave the USB neatly exposed and uncapped meaning you won’t have to fiddle with opening/closing and sealing of any kind of waterproof flaps previously brought to market by Sony, possibly forever? This should be received as a welcome design improvement which it shares with the new Z4 Tablet.
Design
The design is reminiscent of the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact albeit a little bit bigger and without the premium slate-like build but it shouldn’t feel too deceptively cheap in your hands. The M4 Aqua measures a slimline 7.3mm thick weighing in at a feather light 136g which is excellent for a 5inch smartphone of such necessity value. If protecting your phone against spillage is a priority? Then You should know Sony wont be having none of it and won’t be having any non-waterproof products in their smart phone and tablet range and were the first company to declare and in doing so draw the battle line prepared with their ‘Japanese Armada’ whilst everyone else is just as content to play at battleships and follow the leader catching on too!
Specs
The Xperia M4 Aqua operates with the latest coveted version of Android 5.0 (Lollipop) packing a 5inch HD display with a pixel resolution of 1280 x 720 which doesn’t compete with the best premium smartphones’ but is still impressive for its range. Again impressively the M4 is powered by a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 Octa-core processor with one set of quads benching at 1.5 and another at 1GHz with 2GB of RAM running with it. The Octa-core processor should help a lot with proformence and multitasking and be more then enough to balance out things. There’s a 13MP primary camera which is strictly for simple flicks with no optical image stabilisation yet there’s a 5MP wide front lens for selfies.
Storage & Battery
There’s not a lot of storage that comes with the phone but the Aqua also has microSD slot expandable to 32GB and has 8GB of on board memory. The battery naturally from Sony should last you a good solid two days at 2400 mAh. I’ve yet to get my hands on it to test if its only just by using emergency power saving mode but the M4 Aqua will be available in Black, Red and White PAYG at around £220 or £25 on contract per month with a particularly pretty deal going on at at Vodafone at the moment, we opted for black, let us know which one tickles your fancy, or what you would get instead? As usual thanks so much for reading please share and subscribe have an awesome day/night/evening!