Android phone makers and their unearthly naming schemes – please give me a break! Skipping a number from the perfectly normal sequence (OnePlus 5 after OnePlus 3/3T), making them unnecessarily long (*cough* Huawei Mate 20 X 5G *cough*): I can literally do it all day. And here comes the Xperia 5 from Sony.

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Xperia 5

Announced at the IFA 2019, Xperia 5 is kind of a drop-in replacement of Xperia 1 (wait, what?). Sony is trying to portray the new phone as a slightly trimmed down variant of their yearly flagship. Even then, the naming convention does not make any sense.

Talking about Xperia 1, the phone sports a bigger battery (3,300 mAh versus 3,140 mAh) and moderately larger screen (6.5 inches versus 6.1 inches) over Xperia 5. Sony even pushed the August security patches to the former during the first half of the previous month.

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Xperia 1: Notice the difference between the rear camera placements

After taking a look at the Sony update servers, we can now spot a new software update for Xperia 1. In fact, the Japanese OEM has already started rolling out the OTA (55.0.A.6.56). It looks like a relatively minor incremental update over the previous build (55.0.A.6.16).

xperia_1_55.0.A.6.56_ota_prompt
Source

Before you speculate, the 310 MB update does bring September patchset to the phone. Moreover, the internal changelog is pretty heavy. Sony engineers apparently included a bunch of fixes, which seems quite surprising for such a typical incremental OTA.

– Improved Stability of connecting Bluetooth headset signal (especially in AAC connection mode)

– Improve background control capability, optimize power saving of native system

– Improve preview speed of camera interface and camera stability

– Improve zoom framing and image quality

(Source)

Initial feedback from the Xperia 1 owners are hugely positive about this new version of system software. The performance of the fingerprint scanner is reportedly improved, while the stock camera app becomes noticeably faster.

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Click/Tap to zoom (Source)

Well, a few shortcomings are still there. A number of features are still absent from the flagship, although the device should be perfectly capable of handling those tasks.

Still no 21:9 pics, no 4k stabilization fix, no 4k 60fps, no screen vivid mode, no performance mode for Stamina, no option to select the home screen, no fix to overblown light sources at night, no nothing

(Source)

Hopefully Sony will incorporate most of the aforementioned stuffs in the Android 10 update for Xperia 1. When do you think that will happen? Let us know by commenting below.

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Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

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