Apple iPhone 5S v Sony Xperia Z1 - Both are flagship smartphones, but which is the better buy ?
The iPhone 5S is in all likelihood going to be the best selling phone of the year. It’s an iPhone for a start, but it’s also a substantial upgrade over the previous model in a number of ways. While the Sony Xperia Z1 isn’t likely to sell as well that doesn’t mean it’s not just as exciting in its own right, with some of the best specs yet seen on a phone. Read on to find out how the two handsets stack up.
The iPhone 5S has the same aluminium body as the iPhone 5, giving it a classy, expensive look. The Sony Xperia Z1 has just as high quality a build though, with a glass back and metal edges. Both look stunning, but the Sony Xperia Z1 is also waterproof and dustproof, giving it the edge in build quality over the iPhone 5S, though the iPhone 5S’s dimensions of 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6mm and weight of 112g makes it a little more pocket friendly than the 144 x 74 x 8.5mm and 170g Sony Xperia Z1.
The iPhone 5S has a 4 inch 1136 x 640 Retina display with a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. It’s a high quality widescreen display, with natural colours and good contrast.
The Sony Xperia Z1 has a 5 inch 1080 x 1920 display with a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch. That makes it both bigger and higher resolution than the display on the iPhone 5S, while the quality of the screen looks set to be just as good.
The iPhone 5S has a 64 bit A7 processor delivering double the speed of the iPhone 5. In other words it should be enormously fast and powerful.
The Sony Xperia Z1 looks set to be similarly powerful though as while its processor is only 32 bit, it’s quad-core and clocked at 2.2 GHz. It also has 2GB of RAM. While it’s hard to directly compare the power of these two phones they’re both likely to be among the most powerful handsets available.
The iPhone 5S has an 8 megapixel camera with a larger active sensor than the iPhone 5, a dual-LED flash and ‘True Tone’ tech which aims to give pictures more natural colours. It’s also capable of shooting 1080p video at 30fps and has a 1.2 megapixel front facing camera.
The Sony Xperia Z1 has a 20.7 megapixel camera and can also shoot 1080p video at 30fps and has a front facing 2 megapixel camera. While both handsets look set to be great camera phones, the much larger megapixel count on the Sony Xperia Z1 should ensure that it’s the better of the two.
The iPhone 5S has a 1570 mAh battery capable of up to 250 hours of standby or 10 hours talk time, while the Sony Xperia Z1 has a 3000 mAh battery capable of up to 850 hours of standby or 15 hours of talk time. In other words its battery life is a lot better than the iPhone 5S’s.
The iPhone 5S has a choice of 16, 32 or 64GB of built in storage with no potential for expansion, while the Sony Xperia Z1 has just 16GB built in but that can be expanded with a micro SD card.
The iPhone 5S supports Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G LTE, while the Sony Xperia Z1 supports Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G LTE and NFC.
While both the iPhone 5S and the Sony Xperia Z1 are undeniably brilliant phones- the pinnacle of their makers respective outputs in fact, they’re also quite different and one clearly seems better than the other.
The better of the two seems to be the Sony Xperia Z1, which has a slightly superior build quality, a better camera, a higher resolution screen, much longer battery life and the addition of NFC support.
The iPhone 5S has more potential storage out of the box (though less overall if you count the Xperia Z1’s micro SD card slot) and it’s likely to match the Z1 for power but that’s all we can in its favour based on the areas covered in this comparison.
Of course a preference for iOS over Android or an interest in the iPhone 5S’s fingerprint scanner and motion coprocessor may tip the balance, but based on build quality and specs the Sony Xperia Z1 is the phone to go for.
