[Sony Xperia XZ Premium Guides, News, & Discussion] Atrax2010:
The camera has seen some noticable improvements, it resolves much more detail and has less agressive post processing. It still tries to compensate for noise, but does it much better this time, you can see the post processing when you zoom in, but before it was like they were replacing original photo noise with their own post-processed noise. Not so much the case now. The photos look cleaner and more detailed, with much less of that "water paint" effect.

Samples attached, first picture is Oreo, second in Pie.

Keep in mind, the shots made on Pie were under lower light conditions, but they still turned out with more detail and better resolved shadows. On Oreo the building was pretty much under direct sunlight, which should be ideal.

It does seem to have some slight stabilization now even in the photo mode, it is noticable in the viewfinder, it tries to correct for some slight movements.

Why we still don't see an option to lower the framerate of a super slowmo videos in any Xperia yet, is a mistery to me and a missed opportunity. 960FPS is still cool as hell, but still next to unusable if you want to catch that perfect moment. Adding 1080p super slowmo is a complete waste of time if you ask me. Give me 450FPS@720p so that I can actually use the damned thing.

Both GPU and CPU benchmarks are better in Pie. GPU: 7831 / 7991, CPU: 1934-6550 / 1956-6695, using geekbench.

Battery life is better for me, by the end of the day I'm usually at arround 50%, and now I'm sitting at 80%, with same apps and setup, plus I've been editing these photos and screenshots, uploading them to Drive and so on... I feel like the battery is now as it was on Nougat, and it got worse in Oreo. I'm not a power user, so it never really bothered me, I get two days easy with Oreo, but I remember that I could sometimes stretch it to four days on Nougat. With Oreo, three days was not achievable even by my usage.

Average RAM usage dropped from 2.5GB after one day to 1.9-2.0GB, so RAM management seems to be better.

Phone feels smooth, animations are a bit different in feeling, smoother and more noticable, previously you'd might notice almost like a slight framedrop or stutter, it felt a bit jerky sometimes, not slow or laggy, but almost like the animations were at lower FPS or something, can't really describe it.

One thing I'm most impressed about is the fingerprint scanner. I gave it a shot in Nougat and Oreo but gave up, it was always a struggle and hit-or-miss. In Pie, I don't even see a prompt to scan my finger, just push the power button and boom, it's unlocked. And it seems it got faster the more I used it, it did fail to detect a couple of times during the first day, but now it's instant unlock.

All in all, great work on this update, I'm very pleased.

One thing I'm a bit confused about, using volume keys used to lower your call and notification volumes and also could enable Do not disturb. Now it controls media volume. Can that be changed or is it Pie thing?

I saw someone mentioning how themes were removed , not sure what that is all about, themes are still on my phone.

I didn't do a software repair after flashing with newflasher, don't know if that makes any difference, I couldn't use xperia flasher because of the missing fsc script, so I'm not even sure if I flashed this right using newflasher, never used it before. The phone didn't have image on screen when I first tried to boot it, only wallpaper. It was fine on second reboot :silly: