[Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact Guides, News, & Discussion] MarkMRL:
Oh well, I got super angry for no reason. The phone is actually pretty decent, but it's still very disappointing! If you see my post history you'll find out I've been using Sony since the X10 Mini, I also used the Ray, Arc S, Xperia S, and Xperia Z3 (I'd probably still have the Z3 now if I didn't get it stolen from me, that phone was godly). Now I'm just a bit disappointed.

Many things that I loved about the S and Z3 are nowhere to be found in this phone. These older phones had several customized apps by Sony which were great, such as the Walkman, Keyboard, Launcher, and Themes. This phone only has the Walkman successor, Music (which is vastly inferior) and Album (which is still good especially the editing). Probably beacuse of the fact that Sony is having poor sales for like a decade now, they are not bothering with making their own apps and using crappy Google apps like Messages, Dialer, or Swiftkey. I don't understand what happened to the themes, they no longer change pretty much anything, just the wallpaper. Maybe I'm remembering wrong but on S and Z3 lots of things changed, even the background of the system UI, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.

On the Z3 I remember I typed the pin and the phone instantly unlocked, on this one I have to press the ok button to confirm the pin. Also, on the Z3 I'm pretty sure the headphones were notified with a little icon on top, on this one there is no such icon to confirm headphones are in. It seems like Sony totally gave up at some point with the XZ1 series, many features from the OnePlus3 that are the norm on phones from 4-5 years ago are missing from this one:

>double tap to wake (hardware issue apparently, but why?)

>no dark theme

>no startup pin, so what's even the point of encrypting the phone?

>lacks the feature to unify the micro sd with internal memory, something even the Moto G3 (100€ phone from 6 years ago) had

>customizable icons in the top bar, no way to show upload\download speeds

>no night mode, but apparently they were working on it on a "concept" firmware program like they did with Z3?

>What happened to the Xperia keyboard? It was pretty good back on the Z3, definitely better than Swiftkey. But it's still there only for Japanese and chinese apparently for some reason.

>why no way to disable internet access of apps? This is basically the #1 privacy requirement for any phone

Many features are half assed

>No shortcut to equalizer in Music app (I recall Walkman had it as far back as the Ray, why did they hide it under a million clicks in the settings)? The Music app is still crappy and unchanged from the Z3 days, it still has that bug that you can scroll the picture of the vinyl player in the first screen indefinitely until the app crashes, I remember reporting this stupid bug back on the Concept firmware for Z3 many years ago.

>Power button is customizable, but it has just 3 useless settings, what about something like enabling the flashlight? Or having an action on click and one on touch?

>Xperia Assist is like the old SmartConnect, but it's totally half assed. Why can't you add more actions like in the old SmartConnect from the S and Z3? Why can't you enable the Travel action by for example detecting your car's bluetooth instead of having a timeline? Or why can't you add more triggerable actions like controlling the brightness? It's like this app was developed by a robot and not a human. Because robot enters Focus mode every day at the same hour. Honestly wtf.

It's too bad that Sony is not putting any effort in the software anymore. And adding a ton of third party bloat too. Anyway I think I'll keep the phone. I'll root it when the warranty runs out (because it cannot be reversed on this one, as expected) and try some mods. There doesn't seem to be many mods as back in the Arc\Ray days, I remember there were some crazy mods for the Ray and you could basically turn it into an Xperia S with full SystemUI ports and stuff like that. Maybe the phone will become more popular later on, and devs will try to keep it alive. It's the best compact phone ever produced, sad it had such a poor support and half assed software from Sony.