Sony Xperia XA2 Plus

Style and battery back-up packed in one, Sony Xperia XA2 Plus looks to get the title of an all-rounder in the mid-range market. Priced at Rs. 24,990, Sony Xperia XA2 Plus does reach the mark of an all-rounder but falls short due to some small limitations.

The phone comes with a fantastic battery, but due to lack of fast charging, the charging time can be frustratingly long. Plus, unlike the Sony Xperia XA1, the XA2 Plus fails to click good-quality night-time photos, thereby limiting the camera used to day or ideal light conditions.

It is a phone suitable for Sony fans and people who are looking for mid-range performance with passable cameras.

Sony XA2 Plus comes with a metal body which can have green, gold, silver or black color. The rounded edges make the phone grippy and sit well in hand. The phone has thin bezels on the right and left side giving adequate screen space. The quality of the handset is quite robust.

The phone retains the almost obsolete 3.5mm headphone jack, and there is also the new USB Type-C port. On the rear panel is a single primary camera and also, the fingerprint scanner which is located at an ergonomic position. The phone is designed in a user-friendly fashion making it easy to handle.

The Sony Xperia XA2 Plus comes as a 6-inch IPS which offers a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels. It has a brightness of 592 cd/m² which is fantastic and easily beats competing devices like Honor  10’s 537 cd/m² and Pocophone F1’s 486 cd/m² and is only beaten by the Xperia XA2 Ultra 680 cd/m².

The brightness distribution is quite good at 92%. The viewing angle of the phone is reliable and does not distort colours at any angle. The colours are quite accurate, and the contrast is excellent, though you might miss the depth of AMOLED screens.

The Sony Xperia XA2 Plus come with a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 630 and an Adreno 508 GPU. It is a mid-tier performer, paired with 4GB RAM. The performance of the phone is dependable as the websites open up fast and the everyday activities on the internet are smooth.

The GPU is also suitable for gaming, though high-end games need to be tweaked into lower graphics setting if you do not want to experience frame rate drops.

In Antutu, the benchmark scores put it at 70346 points, which is ok, but this gets easily beaten by Pocophone F1’s 227026 and Nokia 7’s 117165.

The Sony Xperia XA2 Plus sports a single 23-MP primary camera with an f/2.0 aperture on its back. It can click beautiful shots, but if there is a significant brightness difference between objects, they tend to darken out. Panoramas of large areas of the sky may not come out well because of that.

Macro shots have better light balance and come out with plenty of details. In low light, the camera fails to take proper pictures. The objects become dark, and only the outlines of the objects can be discerned.

The handset also comes with an 8-MP selfie camera with an f/2.4 aperture. The selfies turn out to be detailed, though the background objects may get a bit blurry. Low-light images struggle too and make the selfies appear grainy.

You can record up to 4K videos and HDR, as well as adjust brightness and color reproduction. The phone comes with the feature of object tracking too. Due to the presence of image stabilizer, the slight jerks are ironed out. However, the quality remains similar to the still photographs, thus resulting in moderately noisy videos.

The Xperia XA2 Plus has a powerful 3580 mAh battery which has a runtime of about 14 hours while keeping the internet on. It can last you a whole day with light to moderate use making the battery life quite an impressive one. However, the phone does not charge fast. It takes about 3 hours to charge the entire battery, which can be quite frustrating.

The Sony Xperia XA2 Plus performs well in most of its aspects. The display is quite bright, and the performance is decent enough for a mid-range phone. While the battery is remarkable, the slow charging can be problematic for some people.

The big 23MP camera does not perform as good as expected, struggling a lot when it comes to low-light images. All in all, this is an excellent handset for people going for an all-around performance.

If you can shell out extra cash, then the Sony XA2 Ultra could be an ideal choice, with dual cameras and the slimmer 18:9 aspect ratio.