Sony Xperia Z Ultra hands-on: First look

Sony Xperia Z Ultra benchmark performance

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is not only an enormous 6.4" beast of a phablet but it also belongs to a very exclusive group of devices that have the Snapdragon 800 chipset up and running. We got our hands on the device once again and this time we even managed to run a few synthetic benchmarks and see how much of a performance update you are actually getting.

The device should be very zippy courtesy of four Krait 400 cores clocked way up at 2.2 GHz and 2 gigs of RAM. The graphics are dealt with by the latest Adreno 330 GPU, which we've heard does a pretty good job.

So let's look at the numbers. With the hardware specifics out of the way the only thing left to do is analyze the scores. First comes BenchmarkPi, which gives a premium on per-core calculations performance. Here the Sony Xperia Z Ultra was a point shy of tying the first spot - an impressive result indeed, but not quite the one we expected.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE
  118
• Sony Xperia Z Ultra
  119
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  132
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  132
• HTC One GPE
  145
• HTC One
  151
• Sony Xperia Z
  264
• HTC Butterfly
  266
• Oppo Find 5
  267
• HTC One X+
  280
• LG Optimus G
  285
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  305
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  330
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  350
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  359
• Meizu MX 4-core
  362
• Nexus 4
  431

Geekbench 2 is a CPU and memory benchmark and is a pretty good place to compare devices running on different platforms. Here, the Xperia Z Ultra scored an impressive victory over its Android rivals, while the Apple iPhone 5 simply got blown out of the water.

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z Ultra
  3889
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  3324
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  3227
• Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE
  3211
• HTC One GPE
  2458
• HTC One
  2708
• Sony Xperia Z
  2173
• HTC Butterfly
  2143
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1845
• LG Optimus G
  1723
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1661
• Apple iPhone 5
  1601

And finally AnTuTu, a compound benchmark. The Sony Xperia Z Ultra totally wipes the floor with the opposition once again, beating the previous best score by nearly 30%.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z Ultra
  33832
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  26275
• Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE
  25755
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  24716
• HTC One
  22678
• Sony Xperia Z
  20794
• HTC One GPE
  18919
• HTC Butterfly
  19513
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15547
• Oppo Find 5
  15167

These results are really the most impressive we've seen on a production device even if the CPU-only test turned out surprisingly low (we'll be redoing that with another unit when we get the smartphone in our office). The new Snapdragon 800 chipset is certainly shaping up to be the beast everyone expected it to become and will most probably be the yardstick against which all other chipsets will be measured for at least another six months (that's ages in smartphone time).

Anyway from what our first encounter suggests, this is the most potent smartphone out there. The Snapdragon 800 makes everything absolutely flow and feels like nothing we've tested before. There are no hiccups anywhere in the UI and app loading is instant.