Sony Xperia M4 Aqua Review

Introduction

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua is a stylish and affordable phone sitting right in the mid-range segment, but borrowing design clues from Sony’s top-tier products. Its signature feature is water-resistance and full-on IP68 rating, so you can submerge it in water and have fun shooting videos in the swimming pool without worrying that the phone would get damaged.

The Xperia M4 Aqua features a 5-inch display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop with a modern, 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 system chip, and has a 13-megapixel camera.

Sony has cut some corners, though, equipping the M4 Aqua with only 8GB of internal storage, and a lower-capacity battery than the top-tier Xperia Z series. Are those deal breakers, or is the Xperia M4 Aqua still a good deal? Let’s find out.

In the box:

• Sony Xperia M4 Aqua
• 0.85A - 5V wall charger
• microUSB Cable
• User manual

Design

The Xperia M4 Aqua is thin and stylish, borrowing the design language of the Xperia Z series, but using plastic on the back and the sides rather than a sturdy combination of metal and glass.

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua looks so similar to the flagship Sony phone - the Xperia Z3 - that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. And that’s a great thing as both are slim and stylish devices that impress with their looks. Despite having a slightly smaller, 5-inch display (the Z3 features a 5.2-inch screen), the dimensions of the two are actually nearly identical.

Given that the M4 Aqua is sold for half the price of the Xperia Z3, though, one does expect to see some differences, and they are indeed present, but rather than being in the outwards appearance, the difference is in the feel and materials used in the Xperia M4 Aqua. The mid-ranger is an all-plastic affair - with a plastic frame and a reflective plastic back made to resemble glass, while the Xperia Z3 is made of sturdy aluminum and real glass on the back. The M4 Aqua’s plastic build feels a bit cheaper and not as sturdy as the rock solid construction of the Z3, but it is still solidly put together, with no moving parts.

Up front, it’s all about the display and the two front-firing speakers - there are no physical buttons, instead the M4 Aqua relies on on-screen keys for navigation. All the physical keys are on the right: a small, but fairly well defined and easy to find without looking lock/power key, a smallish volume rocker without much of a clicky response below and a two-way camera shutter key further down below.

As its name implies, the Xperia M4 Aqua is protected from the elements - both from dust and water - and it’s officially certified with the IP65/68 rating. That rating guarantees that you can submerge your phone as deep as 5 feet (1.5 meters) for as long as 30 minutes without it suffering any damage. First, though, make sure that all the protective flaps are closed and keep in mind that you can only submerge it in fresh water as in a swimming pool (and not salty sea/ocean water).

Display

A 5” 720p IPS LCD display means a picture that is not as sharp as on other phones, but colors look good with a lot of vibrancy and life to them. Brightness is also more than enough for comfortable use outdoors.

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua features a 5-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. This translates into a fairly decent pixel density of 294ppi - sharp enough not to notice much pixelization at regular viewing distances, but still, jagged pixel edges are noticeable when you look at the phone from up close.

In terms of colors, the display of the M4 Aqua looks pretty good: it’s not perfectly calibrated and tends to be a bit on the cold side with lower-than-standard gamma giving a slightly lighter, a bit washed-out look, but while these issues deter it from being perfect, colors on the whole appear pleasantly lively without being unnaturally oversaturated. For its class, this is one good looking display. We’re happy to see that Sony adheres to the sRGB color space, the color standard that everything on the web is tailor-made for. For color perfectionists with their own color calibration gear, Sony includes manual control over the red, green, and blue channels in Settings -> Display -> White temperature. You can safely add a bit of reds to compensate for the cold-ish tonality (white temperature on the phone is set to ~7400K, above our reference 6500K value), and easily get an even better-looking display.

Outdoors, the display is not hard to read at all as it gets very bright, reaching a maximum brightness of 551 nits. It is a bit more reflective than average, but the high brightness makes up for that and outdoor viewing is not an issue. Viewing angles are also very decent, with colors retaining a lot of their vibrancy even at an angle.

Interface and Functionality

With Android 5.0 Lollipop and a fairly light (but noticeable) Sony skin, the M4 Aqua does not feel cluttered in any way and is a pleasure to use.

The Xperia M4 Aqua runs on the modern Android 5.0 Lollipop with the lightweight and fast Sony custom skin on top. The light nature of Sony’s skin allows for a lot of the speedy and good-looking Material Design nature of Android 5.0 to show up.

It’s easier to list the few important areas where Sony’s skin takes over the stock look: that’s the custom Sony dialer, the custom app drawer, multitasking with small apps that run as windows on top of other applications, as well as the camera interface. Naturally, Sony’s custom Album and Media apps come on board as alternatives to the stock Google Photos apps and Play Music, and overall, these are all fast, simplistic and good-looking applications that are nice to use.

The other signature Sony touch comes in the wallpaper and theme department where you get some colorful live wallpapers that convey the Sony brand identity. Think of themes on the Xperia M4 Aqua as a fairly light type of customization - they do not provide as far reaching of an overhaul as do modern themes on the phones like, say, the Samsung Galaxy S6 with custom icons and widgets.

For most else, we’re dealing with stock Android 5.0 Lollipop. And yes - no additional clutter. This alone is worth praise, as Sony understands the importance of having a lean interface that does not ship with a ton of useless apps. Keep in mind, that some carriers across the globe might still ship the phone with their apps, but by design, the phone is free of that clutter.

Processor and Memory

The 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 system chip along with 2GB of RAM is sufficient to keep the phone running peppy in daily use. The 8GB of internal storage, however, are a serious limitation and you’d better get a microSD card quickly.

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 system chip, a 64-bit chip with eight Cortex A53 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 405 GPU.

The big question that most of you will ask is: does it lag? The answer is mostly ‘no’ - the phone runs fairly smoothly, but it does stutter from time to time, and it has some issues with the speed of the camera app, but for all else, it’s a fairly smooth performer.

It’s not exactly a device that crushes through benchmarks, though, and you would notice its below average CPU score in Geekbench, as well as the fairly mediocre AnTuTu score. As important as benchmarks are, though, it’s worth remembering that benchmark scores are not synonymous with real-life performance which is fairly good on the M4 Aqua.

One area where benchmarks give a much more direct idea of performance is gaming and GPU capabilities. The Adreno 405 GPU is far from being a particularly powerful graphics chip, but given that the M4 Aqua has a 720p display (and not a more intensive load) to handle, it does an adequate job for most games and we had no problems running most titles (shooters run at lower detail and a bit lower frame rates).

For internal storage, you have the very scant 8GB on board (of which less than 6GB are available to the end user), but luckily the handset also supports expandable memory via microSD cards of up to 128GB.

Internet and Connectivity

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua features Google’s mobile Chrome as the default browser, and that’s a good thing: the browser is fast, web optimized for touch with its card-based tab switching, and it syncs easily across various devices, from mobile to desktop. Pages load fast and scrolling and zooming in and out happens with only an occasional stutter and is mostly smooth.

In terms of connectivity, you have 4G LTE on board with support for major carrier’s bands. Other connectivity options on the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua include dual-channel Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and GPS.

Camera

The 13-megapixel camera on the Xperia M4 Aqua is mostly a disappointment: slow to start and focus, and lacking in detail. Full HD videos also don’t look great.

The Xperia M4 Aqua ships with a 13-megapixel main camera with a single-LED flash and an f/2.0 lens, while on the front, it has a 5-megapixel shooter capable of recording Full HD video.

The camera app is the usual Sony affair with a choice of the Superior Auto mode, a Manual setting, as well as other fancier options for various effects that you’d rarely (if ever) use. The interface itself is straightforward with separate buttons for video and still image recording, but essential options like HDR are confusingly missing from the Superior Auto mode (in this mode, the phone itself decides whether or not to shoot HDR, and you cannot manually toggle it, which is weird). The camera was also not very fast to start up, and crashed on us on a few rare occasions, making the camera experience feel not perfectly reliable. The same applies to focusing, which was often on the slow side.

The actual images on the Xperia M4 Aqua turn out rather mediocre: apart from the slow focusing speed, the major issues here are a general lack of dynamics - highlights turn out burned out, and detail is not perfectly sharp. In a few images, we also noticed that the camera misjudged the white balance (and if it erred, it picked colder, bluish colors) and in macros, we see that color reproduction is also off with tonalities being overblown to an unnatural, neon-like intensity.

Indoors, in scarce light conditions, images suffer from a similar lack of dynamics, but compared to others in this class, they do turn out to look a bit better as the handset handles itself well and images do not appear too blurry. The single-LED flash does a decent job illuminating fairly large scenes, but it introduces a cold, bluish color cast to images.

Up front, there is a 5-megapixel selfie cam that does a fairly good job with selfies that feature a lot of detail, but colors do seem to appear a bit toned down in terms of color.



Turning over to video, the Xperia M4 Aqua can record in up to 1080p at 30fps with a bit-rate of around 20Mbps. Video quality is a disappointment. The video lacks the sharp detail you might be used to seeing in 1080p videos and it is a bit choppy. There are different focusing options, but no way to have continuous auto-focus working for video, which is another disappointment. Sound captured on the built-in microphone is also of fairly poor quality, with its annoying, very tinny nature.

Multimedia

Media apps are simple, responsive and well designed.

The media experience on the Xperia M4 Aqua features those signature Sony applications that come bundled with every Xperia phone: the album, video and Walkman music player.

All of them come bundled with a quick access button to Sony’s online storage under the PlayMemories Online brand. A hamburger button on the top left allows you to sort files in the gallery by faces, places and favorites, which is a nice touch, and you also have the option to sort and view images only from Facebook and Picasa. Zooming in and out of images happens via pinching to zoom in and out, and is fast and fluid. Some basic editing options are available right in the app, but don’t expect any advanced editing settings here.

The music player features a home screen that shows album art in tiles and overall gives you a more visual overview of what you are playing and could listen to next. Naturally, it categorizes your music collection by artists, albums, songs, folders, and playlists. It features the ClearAudio+ option which is a custom preset that is made to enhance the sound of popular tracks. You also have a song visualization option.

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua features a single speaker located at the bottom. There are two cutouts in the front for an earpiece and microphone, but those are not actual front-firing speakers. Audio quality is of above average quality with sufficient oomph to it, but it could use a bit more definition in the low frequencies.

Call Quality

Call quality is reasonably good on the Xperia M4 Aqua, with no major issues.

In the earpiece, sound quality is clear, but a bit on the quiet side. On the other end of the line, we have a similarly clear sound, which is also loud enough, which is great. Some amount of digital distortion is audible on both sides, but that is a very minimal amount.

Battery life

Sony promises up to two days of battery life, but our experience showed that daily charging would be necessary for most people. Re-charge times are also painfully slow with the built-in charger.

While the Xperia M4 Aqua looks nearly identical to the top-tier Sony Xperia Z4, the two differ a lot when it comes to battery capacity. The M4 Aqua features a 2,400mAh battery, while the Xperia Z4 trumps it with a much larger, 3,100mAh juicer. This does not stop Sony from promising up to 2-day battery life out of the Xperia M4 Aqua, a claim printed right on the box of the handset.

We take this claim to the test using our own battery method that puts phones at equal footing (200 nit brightness) and tests typical smartphone use with no idle time (the screen and the test are on until the phone dies). The Xperia M4 Aqua scores 6 hours and 22 minutes on our test, placing it right around the middle of our phone rankings. The Xperia Z3, on the other hand, scores a much higher (nearly 50% higher) 9 hours and 29 minutes result in our test.

In our experience using the phone, we find it very hard to squeeze two days out of the battery. Modest use would drain the phone battery in a little over a day, while more intense usage will require you to charge your phone daily, so no big surprises here.

We also take how much time it takes to fully re-charge the phone from dead to a 100% battery. In the case of the Xperia M4 Aqua, we have a 5V/0.85A charger that handles the task painfully slowly - it takes a whopping two hours and 52 minutes to fully recharge the phone.

Conclusion

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua features one of our favorite designs for an affordable phone: it’s slim and stylish, and while it’s all plastic, it has the looks and feel of a more expensive gadget. This, however, would not mean much if the phone could not perform well. Luckily, that’s not the case, and the device handles the daily Android grind quickly and mostly stutter-free.

Looking at its price, it sits right in the middle of the market: the full retail price of the Xperia M4 Aqua is around $350 (280 euro), about on par with the Samsung Galaxy A5, its main rival in this segment. Both phones feature great design, with the Galaxy A5 having an advantage in the camera department, but lacking that water resistance. Naturally, there are a bunch of competitors at the same price point from China - phones like the Xiaomi Mi 4 are currently available for the same price, and the Mi 4 in particular comes with the advantage of a sharper, 1080 x 1920-pixel display, as well as a feature rich MIUI software.

The two big downsides of the Xperia M4 Aqua are in the camera department and the limited amount of built-in storage. The 8GB of storage issue can be fixed simply by getting a microSD card, but the slow-to-start and focus camera with middling quality are there to stay. Ultimately, the M4 Aqua is not a bad device, but it’s hard to give it a heart-felt recommendation with those two issues.