Sony Xperia XA2 review

The Sony Xperia XA2 is a mid-range Android phone. It looks similar to 2017’s Sony Xperia XA1, but has a 1080p screen rather than 720p, and the battery has been bumped to 3,300mAh.

The design ensures it feels like a product of 2017, as phones with 18:9 screens like the Honor 9 Lite and Huawei P Smart have a more dynamic up-to-date look than the Xperia XA2.

But Sony’s high-resolution 23MP camera sensor outperforms the competition in many situations, even if you do have to be savvy to get the most out of it.

Sony Xperia XA2 price and availability

• Costs £299/$349 (around AU$450)
• Launched in February 2018

The Sony Xperia XA2 was released in February 2018, an era of Android 8.0 and phones with barely any screen border. It costs $349 in the US and £299 in the UK. That makes it more expensive than the Xperia XA1 was at launch.

There's also an Xperia XA2 Ultra, which costs £379, $449 and has a 6-inch screen. This isn't one of the new ultra-wide screen phones. It's a real pocket-stretcher.

Key features

• Typical Sony design
• Upgraded to 1080p display
• Large 3,300mAh battery

The Sony Xperia XA2 has a 5.2-inch screen, making it a relatively small phone. However, Sony has prioritized a big battery over a super-slim frame, making this thicker than the XA1 to fit in a 3,300mAh cell.

You get a good mid-range Snapdragon 630 chipset, powerful enough to do just about everything without obvious compromise, and 32GB storage.

These are solid mid-range specs.

Typical of a Sony at this sort of price, the camera is a little different, though. It has a single, very high-res 23MP sensor, just like the Xperia XA1. It handles indoor shooting better - and can render more detail - than most of the 13MP cameras used by other "affordable" phones.

It doesn't match the OnePlus 5T camera, though, before you get too excited.

Design

• Chunky classic Xperia design
• Metal sides, plastic rear
• No water resistance

As each month passes, we see more phones with 18:9 screens. These expand the display, to leave less space above and below. The result? A cutting-edge look and more screen area without any increase in the phone footprint.

The Sony Xperia XA2 does not have one of these screens. It's a traditional 16:9 phone, which gives it a squat vibe up against some of its obvious competitors. The Moto G5S? Nope, that's another 16:9 phone, but the Huawei P Smart, Oppo F5 and Honor 9 Lite all have this new kind of screen.

And you'll see the bigger names like Moto, Samsung and LG start to filter this style into their lower-mid-range phones in 2018. Probably.

The 16:9 aspect ratio matched to a relatively fat 9.7mm thickness and Sony’s usual rectangular design makes the Sony Xperia XA2 seem a chunky little mobile. It's also quite heavy at 171g. Despite the added bulk, there's no official water resistance.

This is not a phone you pick up and say "wow, that's so light". However, it is easy to use and doesn't have the finger-stretching feel of some of Sony's larger Xperia models.

The Sony Xperia XA2's sides and top are aluminum, with beveled edges on the top/bottom plates to reveal a glint of the metal underneath. It looks good, but shows off scratches readily, so think twice before putting the phone in a pocket with your keys or a load of coins.

Other aspects of the build are just okay for the price too. The Sony Xperia XA2's back is plastic. It doesn't flex, avoiding the obvious tell of a cheaper plastic phone, but Moto, Honor and Huawei phones at the price make greater use of glass and metal.

Part of the Xperia XA2's back is down to cost, part is to help separate it from Sony's more expensive models.

That doesn't also mean cutting out the fingerprint scanner, as the XA2 has one on its back (even in the US where Sony phones typically don't). It is well positioned and reliable, if not the fastest we've used. Coming out of standby takes about 1.5 seconds.

Screen

• Color tone can range from super-saturated to very calm
• 5.2-inch 1080p LCD screen
• 16:9 aspect rather than the newer 18:9 style

As we've mentioned several times, the Sony Xperia XA2 does not have an extra-wide aspect ratio screen. However, it is much higher-res than its predecessor the XA1.

A resolution of 1080p makes text and images look pin-sharp. At 5.2 inches you'd actively have to try to notice the difference in sharpness between this and a phone of higher pixel density.

On first switching the Xperia XA2 on, its colors seem a little muted. However, this is because it (with launch software at least) disables all its clever color optimization as standard.

Dip into the Settings menu and you’ll find Standard (yes, it's not on as standard) and Super-vivid modes that increase color saturation and contrast. Super-vivid makes the Xperia XA2 look closer to a flagship Xperia.

As the phone has an LCD screen, contrast is never going to match an OLED, but you won't notice in most conditions. In a lit room, the screen's blacks merge into the black surround.

Similar to other Xperias, the white balance is slightly blue-skewed, which promotes the perception of brightness but doesn't appeal to all eyes. There are color temperature controls too, but as usual Sony's are among the least friendly.

Fiddling around with separate red, green and blue sliders makes you feel like you're calibrating a TV, not tweaking a phone screen.

Battery life

• Large capacity lasts a full day on a single charge
• USB-C charging, no fast charger supplied

Battery stamina should be one of the Sony Xperia XA2's stand-out elements. It has a 3,300mAh unit, and that's part of the reason the phone is fatter than its predecessor.

This is also a larger cell than many competitors with larger screens, and the similar-size Moto G5S has 300mAh less at 3,000mAh.

We're mildly disappointed by its real-world longevity though. It'll last a day, sure, but won't necessarily get you the big second-day buffer that separates a truly long-lasting Android with one of just okay battery life.

We can't blame Facebook, infamous battery leech, either as we haven't logged into it during testing. The Sony Xperia XA2 does seem to get a little warmer than most during relatively light tasks, making us wonder if a CPU/resource management issue may be to blame.

Playing back a 720p video at maximum brightness takes 23% off the battery level. Again, this is not as good a result as we'd hope for given the milliampere count. The Moto G5S lost just 16% in the same test. Something is not quite right, but looking into the battery consumption metrics Android 8.0 offers, we have no obvious leads.

The last 12 months have seen some progress in real-world battery life, and we hoped the Sony Xperia XA2 would be a standard bearer for this in 2018. But, at least at launch, it isn't.

This all sounds bad, but the Sony Xperia XA2's stamina is perfectly fine. It lasts a full day, with significant use. We just hoped for more.

You charge the XA2's battery using the USB-C socket. Our sample did not come with a fast charger, although the phone does appear to support Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0.

You can buy a UCH12W fast charger direct from Sony for a wince-inducing £44.99 (around $60/AU$80), although you'll also find it far cheaper elsewhere online.

Camera

• Very high-res rear camera
• Unhelpful exposure metering
• Capable of great shots, but soft at night

The Sony Xperia XA2 has a similar camera to the older Xperia XA1. There's a single very high-resolution 23MP camera on its back, using a large 1/2.3-inch sensor.

Just as we saw in the Xperia XA1, this sort of sensor can outperform the kind of 13MP Samsung and Sony sensors used in quite a lot of low to mid-range phones. You get slightly better performance at night, and greater detail retrieval in perfect lighting conditions.

At their best, Sony Xperia XA2 photos look great, with good sharpness and contrast, although Sony's image engine does tend to favor impact over an entirely natural look.

We find you need to work around some of the camera's foibles to get top-grade results, though. Metering is the worst offender. Point and shoot without picking a focus point and the Xperia XA2's camera brain is just fine, exposing the scene reasonably well.

Tap the screen to choose a subject and it reverts to spot metering. This causes problems.

Spot metering is where the 'brightness' of the photo is judged on that focus point, ignoring how much the rest of the scene may become overexposed as a result.

Take the Xperia XA2 outdoors and pick a focus point, you almost always end up with whited-out skies. Spot metering as an option in a Pro mode? Great. Spot metering as the default in an “intelligent” auto mode? What's Sony Mobile thinking?

A brightness slider does let you customize the exposure level, but we shouldn't have to use this as much as we do.

Other issues include quite a lot of purple color noise throughout images, and unusually pronounced loss of sharpness towards the edge of the frame.

Despite being large, the Sony Xperia XA2's sensor is also not good enough to resolve close to all of its 23 megapixels of detail in anything more than low ISO studio settings. We'd take a high-quality 12MP sensor over this, any day.

However, compared with the 13MP Huawei P Smart, the Sony Xperia XA2 has clear advantages. Images tend to have higher contrast and the Sony’s reproduction of shots with low-level indoor lighting is miles better: more detail, superior color reproduction.

High ISO night shots are still just passable, though, with nothing like the detail of a stabilized or large sensor pixel camera. Almost all fine detail is obliterated to make images look smooth and low on noise.

Sony has cleaned up its image noise processing algorithms in other respects, though. Old Xperias, even high-end ones, used to make a royal mess of fine detail, making it appear ugly and scratchy. The approach is now much softer, and cropped images are much more appealing as a result.

There's more work to be done on Auto HDR processing and that exposure metering blunder, but the Sony Xperia XA2 can take some of the better shots in its class. We'd pick the Moto G5 Plus or Samsung Galaxy A5 over it for everyday shooting image quality, though.

You can shoot video at up to 4K resolution with the Xperia XA2. If you've bought one and are wondering how, there’s a separate 4K capture mode. You don't just dial up to 4K in the camera settings.

Around the front sits an 8MP camera with a very wide-angle lens. Its view is so wide that it actually works better for group selfies than Instagram pout pics as the lens has a mild geometric distortion effect.

Image quality is decent. Photos look bright, but detail capture isn’t close to the very best 8MP selfie cameras.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Great general performance
• Standard Sony UI
• Android 8.0

The Sony Xperia XA2 runs Android and has Sony's custom user interface. A few years ago this was a lot like standard Android, but had Sony's characteristic moody look and a bunch of Sony apps.

But Android has changed since then, and the Sony interface, well, hasn't much. Use a Google Pixel phone with 8.0 and you get a vertical scrolling apps menu that you can summon with an upward flick, then scroll through with the same gesture.

The Sony Xperia XA2's apps menu can be brought up with that kind of swipe, but it uses horizontal pages like Android did back in Android 5.0 and earlier. It's not necessarily a worse style, but does feel different if you’re used to the vertical app drawer.

Sony lets you make folders in the drawer, and arrange icons as you like rather than forcing alphabetic order.

The Sony Xperia XA2's interface also supports themes. Rather than being made by "some person on the internet" like Huawei themes, most are created by Sony Mobile, making them closer to the skins used by a PS4.

Lots cost money, and many aren't much better than the user-made standard, even if they have been produced by Sony Mobile. Or maybe we're just too picky.

The default theme blocks off the last centimeter of display for the soft keys, which makes the screen appear even squatter. But it's a sharp-looking theme we're happy to live with.

We've noticed zero lag in the Sony Xperia XA2. It runs perfectly, with very little difference between this and a higher-end model. Get the stopwatch out and you'd see some change in app load speeds, but nothing that stands out much in general use.

The slight disparity between this and a top price phone isn't just about the CPU power. The Sony Xperia XA2 doesn't have the fast dual-channel DDR4 of the top phones and its 32GB of storage is quick, rather than faster than the SSDs of some laptops like the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus's storage.

Movies, music and gaming

• Good gaming performance
• Solid but unremarkable speaker

The Sony Xperia XA2 comes with more media apps than most Android phones, because this is Sony's area. There's a solid media player for your own videos, and a glossy music player app, made by Sony.

Kobo and antivirus apps are also pre-installed, but you can disable them if you think they are bloatware.

The Sony Xperia XA2's sharp and punchy screen makes games and videos look good, but at this point we've been spoiled by the recent glut of 18:9 phones. While made for TV content is a perfect fit for a 16:9 screen like this, console-style games and cinema-aspect movies just work better on a wider display.

Games run very well, though. The Xperia XA2 has a Snapdragon 630 chipset, with enough power to cut through high-end titles even if this is a mid-range processor. Asphalt 8 plays more smoothly than on some other phones of this sort of price, including the Huawei P Smart.

The phone also has a sound speaker, if predictably not one of Sony’s best. It's a single driver on the bottom edge, so the sound is mono and directional.

Top volume and sound quality are both decent, although you don’t get the same sound weight as the best-sounding premium phones.

Performance and benchmarks

• Snapdragon 630 has a good GPU, solid CPU
• Octa-core chipset
• Matches other phones in class in CPU tests

So, how powerful is the Sony Xperia XA2's Snapdragon 630 chipset? This is part of Qualcomm's mid-range series, but it uses the same Cortex-A53 cores as its low-end chipsets. Eight of 'em.

However, this matched with 3GB of RAM is enough to make Android 8.0 run well. This chipset also has an Adreno 508 graphics chipset. Again, while no match for the GPUs of the 8-series processors in more expensive phones, it's a good fit for the phone and a substantial upgrade over the Adreno 506 used in the Moto G5S Plus.

We're talking about a 30-40% performance improvement, which is huge when the difference between the Snapdragon 625 and 630 may otherwise seem minimal.

It scores 4,222 points in Geekbench 4, which is actually slightly lower than the score we squeezed out of the Moto G5S Plus with its Snapdragon 625. However, it just reiterates that the Snapdragon 630's most significant upgrade is on the GPU side, which is not a Geekbench 4 focus.

Verdict

The Sony Xperia XA2 is a solid phone that, like most other Sony devices, has not switched quickly to the trends of the moment.

It doesn't have an 18:9 display, instead using a more conventional 16:9 aspect ratio, and shares camera tech with its predecessor.

However, its performance is rock-solid and despite being thicker than most it's easy to handle and scores fairly high on the plain likability factor.

Who's this for?

The Sony Xperia XA2 is for people who like Sony's phones and don't want to spend a huge amount on a new mobile. An appreciation of Sony's design is needed as the XA2 has few stand-out features.

Should you buy it?

You get slightly better value with a Moto, or Huawei phone in this class, but if you're into the way Sony makes phones we can think of few reasons to hold off buying an Xperia XA2.

If you're not sold on Sony the following three phones are strong alternatives.

Samsung Galaxy A5

The closest Samsung rival to the XA2 is the Galaxy A5. It has a slightly higher-end design, with glass on the rear rather than plastic. And its camera fares a little better in low-light conditions. It’s also water resistant, slimmer and has an OLED screen rather than an LCD.

Don’t put too much weight on the OLED factor, though, as the XA2’s colors can be made to look very punchy.

• Read the full Samsung Galaxy A5 review

Moto G5S

If you want to save a little more money, the Moto G5S is a good option. It has an all-aluminum frame, very simple software and a good, if slightly laggy, camera. As with other Moto G phones, value is the main draw. It simply costs less, and that matters.

• Read the full Moto G5S review

Huawei P Smart

One of the best early lower-cost 18:9 screen phones, the Huawei P Smart has a more “current” look than the Xperia XA2.

It has a few performance blips and the camera doesn’t produce quite as punchy-looking shots. However, it also seems to be slightly cheaper at the time of writing.

• Read the full Huawei P Smart review

First reviewed: February 2018