Ultra only in size: Sony’s Xperia C5 Ultra reviewed

Using the phone, you’ll find 4G performance is stellar, offering 4G LTE at speeds ranging from 20Mbps all the way up to 100Mbps, network dependent of course.

That’s not bad at all, and fairly par for the course, which will be great for people keen to use the C5 Ultra as a portable YouTube machine when they’re out and about.

At 6 inches, it’s totally conceivable that you might want to watch all the cat videos every day on the bus, but please do everyone a favour and bring some headphones.

sony-xperia-c5-ultra-review-2015-screenshot-4g-lte

Battery life is about average for this, though at least it is on par with not just Sony’s flagships, but pretty much every other flagship.

We found throughout the course of time with the C5 Ultra that it would manage roughly a day of life, either with Bluetooth switched on or without, so you’ll want to charge this one daily.

sony-xperia-c5-ultra-review-2015-screenshot-battery-wireless

But if there’s one thing stopping the C5 Ultra from being a fantastic mid-range bargain, it’s the system performance.

It’s not that the eight-core processor is mediocre — it’s that, too — but it’s more the stability Sony has provided for the not-so-expensive phablet.

In fact, after the phone crashed several times throughout two days and decided to restart itself a couple of other times, we have a hard time saying good things about its performance in general.

Aside for these rather curious performance glitches, and they’re pretty severe, it’s an adequately performing smartphone, with the eight-core processor allowing you to jump from app to app fairly easily usually with half a second of day, though some apps and features — like the camera — can certainly take their time to load.

We need to stress that mediocre performance isn’t the C5 Ultra’s main problem, though, because for the most part it is overall decent experience.

sony-xperia-c5-ultra-review-2015-11

It’s the crashing that really kills it.

All of a sudden, your phone will just reset. You’ll turn to it and voila, it’s going through the Sony Xperia start-up, and you’ll wonder why that’s happening.

Other times, the crash is more severe, and you’ll be browsing a webpage or trying to use the phone and it will just stop. The screen will stay on and you’ll feel like you’re using the device, and yet it will be doing nothing.

Less than nothing, actually, because it has stopped, and requires you to hold down the power button and volume up to force it to reset, you know since the battery is built in and you can’t just give it a good whack to cut the power.

And much like the recent Xperia Z5 and Z5 Compact, our time with the C5 Ultra revealed a camera that required at least five seconds to load. Yeesh.

sony-xperia-c5-ultra-review-2015-screenshot-camera

That camera performance wasn’t the best we’ve ever seen, either, despite the C5 Ultra rocking more megapixels on the front, sitting at 13 megapixels, which is more than the 5 megapixels than either of the current flagships.

But just like we expect out of a good analogy, you can’t expect more megapixels to instantly equal more quality, because the 13 megapixel camera comes with flaws.

First of all, it’s not the best camera on the planet, because while it’s a totally acceptable camera, it doesn’t rival the flagships in the slightest.

Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra's rear camera
Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra’s rear camera

It also lacks the ability to control the megapixels from the camera software, which is a first for us on a Sony camera. Normally, this is fairly easy, requiring a settings change, but on the C5 Ultra, your selection of megapixels amidst aspect ratios has been reduced to merely an aspect ratio: do you want 4:3 or 16:9?

That’s your selection, and you’ll find it spits out a 13 megapixel image in 4:3 and a little over 8 megapixels in 16:9, but it doesn’t tell you that, and you only find out when you take the photos and multiply the dimensions yourself.

We’re not sure why Sony has taken this route — surely megapixel sizes aren’t that difficult to understand and pick between? — but it’s what exists on the camera.

Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra's rear camera (100 percent crop)
Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra’s rear camera (100 percent crop)

And the camera, which we’ve said isn’t the best on the planet and is acceptable, is okay, but it’s not great. Images tend to lack detail, especially up close, and at night, the image quality just feels altogether blurry and soft.

Daylight is fine, while indoors, the automatic white balance doesn’t feel like it’s doing the best job.

Really, the one thing really going for the camera is that it can get really close and sharpen up nicely, allowing us to take some nice shots of the dogs from the front-facing camera.

Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra's front camera
Image sample from the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra’s front camera

Conclusion

Compared to last year, there hasn’t been a lot of movement in the phablet space, and we’ve even seen people in marketing pull away from that term “phablet” of late.

That’s a good thing, because the idea of a phablet or a “tablet-sized phone” has just kind of become the norm. Now that Apple has joined in, a phablet is just a phone because big phones are totally normal.

Now that they’re normal, so too is the reduction in price on the big phones.

And six inches is definitely big. Offering a six inch screen, the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra is definitely one of the larger phones we’ve seen this year, bordering on being a tablet, not just because of its size, but because even Sony’s tablet software looks and performs just like one of its phones.

In essence, the C5 Ultra is a small tablet, and yet it’s also a very big phone, offering the best of both worlds for someone who wants just that.

Despite the excellent price, Sony hasn’t delivered the masterpiece you might expect, because the model Australians will be seeing just seems to lack the polished software you might expect

sony-xperia-c5-ultra-review-2015-02

Overall
Features
Value for money
Performance
Ease of Use
Design
Reader Rating0 Votes
Fantastic practically edge-to-edge display; Screen is visible in direct sunlight; Despite the plastic build, the C5 Ultra feels great in the hand; Upgradeable storage; Excellent 4G speeds;
Phone tends to reset itself or crashes hard, forcing a multi-button power down; No waterproofing; Camera isn’t the fastest to load; Mediocre camera; Fingerprint magnet;
3.8