Sony Xperia ZL Camera: 13 MP or 11.5 MP?

So all the spec sheets say the ZL has a 13 megapixel camera sensor. However, when you go into the settings screen the max resolution you can select is “12 MP” in the 4:3 setting, as seen here in this screen shot:

If you do the math, even 12 MP turns out to be a generous marketing number:

3920 x 2940 =  11,524,800.

That’s 11.5 MP people. I’m not really complaining per say, I’m getting really nice pictures from the ZL. I’m just curious about how Sony’s marketing can go around stating 13 MP when their own settings screens say 12 MP. 

My Red Sony Xperia ZL (C6506) is finally here!

So I finally finished getting my HTC One setup and look what shows up today? Haven’t even booted it up yet but wanted to get some pictures up because this phone is absolutely gorgeous. My quick pictures here are close but really don’t emphasis how good the red back looks; it’s a metallic red and makes the plastic back look more like anodized aluminum. It’s a little thicker than the HTC one but it’s shape feels fantastic in the hand. 

I love the look of the aluminum power button. I’m a big fan of dedicated camera buttons but the last couple of phones I had didn’t implement them well, so we’ll see how Sony’s done here.

The front is very reflective (that’s my office ceiling you’re seeing there), but almost no bezel, all glass up front. Sorry I forgot to dust it off before the pics (amazing how much crap you can get on a phone in 30 seconds for less).

In the hand. This pic is the closes to representing the color, its still actually a little darker than this. 

The ZL next to the One. Now if HTC would make the One in red …

Thickness comparison  It doesn’t feel as bad in the hand as it looks (but I think the One is almost too thin).

The ZL looks really think from this angle, but it’s more of an illusion caused by the tapered edges of the One.

The notification LED in charging mode - it’s absolutely stunning. I have a weird thing for notification lights, I love the one on the Nexus 4, hate that HTC won’t put a true RGB LED in their phones. Can’t wait to get Light Flow up and running on the ZL!

More to come as I set this baby up.

The HTC One is running Android 4.1.2 and for me that’s actually better than 4.2.2 on my Nexus 4 for Bluetooth  On my Nexus 4 if I have my Pebble connected and then I try to connect my Jawbone Bluetooth headset I get a lot of erratic behavior: music/podcast players won’t stream audio or just lock up completely, the phone becomes unstable and eventually requires a reboot, etc. 

On the HTC One I’m not having any of those problems, I can connect multiple Bluetooth devices and there are no issues. Sometimes having the latest Android release isn’t having the “best”. That said, I really miss the enhanced expandable notifications in 4.2.2 more than I thought I would, particularly with work emails. 

It’s really annoying how HTC changed how you add apps to your home screens. On most Android phones you just hold down an app icon in the app tray, and that lets you “punch it through” to the home screen, where you can drag it around. On the One, you have to hold a blank spot on a home screen, then you get a the special “personalization” screen where you can add apps to the home screens. Unless, of course, you’re trying to add an icon to the dock, in which case you must do that from the app drawer. Inconsistent, and stupid.

So my HTC One Developer Edition (64 GB, unlocked bootloader) finally arrived today. I’ve been messing around with it most of the day getting it setup, so far so good for the most part. I’m not going to “review” the One per say (plenty of others have already done that), so I’ll just be commenting on things I notice from a usability standpoint on a daily basis.  One thing I’ve already run into is the lock screen is broken. The first couple of times I used the phone it worked as I expected; I had to drag an icon up from the dock or drag the lock icon up to unlock the phone and get to my home screen (I typically don’t use a pin or pattern lock if I don’t have to, mainly as a speed thing).  Now however after hitting the power button all I have to do is just touch the screen anywhere and the phone goes straight to the home screen. Likewise if I just tap any of the icons in the dock it will immediately open that app/folder without a drag motion. I anticipate this will result in a lot of unintended unlocks, and will force me to add a pin or pattern lock. Not sure what’s happened here but I’ll let you know if I figure it out.  As promised the phone arrived with the bootloader already unlocked. All I had to do was flash CWM Touch Recovery and then install SuperSU to get root. Hopefully root isn’t why the lock screen is acting wonky ;) Other than installing and configuring apps I really haven’t “used” the phone too much yet. However I can say I’m really impressed with the Beats Audio enhancements for the front-facing speakers. After downloading Doggcatcher I listened to a podcast to see how the speakers were. The speech sounded excellent, and I noticed the Beats Audio icon was displayed in the notification panel. So I went in and turned Beats off, and the difference in quality was night and day. The voices were very “tinny” with Beats off, but on they sounded very full and rich. That’s an enhancement setting I’ll be leaving on. I also tried it with my Jawbone bluetooth headset and while it wasn’t as noticeable a difference it still sounded a little better with Beats on.  Anyway, more to come as it happens :)
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So my HTC One Developer Edition (64 GB, unlocked bootloader) finally arrived today. I’ve been messing around with it most of the day getting it setup, so far so good for the most part. I’m not going to “review” the One per say (plenty of others have already done that), so I’ll just be commenting on things I notice from a usability standpoint on a daily basis. 

One thing I’ve already run into is the lock screen is broken. The first couple of times I used the phone it worked as I expected; I had to drag an icon up from the dock or drag the lock icon up to unlock the phone and get to my home screen (I typically don’t use a pin or pattern lock if I don’t have to, mainly as a speed thing). 

Now however after hitting the power button all I have to do is just touch the screen anywhere and the phone goes straight to the home screen. Likewise if I just tap any of the icons in the dock it will immediately open that app/folder without a drag motion. I anticipate this will result in a lot of unintended unlocks, and will force me to add a pin or pattern lock. Not sure what’s happened here but I’ll let you know if I figure it out. 

As promised the phone arrived with the bootloader already unlocked. All I had to do was flash CWM Touch Recovery and then install SuperSU to get root. Hopefully root isn’t why the lock screen is acting wonky ;)

Other than installing and configuring apps I really haven’t “used” the phone too much yet. However I can say I’m really impressed with the Beats Audio enhancements for the front-facing speakers. After downloading Doggcatcher I listened to a podcast to see how the speakers were. The speech sounded excellent, and I noticed the Beats Audio icon was displayed in the notification panel. So I went in and turned Beats off, and the difference in quality was night and day. The voices were very “tinny” with Beats off, but on they sounded very full and rich. That’s an enhancement setting I’ll be leaving on. I also tried it with my Jawbone bluetooth headset and while it wasn’t as noticeable a difference it still sounded a little better with Beats on. 

Anyway, more to come as it happens :)

So in the end I pre-ordered the HTC One Developer Edition after all

I was pretty set on getting the T-Mobile version of the One, since it includes AWS 3G bands and dual channel HSPA+ support which the Developer Edition doesn’t. Then HTC put up the pre-order screens on Friday, and after some deliberation (or agonizing), I ended up pulling the trigger on the Dev phone.

I was a little surprised when I saw the T-Mobile phone was listed as an option on HTC’s pre-order site, especially since T-Mobile has been mum on  an actual release date both on Twitter and the lack of notification from their email notification system. When the site listed the phone as shipping the same day as the Dev Edition phone I was pretty suspect. Yesterday I saw several posts from angry customers who pre-ordered the T-Mobile phone only to later get an email saying their order had been cancelled, so looks like I was right about that.

But the bigger thing (litterally) was the on-board storage. I really want the 64 GB model, which apparently AT&T has some limited time exclusive on (typical). I plan on taking a lot of photos with the One and also plan to leave Zoe on most of the time; my thought is that’s gonna chew up a lot of storage, and I don’t want to have to worry about it. 

I also have felt hamstrung by the 16 GB in my LG Nexus 4. I’m used to keeping high-def local copies of my race videos on my phone to show people without having to worry about having connectivity to YouTube. The lack of storage space on the Nexus 4 has forced me to live like Google wants me to (in the cloud) and frankly I don’t like it; I’d rather have the choice, and if I can’t have expandable memory than I want the most I can get (all three of my iPads have been 64 GB as well).

So 64 GB wasn’t an option listed on the T-Mobile pre-order page, and even more irksome was the fact that they wanted $650 for the T-Mobile 32 GB phone, the same price as the 64 GB Developer Edition. In the words of T-Mobile’s John Legere, “Stop the bullshit!” Apparently T-Mobile will only charge me a fair price for the phone if I’m willing to put a $100 deposit down and pay $20 a month (theoretically putting golden handcuffs on me to stick around for 24 months). Legere said in his Uncarrier presentation that people could pay off their phones at any time, so I guess the smart play for a T-Mobile device is to do the payment plan for a month, and then pay it off, because if you want to pay it all up front and get it unlocked day one they’re going to charge you what appears to be an $70 premium. 

Why do I want to pay for my phone up front? I want it SIM unlocked. I need to be able to use my phone on two networks, T-Mobile and StraightTalk. I don’t really care too much about the unlocked bootloader on the Developer Edition, and could have bought a SIM unlocked-only phone for $580, but it was only 32 GB. So Developer Edition it is. 

Plus with the unlocked bootloader there’s a chance the clever boys and girls over at XDA will figure out a way to enable 3G AWS on the One. Fortunately for me Chicago has solid T-Mobile 1900 HSPA+ so I’m covered there, but from what I understand the Developer Edition will be like the AT&T model of the One and locked out of Dual Channel HSPA+, so no 42 speeds. I’m pretty confident that the Chicago market will be getting T-Mobile LTE around summertime though, so that helps there as well.

We’ll see how this all works out in a couple of weeks when the phones finally start shipping. I’m really curious as to what the delay is for the T-Mobile model of the phone, but so far the rumours of a mid-May release seem about right.

HTC One versus LG Nexus 4 | Android Central - Camera Sensor Dimension

This comparison by Alex Dobie over at Android Central was particularly interesting to me since I have a Nexus 4 and am planning on getting an unlocked HTC One. One very surprising (to me, anyway) bit of information contained within is that the HTC One’s camera sensor’s physical dimensions have an aspect ration of 16:9 vs. the typical 4:3 seen on the Nexus 4 and just about every other smartphone available.

I personally don’t care for 16:9 photos, I think it’s a little too wide. I grew up shooting with 35 mm cameras so I prefer a more classic 3:2 aspect ratio, and in fact have my Samsung Galaxy Camera set to that (even though I’m not taking advantage of all the sensor’s pixels, since it’s a 4:3 sensor). 

I’ve always found it odd that phone manufacturers tout their megapixel counts (8! 13!) but then ship the phones defaulting to 16:9, which on a 4:3 sensor means you’re taking pictures with less megapixels than the manufacturer beat you over the head with as nirvana. Even the Nexus 4 ships this way.

I believe the reason the phone’s camera apps default to 16:9 is because that’s the dimensions of the phone’s display. The average user who really doesn’t have any idea about camera sensors or what the megapixels really add up to doesn’t care if they’re not using the “full” sensor, but would probably bug support staff with “why are there back bars on the sides of my pictures?” “the camera on my phone is broken, it doesn’t use the whole screen!” questions if it defaulted to 4:3 to use the full sensor. In order to keep the lowest common denominator happy, shipping with 16:9 as the default would make sense, and the people who care/know can always change it to 4:3 in the settings. 

With a 13 MP or 8 MP sensor, defaulting to 16:9 still leaves you with pretty significant pixel counts for your photos. But what if you’ve dropped to 4 MP as HTC has done? They’re already fighting an uphill battle in the spec war trying to convince people that fewer, larger pixels is actually “better” than more, tiny pixels. If you format those fewer, larger pixels in a traditional 4:3 sensor which you then effectively ”crop” for the average user who wants to use their full display to frame/view their pictures, you’ve lowered the actual “used” megapixels into the 3-range.

So there’s that. Or it might just have more to do with Zoes and other special features HTC has included with their camera that take advantage of video processing which is done in 16:9. 

Whatever the reason, the bottom line for me is if I want to get the highest resolution still pictures possible on the HTC One, I have to shoot in 16:9. The camera was the major attraction for me to this phone - now I’m not so sure.