Sony - XPERIA XA Ultra 4G LTE with 16GB Memory Cell Phone (Unlocked) - Graphite black

So my mother's old Xperia T2 Ultra decided to burn out the internal Wifi, Bluetooth, and cellular antennas, so had tried twice to get it fixed under warranty, but 2nd time they advised that they would need $369.99 before being able to proceed with another repair. I told them, that I've sent this to them once already, and they didn't even fix the issue the first time, so took to Elite services, and got it pushed through for a gift card to preorder this. In the meantime, mom is using my old C4. I was originally going to get her a C5 Ultra, but none were available any where local, so ordered this. Basically this is nearly double everything that she had before with her T2 Ultra, while maintaining the same screen size. I first saw this at a mobile conference back in February. It's 1080p resolution screen is sharp and plenty bright, the zero bezel screen is a delight to view, and the speakers are both clear and loud, and even the earpiece speaker has been improved over Sony's previous efforts with a great signal range to boot. The Stamina mode for extended battery touts a full 2 days of use on a single charge with normal use. Power users could expect closer to the 8 hours mark, while social media and entertainment users mileage may vary based on brightness, volume level with/without headphones, and if you are utilizing wifi/HSDPA+ or LTE. Keep in mind that with most phones nowadays, this does make use of a nano sim card, so have yours read or cut accordingly. Mom uses Net10, and it was easy to setup, and the fact that this device should get Android 7.0 Nougat by year's end makes it extra icing on this very pretty white cake of mobile enjoyment. Worth your time, if you aren't all hung up on having the latest greatest faster thing around. This thing is no slouch with 3gb of LPDDR4 1866 hynix memory, and a mediatek refined design 8 core of what was in the C5 Ultra, but in my experience doesn't get as warm as that device or the Z series do. No 4k camera support on this, but with time, I'm sure that the xperia community on xdadev will have a port of one for very capable shots. The HDR feature really pops in all photo samples I've taken or seen with various lighting. The fact that this has both a front and rear LED for selfies that are bright and lit without an extra attachment or flash bar, and the rear flash is a bit more closely resembling a pop flash than a torch, so it's much closer to a xenon style flash. The fact that this has a larger screen, and more memory, and 16gb storage with microSDxc expandable up to 256gb makes this a future proof device for those that really just use a phone for what it's meant, and occasional media viewing, it's hard to go wrong with this device. The fact that with the order it included free a 64gb class 10 microSDXC sandisk was just extended sweetening of the pot. Works great with a tempered glass screen protector extension also. If you get it on its merits and what it's not, you shouldn't be disappointed. My only issue is that most of the good multi layer device protection and case companies don't have a good option available for this to be protected. Outside of Ringke fusion clear or smoked that has port covers, and tactile button covers, which isn't bad for as thin as it is. Just hard to find any good cases for Sony Xperia series devices of late.

This is a fairly thorough review after 1 month of comprehensive use. I am a habitual smartphone user who is addicted to these devices for business and entertainment purposes. My previous brands were Samsung and LG phones. I decided to go Sony XPERIA XA ULTRA for the first time because I have used their DSLR Cameras with success and trusted the brand to deliver, but it did NOT.. PROS - Limited versus more popular brands. I fell in love with the stylish slick square body and clean edges. For someone like myself who does often business and reads documents through smart phones, I enjoyed the larger screen size. Unfortunately that's about it. CONS - Where do I begin? 1) Screen sensitivity is off. It's only been less than 1 month of usage, more and more often I cannot swipe to answer or decline calls. I would swipe and the 'green' circle would move across the screen half way and freeze. Phone would keep ringing and I keep swiping harder and softer but the 'green' circle to accept the call would be stuck. C'mon its only been a month and this is occurring once a day at least. 2) Smartwatch, does not function well with them or at least Samsung one. It picks and chooses it seems like. I used to get SMS, phone calls, and a variety of messenger apps notification from this phone to my smartwatch. Now, just FB notifications and mail, my phone will receive a call and it won't even notify the smartwatch anymore like it did the first weeks. I'll check my phone and see new messages, then check my smartwatch and nothing, but it'll continually send me notifications of other useless updates. 3) User friendly function is extremely basic on the Sony OS. with LG and Samsung, it was super simple and clear. It's hard to explain, but it's as if the developers didn't bother to make this as user friendly as they could've. Things that are simple on other systems like call forwarding, putting on speaker, transferring to blutooth, etc. isn't as simple on this phone. 4) Media files are not recognized, specifically videos. I would download a video of a movie or TV show. When i move it to the SD card because the phone only has 16 gigs (12 gigs already used by Sony software), if I ever take the SD card out to transfer files, it WILL NOT recognized the movie file when I put the same SD card back in. The file is still on the SD card, but it is not recognize. If the SD card was NEVER removed in the first place, the video file can be played again and again off the SD card. At least 6 times so far, if I removed the SD card, all video files is not recognized on there. Even though the Xperia was used to download, play and transfer the files. 5) Inaccurate Battery Display - I've caught it twice with inaccurate battery display. The first time, just 3 days after the 2 week return policy ended, while on the web, it notifies below 15%. Less than 30 seconds later, it completely turns off. Another time, it notifies below 15%, within 1 minute, it states 1% left. 6) Battery Life - awful, just awful. I am not even video graphics heavy. I don't even play games. This phone is almost dead before the sunsets. 7) Charging lag - for such a small battery, this phone takes an incredibly long time to charge. 8) Screen barely dim. From the highest setting to the lowest setting is like 1 shade of brightness. On the absolute LOWEST brightness, I can still read the screen clearly without effort outside on a sunny day. 9) Poorer Cell Signal receiver. I've been at the same job in the same desk for 3 years. I get about 2 signal bars where I am. With the other phone brands, I make calls and SMS fairly smoothly. It all went down with the Xperia. I would have text come in with 20-30 min delays. Often I would leave the office and get up 5 new voicemails because their calls didn't go through while I was in my office. 10) Slow camera. Slow to turn on, slow to focus and very poor with night pictures on auto mode. The selfie camera is supposed to be best in class but it does not make up for how deficient the back camera is.

The Sony Xperia Xa Ultra is a good phone but there are better phones to choose from. I'll be honest it was the 6 inch screen size of the Sony Xperia Xa Ultra that really hooked me and made me purchase the phone. Movies and videos look really good on the screen and because the phone has bezel less edges the screen size looks even more massive. The phone has some good features like the camera app with it's 16.1 front megapixel camera and 21.0 back megapixel camera. The camera takes good pics especially the front camera for selfie pics. There are some cons to this phone though such as the Wi-Fi will sometimes drop unexpectedly, The call quality / reception is not that good, when i call people or they call me I am told by people they can't here me even though i am speaking directly into the phone microphone. There's only 16 gigs of internal storage and even though you can add an micro sd card for more storage the Sony Xperia Xa Ultra doesn't have adaptive storage. Adaptive storage means that you can store or transfer apps to the micro sd card but you can't do that on the Xperia Ultra, you can only transfer photos, music and videos to the micro sd card. Because the phone is constantly updating apps ( unless you turn off automatic updates in settings) you will constantly find yourself deleting the cache of the internal memory. And one last thing about the 16 gigs of internal memory, about 6 gigs of it is set aside for the OS leaving you with only 10 gigs to use before downloading any apps, you will find yourself running out of internal memory fast. The battery life is also not the greatest. The battery is only a 2800mAh which is not a large battery for a large phone of the Sony Xperia Xa Ultra. Usually by late afternoon like 4pm I am finding myself charging my phone. The battery is non removable so the other concern is how well will the battey hold a charge after two years if I have the phone that long. The Sony Xperia Xa Ultra is a good phone but I wish I had done more research of other phones and what features other phones offered before I purchased this phone. The Sony Xperia Xa Ultra is not a bad phone per se but there are better phones to choose from.

I was excited to finally step outside if the Apple and Samsung boxes and tree tree try something new! The camera specs were amazing, the screen was a bit much, but it looked amazing so I quickly got over it. Then the guy that sold it to me said they didn't carry cases for the Xperia Ultra and everything went downhill from there. It was really difficult to find accessories that I liked for this phone, was never sure if I could fast charge it or not, couldn't find screen protectors to fit the screen (which ended up being the Achilles heel that brought mine down), and got little help from best buy when I inquired about some apps or accessories made specifically for Sony phones so I could really get the full experience. Needless to say, I never did, and ended up returning to the best buy that I had to travel 6 hours to, with a cracked screen. Which brings up the most infuriating part of all of this! The selling point for the geek squad protection plan was that if I broke my phone, I could come back in with it any time and they would take the broken one and give me a brand new one off the shelf right then, my brother can attest to that having been said as he was standing right there as well. When I took my broken phone in 14 days to the day later, the geek squad guy straight up laughed at me, saying they hear that a lot, but they can't do that. So I asked what can I do to have you guys take this phone back from me so I no longer have to do business with you? After he laughed again and said something snotty I turned and walked off. Needless to say, I won't be stepping outside the box again any time soon, and can thank Lynnwood, WA Best Buy for that! Such a horrible experience!!!

When I first purchased this phone, i went into it with the understanding that it was not a top of the line phone. However, for the price, I was okay with that because I really wanted to get away from a 2 year commitment with a cell phone company. Well, 5 months later and I have a 2 year commitment with a cell phone provider because this phone just wasn't good enough for my needs. The only thing nice I can say about it was that I liked the 6 inch screen. That's it. The biggest things that annoyed me were: Internal Storage was only 16GB and about half of that is taken up by the operating system. I added a 128GB storage card, but apps don't install to the storage card unless you download a 3rd party app to move them over to the storage card. Further complicating matters, every an app was updated, it had to be moved to the storage card all over again. You can imagine how tedious and annoying this gets over time. The next issue I had was that the phone had a very hard time staying connected via bluetooth to my car. I had to disable and renable bluetooth - sometimes several times - just to get the phone to sync up with the car. The battery - for such a big phone - would barely last an entire day without having to be charged again. No Android 7 (Nougat), even though it was supposed to be available last March, according to the Sony Website. No WiFi calling available (Per T-Mobile, not sure about other carriers) No otterbox cases. I ended up getting a case from Japan that made the phone appear to be another inch wider and taller and very heavy. My friends would tease me about the case 'cause they said I was carrying a weapon, not a phone. But I wanted a case that would protect the phone and it was the best one I could fine - pickings were slim. The bottom line is that I would not recommend this phone to anyone unless it was for a kid as a starter phone.

So wow really awesome phone! But with the capability to expand memory becomes ultimately useless if you can't use it to expand more functions. As in, use it to store apps and or updates. Some apps are required to be on the phone and with 16 GB between phone updates and app updates you lose that space fast! At some point you will only have 1 downloadable app with Sony updates taking most of the internal memory. while I'm not there yet, I'm getting close as new updates come in I'm making that dreaded decision of which app to sacrifice to update the phone. While I love the camera and it's overall simplicity for a touch phone. The memory card is only for pix, videos and some apps. And even the apps that can be transfered to the memory card it'll only transfer around 75mb more or less or U'll read "file is too big to transfer" or " there is no space on SD card." Regardless of actual space left. Initially it was a great phone and I saw a lot of potential, which soon left me frustrated because I can't get basic apps due to lack of space even tho I have 256gb sdxc card, with at least 200gb of space left.

I bought this phone on 11/22/16 and the glass screen has already cracked. I have had several phones over the last 9 years (I'm always wanting the next best thing) and this is the first time that I have EVER had a cracked screen!! Yes, it was accidentally dropped ONE TIME, and the screen cracked. I dropped my previous phone (note 4) several times and never had anything wrong with it! The Sony Xperia Xa Ultra is a really heavy phone and that's why I dropped it. I got it out of my pocket and the weight of the phone is something I'm not use to and it slipped right out of my hands. The buttons on the side are really oddly placed! The power button is in the middle on the side. The volume button is right under it and towards the bottom is a button for the camera. Very annoying! The battery life is not forgiving either. It sucks. If you text a lot and Facebook here and there, this is not the phone for that as far as the battery is concerned. As for repairs on the phone, it's expensive IF you can find anyone around that will work on a Sony phone! I live in a big town and of all the places here, only ONE place will work on it. Replacing the screen is $140! Best Buy doesn't even work on them. You also cannot set individual message tones for anyone. You can set individual Ringtones, but not message tones. As soon as I get the money, I'm getting away from this phone!! The only good things about this phone is the size and the bright display.

This phone will not disappoint! The first thing you'll notice is the size and beauty of this phone. The sleek design along with the metal frame makes this phone an attractive one. The 6" full HD screen delivers sharp and clear picture which is perfect for watching videos or flipping through pictures. The sides of the screen curve right into the edges seamlessly which is pleasing to the eye. The front-facing camera is incredible. It even has flash for selfies taken in low-light conditions. Rear-facing camera is no slouch either. The speaker is as loud as most smartphones go but nothing too impressive. The ability to add more storage via the micro-sd card slot is a great touch since it only has about 11GB of usable storage. This phone fairs well with high-end phones and for half the price too, great value!