Sony Xperia M4 Aqua Review

Table of Contents

Display and Multimedia

The M4 Aqua has a 5-inch display with HD resolution or equal to 294ppi – still a decent resolution given the screen size. The screen is crisp, has good color reproduction, and can produce enough brightness when used outdoors. There’s no mention of IPS but it has good viewing angles.

Sony’s known for turning their devices into multimedia-centric devices and that means the M4 Aqua is equipped with a good down-firing loudspeaker. It can produce loud and clear sounds with decent bass. If you want to boost the quality, you can switch on ClearAudio+ in Settings.

Camera

Sony is know for its imaging technology in mobile phones so we have high hopes for the Xperia M4 Aqua. It sports a 13-megapixel main shooter with Exmor RS mobile image sensor and a 5-megapixel front facing camera. The latter has a wide-angle lens which is good for group selfies and can produce decent photos with acceptable detail and colors. The former, on the other hand, can produce crisp images with vibrant colors but tends to choose a cooler color temperature.

If you’re looking for in-camera apps, the M4 Aqua has plenty of it. It has Superior Auto, Manual, Sound Photo, AR Fun, Multi-camera, AR effect, Creative effect, Sweep Panorama, and Portrait retouch. And these are just the ones that come pre-installed. You can still download more straight from the camera app.

As for video recording, the M4 Aqua can shoot 1080p videos at 30fps in MP4 format with quality similar to stills. Watch the video below:

OS, UI, and Apps

Running the software department for the M4 Aqua is Android 5.0 Lollipop with Sony’s UI on top. It uses a transparent background for its app drawer, has a quick menu from the left side for organizing the apps, and has plenty of widgets, themes, wallpapers, and floating tools baked-in.

Pre-installed apps are present as well. There’s the usual Google apps, AVG Protection, File Commander, and a slew of Sony apps that you might rarely use: PlayStation, What’s New, News from Socialife, Video Unlimited, Xperia Care, and Xperia Lounge.

You can uninstall a couple of them, though, but it won’t be enough to push its limited storage as the M4 Aqua only has 8GB of claimed storage with 3.02GB as usable out of the box. The rest are used by the System (4.03GB) and Apps (1.16GB).

That being said, if you’re heavy on multimedia, better invest on a large capacity microSD card. As for USB OTG, sad to say it is not supported.

Next Page: Performance and Benchmarks, Battery Life, Conclusion 12

5 Comments

Jhon Brillante says:

9 years ago

metal frame??? akala ko plastic frame lng yan
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Sui Generis says:

9 years ago

used to own this unit but it lagged a lot and heated up very quickly, especially if you have more than 3 apps running in the background.
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Easy E says:

9 years ago

My friend have this. Ayun nga madali daw mag init. By the way, nabili lang nya yung unit nya nga 12k plus sony headphone. Yung over the ear ang binigay.
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