Valentina Palladino

The Sony Xperia X Performance.

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Sony is switching gears when it comes to smartphones and that shift is embodied in the new X line of handsets. There’s the Xperia XA Ultra, a “selfie” smartphone with a 16-megapixel front-facing camera, the middle-of-the-road Xperia X equipped with a Snapdragon 650 processor, and then there’s the Xperia X Performance. This device is the “flagship” of sorts for the new line, sporting a 5-inch FHD display, a Snapdragon 820 processor, and 3GB of RAM.

New letter aside, some of these X phones pick up right where the Z series left off, which means that in some ways they feel just a step behind the rest of the competition. The X Performance’s biggest problem isn’t that it’s a bad phone but that it’s a $700 phone that often feels inferior to $400 phones.

Look and feel

All of Sony’s new Xperia X smartphones look quite similar, and the Xperia X Performance looks nearly identical to the standard Xperia X. Thanks to a better processor and a larger battery, the X Performance is just about a millimeter thicker and a few grams heavier than the Xperia X. While the lower-powered handset resembles a more rigid iPhone 6s, the X Performance emphasizes its blockiness with the additional thickness and weight.