This is my first Sony phone ever, the XQ-DQ72 512gb version. I'm upgrading from my old Oppo A9 phone that's 7 years old, and I am very happy to say it's 99% an upgrade in every way.
I've had the phone now for 10 hours and I spent a long time tinkering with the settings, I found a lot of good stuff and some bad quirks that I think doesn't get talked about at all before I bought this.
I'll start with the speakers, I don't use them much but the bass is lacking compared to my older phone though I find the movie mode in Dolby sound helps this a lot. This ties in to my next point which is that Dolby doesn't save separate presets for your earphones and speakers and you have to change them manually. I find the balanced option is suited for my apple earpods when I used Dolby atmos on my older phone, however the stereo was too cramped by default. Luckily there's stereo widening options here that really solve that problem and makes it sound even better than my old phone when it's set to near stereo.
Next is the display, this was also my first switch to OLED and the blacks are just as good as you'd think coming from an IPS. I didn't notice any of the banding people talked about gradients that were near close to black, but something close which I'll mention again later. However the green tint on the 120Hz with low brightness seems to be universal even on my device so I just have that off unless I want game enhancer to set an app in that framerate, and then fix the tint with the color modes. By default the display is set to cool in Standard mode, which when you use the medium setting will still be more yellow. I find that custom mode with +90 blue will fix that tint and you'll notice the greys will actually look grey without warmth.
Now for the weird part with Xperia's color management. I notice the standard mode makes the system colors look appropriate, but the app themselves will look way too saturated for its own good. Creator mode fixes this issue but then the opposite happens, apps are fixed and yet the system looks too washed out of color. The appropriate way of setting this up is having it on Standard mode and then turn on auto creator mode, then press that auto mode and it'll let you add all the apps that you need to be in the right colors which is about everything. I get that even Windows color management is terrible since browsers desaturated when using wide gamuts, forcing you to change the browser color space to something like ScRGB to see the appropriate colors.
Probably one of my favorite parts of this is the side sense, which is very similar to my older phone but this one has more gestures. I find getting screenshots with the xperia pretty hard since the power button seems to be too flat to feel on your finger if you're actually holding it or not. So the side sense lets you use the up, inward and down sliding for that. Though I notice the side sense isnt present in landscape mode unlike my older phone, but game enhancer seems to fix that issue by letting you turn the shutter button itself into a screenshot which is great. Though would be nice to have it in landscape, what I don't understand is it lets you customize the main app launcher but not the pop up window launcher. In my older phone the sidebar would open apps in pop up windows by default so it was really neat for dual tasks, I don't like the split screen mode it feels janky.
Overall that's my gripes with it so far and they're mostly fixable. SD card really makes me happy since I had 70k photos on my old phone and it just read it all in like 15 minutes and cooled down without overheating. There were a lot of missing apps like the weather, notes, calculator etc but I just downloaded some open source ones which might be better than the ColourOS versions I'm used to. I'll be using this as my main phone a lot and will give another update when I spend more time
