Sony Xperia M2 Aqua review: Cliff diver

Introduction

The Sony Xperia M2 Aqua will give you all the water resistance you need. That's more than enough for marketing to work with, but they'll need to work hard nonetheless. You see, it's otherwise a well familiar package. So, Sony will take you to the water but will they make you drink?

Although we can safely do without expectation management, the Aqua shouldn't be construed as an upgrade. It's more of a special waterproofed edition of the regular M2, which took care of the upgrades just fine, a few months back. The Aqua will serve a small niche but, luckily, not one that's packed with competitors. The Xperia M2 Aqua has the highest water-resistance rating for a mass-market smartphone. That's something very few, besides Sonim, can match. Yes, it's that serious.

Sony Xperia M2 Aqua

And for the users who don't care about water resistance, the Xperia M2 will gladly provide the rest. We're talking the same camera, chipset, screen and battery - in a package that's virtually the same size. With the regular M2 eligible for a KitKat upgrade, and already getting it in certain places, the water resistance is the only notable change by way of specs. Here they go anyway.

Key features

• 4.8" IPS LCD, 540 x 960px, 229ppi, Gorilla Glass 3, ambient light sensor
• LTE connectivity
• Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Xperia UI on top
• IP68 certified - dust and water proof up to 1.5 meter and 30 minutes
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 processor, Adreno 305 GPU and 1GB of RAM
• 8MP camera, single LED flash, 1080p video recording, dedicated hardware shutter key
• VGA front-facing camera with video recording
• 8GB of built-in storage, expandable via the microSD card slot
• Active noise cancellation with a secondary microphone
• 2,300mAh battery; STAMINA Power Saving Mode

Main disadvantages

• Low screen resolution for the size
• Non user-replaceable battery
• 3.5mm headphone jack has a flap (unlike most other waterproof phones)

Snapdragon 400 is a popular choice with this generation of Sony midrangers and that makes sense - it's what the competition's been doing for a while now. A Snapdragon 400 and a qHD screen are last season's minis' specs - to be on the safe side, Sony should price the Aqua comfortably below the new crop, which boast HD screens.

In fact, some rivals manage a 720p screen with a Snapdragon 400 chipset. What if Sony wasn't busy plugging the Xperia M2's holes and went for a higher screen resolution? Maybe they thought they had enough supply of those in the T2 phablet, the C3 and the T3, the still relevant SP.

Sony Xperia M2 Aqua at HQ

Anyway, we cannot judge a device solely on specs, especially with the price tag still unknown. Let's get busy testing and see if the original Xperia M2 just got more outdoorsy or there's more to it than we can see on the surface.