The Sony Xperia X looks just like the Xperia Z3+. And the Z3. And the Xperia M5. And pretty much every phone the company has released in the past five years.

It isn't an ugly phone by any means; it just lacks imagination. Both the front and back are flat, while the sides are slightly rounded with pronounced corners. It isn't particularly thin, but its fairly compact nature makes it easy to grip in one hand.

One improvement over the previous Xperia Z handset is the rear, which isn't glass, but brushed aluminium. It has a slight texture, and is no longer a magnet for sticky fingerprints and oily residue.

Along the side of the phone sit an elongated lock button with an embedded fingerprint sensor, volume rocker and a dedicated camera button. I have a problem with each of these.

First, the fingerprint scanner is mushy, has barely any give and seems unreliable. There's no doubt that it's quick, but it often pops up with the message "Fingerprint hardware not available", and out of 20 attempts it failed seven times. Bizarrely, the volume switch is positioned towards the bottom, making it a pain to reach.

I do like that Sony has stuck with its dedicated camera button, but like the others, it’s mushy and requires a lot of pressure to push. Another little annoyance in a phone where there are so many.

On the other side is a SIM-tray – no annoying SIM tool required – that holds both a nano-SIM and microSD card, but every time you open it, it automatically restarts the phone. I’d understand this if the phone supported Marshmallow’s adaptable storage feature, since you’re not supposed to take out the SD card when the phone is on – but it doesn’t.

Sony’s phones have a history of being water-resistant, but the Xperia X isn’t. The isn’t a major omission, but the feature would have at least given the Xperia X something to make it stand out from the crowd.

Sony made headlines last year when it unveiled the Sony Z5 Premium, the first phone with a 4K screen. People gushed and were in awe – just think of all those pixels. Then the realisation set in that the 4K was limited and that 99% of the time it was a plain-old 1080p panel.

While the same trick isn’t played here, a whole host of buzzwords and tech jargon has been used to describe the 1080p, 5-inch LCD panel in the Xperia X. It’s a "Triluminos Display for Mobile", with an "X-Reality engine" and "Dynamic Contrast Enhancement".

All you really need to know is that’s it’s a decent display. One of the better ones out there and definitely one of the brightest. It might not be quad-HD, but the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution is still fantastic when spread over a 5-inch display. The smaller screen means it isn't great for media, but pixels on photos and games are virtually impossible to spot.

Blacks are deep, colours are accurate and viewing angles are fantastic. There’s no discolouration when you tilt the phone to the side, something I found very obvious on the HTC 10.

Since it’s an LCD panel, colours aren’t quite as vibrant as those on the OLED panels favoured by Samsung. But, realistically, unless you’re holding both phones next to each other, you're unlikely to notice the difference.

Sony's screen isn't entirely free of issues, though. Since the maximum brightness is so high, it becomes even more obvious when the auto-brightness doesn’t work. I’ve unlocked the phone in the pitch-black at night to find that it’s lit up the whole room; similarly, I've tried to use it in the bright sunshine and it’s unreadable.

Sony is marketing the Xperia X as a "flagship" device, pricing it between £459 and £529 in the UK. However, it isn't powered by the de facto high-end CPU of 2016 in the form of the Snapdragon 820. Instead, you get the Snapdragon 650. This is slightly better than the Snapdragon 617 used in the Moto G4 – a phone that costs a mere £169 – and is also use by Xiaomi in its equally affordable Redmi Note series.

When it announced the X series, Sony also showed off the X Performance – a spruced up X, with a Snapdragon 820. However, Sony seems to have said this unit won’t officially be coming to the UK, which is baffling.

The 650 CPU of the Xperia X is paired with a healthy 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 510 GPU – again, neither of which can be considered high-end. Internal storage stands at 32GB, and is propped up with a microSD card slot.

I have few qualms with the day-to-day use of the Xperia X. Opening up apps, browsing fairly basic sites and playing casual games are all done with ease. If you do little else than emailing, messaging and browsing Facebook then you won’t be longing for a faster CPU.

If you like to push things a little harder then you might run into issues. Overly image-heavy websites take a while to load and you'll struggle if you want to edit RAW snaps. It also has a tendency to become warm, especially when watching videos and playing games.

The shortcomings of the CPU/GPU combination also become apparent when trying to play graphically intense games. Asphalt 8 stutters intermittently, and loading times are noticeably long – but it's mostly fine to play.

In our standard suite of benchmarking tests, the Xperia X falls behind some of its similarly priced competition. Its 3,691 score in Geekbench 3’s multi-core falls short of Huawei P9’s 5,065 and the LG G5’s 5,172. It’s scores are more in line with the Honor 7, with costs £250.

Sony’s continued support for the Hi-Res audio standard is once again present here, and it’s great. Audio through headphones sounds excellent, and the dual stereo front-facing speakers are decent too. They lack the oomph of BoomSound on the HTC 10, but there’s enough bass for basic music listening and a good hit of volume.

Oddly, the Xperia X is the first phone in a while to suffer issues with phone quality and Wi-Fi signal. In my modest (okay, tiny) two-bedroom flat, I haven't come across any device that struggles to stay connected to the the router, even in the furthest away room. Yet, the Xperia X does. Phone signal, on Three’s UK network, is also consistently is two or three bars below other phones.

One of the highlights of the Sony Xperia X is its approach to software. This is really because, instead of overlaying Android with an ugly skin, Sony has kept it simple with a pretty much stock version of Android Marshmallow 6.0.1.

This is the best software I've ever used on a Sony phone. It’s clean, smooth and doesn’t try to overdo it with swathes of useless additions.

It’s one of the few instances where well-thought out extras over the top of vanilla Android actually make it better. There’s a clear-all button in the multi-tasking bar; you can add in your icon packs and edit the quick-settings menu. They’re minor changes, but they help usability no-end. You can swipe down from the homescreen to access an iOS-like search bar, too.

Where Sony falters somewhat is in its plentiful bloatware. There’s the usual duplicate apps, alongside a number of Sony’s own creations, such as Movie Creator, Sketch and What’s New. My biggest issue with the bloatware is the incessant notifications they all seem to throw up. In my opinion, notifications should have to be turned on by the user, manually; not automatically. Yes, I can turn them off, but I shouldn’t have to.

Remote Play is still present for beaming games from your PS4 – although why you’d want to stream, say, Uncharted 4 onto a 5-inch display is beyond me – and the Music app supports a number of high-res files types.

I’m a little cautious about future updates. The Sony Xperia Z5 Premium that's sitting gathering dust in my desk drawer is still stuck on Android 5.0.1, so who knows when the X might see an update to the final version of Android N.

Each time Sony releases a "high-end" phone, much of its marketing surrounds the camera. I can hardly blame the company for this tact, especially when you consider the brand’s heritage in the space and the fact that it makes the camera sensors for many of its rivals.

But I’ve never really seen Sony deliver a truly great mobile phone camera. While there's no doubt that the sensor has been a strong feature, the camera has always missed the mark with dodgy, slow software and some overly harsh post-production.

I’m afraid to say it’s a similar story here.

The rear-facing sensor packs in 23-megapixels, much more than its rivals, although it uses Sony’s Steady Shot software rather than optical image stabilisation. The sensor itself is slightly smaller than that on the Galaxy S7, and its f/2.0 aperture isn’t quite as wide as the f/1.7 in its rival.

Having that narrower aperture means it’s virtually impossible to get those lovely bokeh shots, where the foreground is in sharp focus and the background blurs out – something that really pushes the Galaxy S7 and LG G5 forward.

Pictures taken with the Xperia X do look good: colours are nicely represented and it doesn’t overexpose light sources in the way of the HTC 10, but its strong post-production overly sharpens images so they end up looking a little fake.

 Pictures can look over-sharpened, leading to them looking a bit fake

 Yet detail is rich and colours are strong

Sony has talked up the auto-focus system here, something it calls Predictive Hybrid Autofocus. But again, it can’t compete with the competition. It jumps around too much, failing to maintain focus on the subject that I want it to focus upon, which means you’ll spend some time trying to compose your shot. It’s good at snapping fast-moving action – but realistically, it’s more important that it works for general use.

The lack of OIS is noticeable in low light, where pictures are bright and have enough detail, but the resulting image is often blurry or out of focus.

The issue with nighttime shots is that often you want to take them quickly – no-one wants to be standing around forever in a bar waiting for the picture – and this is where the Xperia X struggles. I was able to achieve decent results if I really put time into it, but that’s something I don’t have to do with competing phones.

On the whole, it’s just an unreliable camera. Too many times when I opened it up I was presented with a black screen, or a camera error, or it just took an age to get going. This is frustrating for a device costing £459.

There’s no 4K recording either, even though the CPU supports it, so you’re limited to 1080p at either 30 or 60fps. This isn’t a vital feature, but it seems an odd omission from a brand such as Sony.

Sony ups the selfie sensor to 13-megapixels. Results are mostly good, although again, harsh processing results in skin tones that look a little fake. The sensor is wide though, so you can cram lots of faces into your selfies.

Sony claims you’ll get two days of use from the Xperia X. I haven’t. And I’m doubtful whether you will either.

It’s a 2,620mAh cell, which may sound small but is meaty enough to get you through the day. But Sony’s two-day claims are far too optimistic. Yes, you can stretch it out if you enable all the battery-saving modes, but this hampers performance, and isn’t something you’ll want to do all the time.

When compared to other phones on the market, however, the Xperia X is able to keep up. A 45-minute HD stream on Netflix ate through 11%, while a locally stored 1080p episode took it down 8%. I did notice that because the screen is so bright, having it on maximum almost doubled these numbers, so you’re better off keeping brightness to around 60%.

It was a similar story in terms of gaming, with intensive titles (Hitman Sniper, Asphalt 8) using up about 10% per 30-minute play and simpler games (Monument Valley, Dots) about 6-7%.

The Xperia X has Quick Charge 2.0 on board, which will take you from 0-100% in just over an hour when you use a compatible charging block and micro-USB cable. It’s interesting that USB Type-C hasn’t been used here – however, we’re not at a point yet where I can really say this is a negative.

If Sony stopped harping on about getting multiple days from a single charge then I’d be impressed by the stamina of the Xperia X – I haven’t had any issues getting through the day – but don’t make claims you can’t back up.

With so many fantastic phones out there, the Xperia X is tough to recommend. Especially when I believe it costs far more than it really should.

It’s unambitious in design, mid-range in performance and it takes too much effort to really get the best from the camera. The screen is decent, but it isn't alone here; there are plenty of handsets out there sporting excellent displays.

The Sony Xperia X fails to offer up anything that sets it apart from the competition, especially considering its price. I’d suggest opting for the LG G5 or the Huawei P9, even last year's Samsung Galaxy S6. Better still, wait for the Moto G4 Plus, which costs half the price.

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