Introduction
It's not often we have a Sharp device with us for review. Primarily sold in East Asian markets, these devices are hard to come by elsewhere. So, when Sharp contacted us to review their mostly new Aquos S2, we couldn't really say no.
The Aquos S2 is a mid-range device in Sharp's lineup. The standout feature for it is the edge-to-edge display that Sharp was the first to bring to market with the Aquos Crystal three years ago. Apart from that the phone comes reasonably equipped, complete with a dual rear camera, making it keep up comfortably with all the 2017 trends.
Sharp Aquos S2 Key Features
- Design: Aluminum frame, plastic back
- Display: 5.5-inch, 2040x1080 IPS LCD
- Rear Camera: 12MP, f1.8, dual pixel PDAF, 8MP depth sensor, LED flash, 4K 30fps video
- Front Camera: 8MP, f2.0, 1080p 30fps video
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 630, octa-core CPU (2.2GHz Cortex-A53 + 1.8GHz Cortex-A53), Adreno 508 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon 660, octa-core CPU (2.2GHz Kryo 260 + 1.84GHz Kryo 260), Adreno 512 GPU
- Memory: 4GB RAM, 64GB storage (Snapdragon 630); 6GB RAM, 128GB storage (Snapdragon 660), microSD expansion
- OS: Android 7.1.1 with Smile UX
- Battery: 3020mAh
- Connectivity: Dual SIM, LTE, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, A-GPS, USB-C
- Misc: Fingerprint sensor
Main shortcomings
- Hybrid DualSIM/microSD slot limits options
- No headphone jack
The Aquos S2 is very clearly a mid-range device, down to the Snapdragon 600 series processors and a second rear camera that is only really a depth sensor for the background blur effect and nothing particularly fancy. Even the choice of materials is a mixture of metal on the sides and plastic on the back. This isn't the device you impress your friends with.
Sharp Aquos S2 press shots
Still, we were curious to see how this device performed and especially check out that Smile UX that Sharp has going on in there. So here's what we found.
Design
The Aquos S2 is a relatively compact smartphone by today's standards. The main focus of the design is the screen-to-body ratio, which Sharp pegs at an impressive 87.5%.
The front of the phone is dominated almost entirely by the display but with a sizable chin area at the bottom. This is usually where things like the LED backlighting and touchscreen controllers are placed since there is no space at the top but from the outside all we see are the fingerprint sensor and the Sharp logo. There are no other physical buttons here, as Sharp has opted for on-screen navigation controls.
Near the top is where all the action is. When the display is off, there really isn't anything particularly striking about the design, save for a rather large front camera and a thin slit for the earpiece. It's when the display lights up is when you see what Sharp's engineers have been up to.
The front camera cuts deeply into the display, carving nearly a centimeter-long notch for itself. This would have been super odd had we not already seen this on the Essential Phone. What's even more quirky are the corners; unlike the Essential Phone, and several other phones these days, the Aquos S2 does not have curved corners. Instead, they look like they were just snipped off, making them look incredibly odd.
The area with the front facing camera also houses the proximity and ambient light sensor. Above it is a small slit where the earpiece audio comes from. The earpiece is located a bit below under the screen and the audio is piped to the top. Next to the slit is a small LED indicator on the right.
The sides of the Aquos S2 are the only place you will see metal. The edge has a prominent crease that makes it blend into the curvature of the back. On the right are the volume and power buttons, also made out of metal with polished chamfered edges. On the right is a hybrid dual SIM/microSD card slot. At the bottom is the USB-C connector with a loudspeaker and a microphone. There is no headphone jack on this phone. Very 2017.
Right side • Hybrid SIM tray • Bottom
The back of the phone is made out of glossy plastic, which is an incredible fingerprint magnet and nearly impossible to keep clean. Near the top is the dual camera system with a sizable bump, and a two-tone LED flash.
In terms of design, the Aquos S2 is quite underwhelming. Even the edge-to-edge display, which is probably supposed to wow ends up looking silly. The build quality is alright but the plastic back doesn't feel great in hand and looks even worse after a few minutes of use. The only really good thing about the design is that it's quite thin and light and the relatively compact size also makes it easy to use and carry around.
Display
The Aquos S2 has a 5-inch 2040x1080 IPS LCD. The image quality is generally good but with a flaw; the color saturation is way over-the-top. This makes the colors really pop off the screen, which most people will probably really like but if you want accurate colors, you are not going to get them here. The display settings let you adjust the color temperature and for some reason, make them even more saturated.
Display settings
In terms of how all the weird cut-outs look, we have to admit they are extremely distracting. As if it wasn't bad enough to have a giant wart right in the middle, you have these corners that look like the ears have been cut off. In apps with dark status bars, this isn't really noticeable but in other apps it sticks out like a sore thumb. Eventually, you get over it as you are looking at the bottom thirds of the screen most of the time but it's still quite jarring every now and then.
Battery Life
While we didn't put the Aquos S2 through our usual rigorous battery life test, in our regular use the phone frequently gave us about 5-6 hours of screen-on time. This includes taking pictures, using social media applications, browsing the web and some phone calls. Despite the seemingly small 3020mAh battery, the efficient Snapdragon 630 processor in our review unit barely sips power, making going through an entire day of use easy.
Software
The Aquos S2 runs Sharp's Smile UX on top of Android 7.1.1 Nougat. Having not had a lot of experience with Sharp phones in the past, we were curious to see how it stacked up.
Smile UX, for the most part, isn't particularly intrusive or overbearing like some of the other Android skins out there. One could even blame it for being simplistic, to the point of wondering why Sharp bothered designing it at all instead of just going with stock Android design.
The launcher is a good example of this, which is very basic. It has the same iOS style app layout that everyone loves to hate. That is to say, there is no application drawer and all the app icons permanently sit on the homescreen. In terms of customizability, you can change the animation between page turns, icon density and whether to have the icons bottom to top or top to bottom. There is also something called HiBoard, which is a page to the left of the first homescreen, where you can search for things and get app suggestions, again, similar to Spotlight on iOS. And that's pretty much it.
Homescreen
We eventually ended up installing Google Now Launcher because we didn't like how the default launcher added boxes around some icons while left others alone or had app shortcuts when you pressed and held on certain icons. Also, we kinda like having an app drawer. The default launcher also had buggy weather widgets that just wouldn't pull weather data no matter how much we tried and just kept displaying N/A in large font.
Moving on, we noticed the notification shortcuts have been reskinned but didn't have any particularly new functionality. Same for the multitasking or overview screen, which had MIUI (or old iOS) like large side scrolling app windows with an option to close all of them. You can choose to minimize this to a smaller window that pops up at the bottom of the screen instead of taking up the entire screen.
The Settings app has also been redone completely, with fewer options on the main page but clicking on each load up additional options within. Among the list of interesting features here includes an option to enable Dual Apps feature (but seemingly only for QQ and WeChat), a screen record feature and an option to make the fingerprint sensor to double up as navigation key (short tap goes back, long tap goes Home and a slide opens recent apps).
Settings
All the other apps have a custom design too but there is nothing particularly striking about them. Again, it feels like Sharp could have just gone with the stock design and applications in Android. A custom UI just delays future updates, something we aren't particularly sure of this device to begin with as we didn't see any during our time with it.
We should mention the way the software handles the display. Despite the 17:9 aspect ratio, most of the time the apps only have access to the 16:9 window below the camera notch, with the remaining area around the notch being used for the status bar. This is similar to how things are handled on the Essential Phone, except the Essential Phone has a 19:10 display, meaning the area below the notch is still more than all the 16:9 phones.
Fullscreen settings • How apps look
Some apps can access the area next to the notch to display content, such as the Camera and Gallery app. You can also force other apps use the entire screen, so apps like YouTube and games will go edge to edge. As you can imagine, the problem with this approach is that the notch will cut right through your content, which in case of games means you could be losing out on important information on top.
Video don't spread as far as the notch so there is a black bar
Overall, it's not the greatest solution and perhaps Sharp had the right idea with the original Aquos Crystal.
Performance
Our review unit of the Aquos S2 came with the Snapdragon 630 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. While we weren't expecting any miracles, the Aquos S2 managed to perform better than what we expected. Launching apps, switching between them, scrolling and such was all performed admirably and we weren't often left wanting for more performance.
Gaming performance too was alright as long as we didn't push the graphics settings to the max in some of the titles. All the games ran in 16:9 just like all the apps but in this case the area around the notch was just left blank.
As for other aspects of the performance, we liked the quick and accurate fingerprint reader that was located conveniently on the front. The network and wireless performance was also as one would expect it to be. Lastly, the single loudspeaker at the bottom was indeed quite loud but also tinny and best used at medium volume.
GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)
Higher is better
- Xiaomi Mi A1
4292 - HTC U11 Life
4140 - Motorola Moto X4
4136 - Sharp Aquos S2
4046 - vivo V7+
3912 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
3783 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
3603 - Huawei P10 lite
3344 - LG Q6
2244
GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)
Higher is better
- Huawei Mate 10 Lite
913 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
901 - Xiaomi Mi A1
877 - HTC U11 Life
873 - Sharp Aquos S2
869 - Motorola Moto X4
866 - Huawei P10 lite
834 - vivo V7+
767 - LG Q6
652
AnTuTu 6
Higher is better
- HTC U11 Life
72854 - Motorola Moto X4
71224 - Sharp Aquos S2
69524 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
63068 - Xiaomi Mi A1
61762 - Huawei P10 lite
60895 - vivo V7+
57791 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
55657 - LG Q6
40558
GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)
Higher is better
- vivo V7+
13 - Motorola Moto X4
11 - Sharp Aquos S2
10 - HTC U11 Life
9.6 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
6.7 - Xiaomi Mi A1
6.3 - Huawei P10 lite
5 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
4.6 - LG Q6
3.6
GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)
Higher is better
- vivo V7+
6.6 - Motorola Moto X4
5.8 - Sharp Aquos S2
5.6 - HTC U11 Life
5.3 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
4 - Xiaomi Mi A1
3.5 - Huawei P10 lite
3 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
2.7 - LG Q6
2
Basemark X
Higher is better
- Motorola Moto X4
14479 - Sharp Aquos S2
14298 - HTC U11 Life
14286 - Xiaomi Mi A1
10472 - vivo V7+
9955 - Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
9543 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
8721 - Huawei P10 lite
7588 - LG Q6
6336
Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal
Higher is better
- Sony Xperia XA1 Plus
191 - Motorola Moto X4
189 - Sharp Aquos S2
186 - HTC U11 Life
183 - Huawei Mate 10 Lite
146 - Huawei P10 lite
145 - Xiaomi Mi A1
136 - vivo V7+
131
Camera
The Aquos S2 has a 12-megapixel camera at the back with f1.8 aperture and dual pixel phase detection autofocus. It is accompanied by a second 8-megapixel camera that acts as a depth sensor and a two-tone LED flash.
The camera app was thankfully not completely barebones like some of the other software on the phone. Sharp's fascination with iOS continues here, with the camera having all its modes listed down at the bottom and you can just swipe between them. One of them is the Pro mode, which lets you adjust the shutter speed, ISO, white balance and focusing.
Camera app
At the top are some controls in the area next to the front camera. Here you can switch on the flash, select the aspect ratio of the image, enable the background blur mode and choose some additional options, including a circular crop mode, a cutout option for replacing the background of your images captured with the background blur effect, a watermark option, color filters, timer, HDR and the Settings.
We found the camera app to be generally well designed, with everything being laid out properly and usually easy to use. It's just that because the display isn't so large, some of the text and other items could look a bit small especially while out in daylight.
We weren't quite sure what to expect from the camera in terms of image quality but to our surprise it took some really good-looking pictures. Images looked clean with great detail, natural colors and accurate white balance.
Daylight samples
The only noticeable drawback was the dynamic range. While the HDR mode did remedy this in some cases, it was far too aggressive in bringing up the exposure and saturation levels of the image, making it look like some strange filter was applied.
HDR samples
We gave the background blur option a shot again, it worked relatively well. The camera app lets you adjust the blur effect before taking a picture. You also see a live preview on the viewfinder, albeit a low quality one before the picture is taken. When testing with simpler subjects the camera did a perfectly fine job of blurring the background. Even with people and slightly more complicated subjects it worked quite well. We are not sure how often people actually use this feature but if you want to it's here and it's generally quite usable.
Background blur effect
Lastly, the rear camera can also record 4K video at up to 30fps. You can also record in 1080p or 720p but they are all locked to 30fps. 4K image quality was again quite decent. However, the video was terribly shaky due to the lack of any kind of image stabilization. The audio was also not great and sounded thin and lifeless. The phone also didn't seem to have any slow-motion video modes.
Wrapping it up
If we had to summarize our experience with the Sharp Aquos S2, we would say it was mostly positive. The things that stood out to us were the thin and light design that was quite compact by today's standards, the generally good performance, the simple and straightforward UI, good camera quality and great battery life.
At the same time, there were some things that stuck out as being not-so-great. Things like the plasticky back, the weird cutouts in the display and the shaky video quality were a bit of a downer and we also missed having a headphone jack.
However, none of these are deal breakers in particular. Priced at 2499 Yuan ($379), the Snapdragon 630 model is a tad bit on the expensive side compared to its Chinese rivals. As of now it is available in China but it will be releasing in India in January next month at an undisclosed price.
Assuming the price is right, we think the Sharp Aquos S2 has a fairly decent chance in the market and should be a good purchase overall.
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