Sony's 2015 flagship phone Xperia Z5 Premium was the first phone to feature a 4K display, but how does it perform versus Samsung's marquee phone of yesteryear Galaxy Note 5? Here's a review.

At the first glance, both phones look as premium as it can be. With its simplistic design, the Z5 Premium features a clean, rectangular metal frame and glass panels on the front and back, making it look and feel just like any other Sony smartphone. While the Galaxy Note 5 has a similar build, the curved back design, along with its thinner footprint makes a better handling experience than Sony's flagship.

A quick review from Android Authority mentions the two phones' powerful features. Both phones have fingerprint sensors: Galaxy Note 5's at the home button, while the Z5's sensor is at the power button on its right side. Both sensors work extremely accurate and fast.

Xperia Z5 Premium boasts its water resistant ability, as well as its 4k display with an insane 806 ppi pixel density. While the Note 5 only has a Quad HD screen, its high-brightness Super AMOLED panel makes it up to par with the Z5 Premium's incredibly crisp text, images and video.

The Z5 has 3GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 810 processor, which features in eight 1.9Ghz cores in a single chip. The Galaxy Note 5 has an extra 1GB of RAM more than the Z5, but both devices are quick and snappy so there's nothing to worry about the phones' performance.

Sony won the memory expansion department by including a microSD card slot, in addition to its 32 GB of internal storage. The Note 5 offers up to 64 GB of storage without any expansion options; however, the S-Pen stylus holder space might be the reason why a microSD card was not present: a feature not available with the Z5.

In a spec comparison sheet by Phone Arena, The Z5 has a 23-megapixel camera while the Note 5 camera can shoot up to only 16 megapixels: however, the Note 5 has RAW image capture out of the box. Both cameras can capture 3840x2160 (4K) video, and also features a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

With these enormous features and specs, these phones definitely need large-capacity batteries. Sony wins this part by packing in a larger 3,430mAh battery inside the Z5, while Note 5 has a 3,000mAh, non-removable battery.

The Xperia Z5 Premium and Galaxy Note 5 feature Android 5.1 (Lollipop) at its release, and are both upgradeable to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). Sony's Xperia UI software looks closer to stock Android, while Samsung has TouchWiz UI with additional software for the S-Pen stylus.

Overall, Sony's 2015 flagship definitely has shown some of its exclusive features to compete with Samsung's high-performance, feature-rich and greatly-designed phablet.