When you come up with a flagship device under your company banner, you can be sure that the company has done its level best to include top notch parts as well as performance tweaks possible to make it as complaint-free as possible upon release. After all, it is the very soul of a company’s pride we’re talking about here, so when Sony first introduced the water-resistant Sony Xperia Z, many people fell in love with a rugged device that still looked sleek. Unfortunately, a small number of users (<10) and a few blogs have discussed in the Sony Mobile and the XDA-developers forums that the Sony Xperia Z may suffer from manufacturing issues as they have noticed that their back panel glass that has lifted slightly on one side. Note that during our own review of the XPERIA Z, we have not experienced any such issue, but this seems believable in the right conditions.
Some folks are concerned that the handset would have had its water resistant capability compromised. While majority of the users do not see this as a huge issue, other folks did report that it has caused the water resistant indicators on the ports to turn red, never mind that the rest of the flaps remained closed. Apparently, it is theorized that this issue arose in hot weather, or when the handset undergoes high stress moments such as playing games, heating it up and melting the glue which holds the back panel in place. Forums do point out that Sony repair centers have turned down such affected devices, as they cannot tell whether it was a loose back panel or an open flap that caused the damage.