It’s official: Sony has used its Japanese website to unveil its much-awaited new flagship Android smartphone, the Xperia Z4.
It only seems the other day that the Xperia Z3 was launched, but Sony’s rapid release schedule for its top smartphones has been fuelling rumours for some time that the Z4 was about to debut at any moment. It’ll be hitting the shelves in Japan later in the summer, but no international release dates have yet been announced.
Given that Sony has already started rolling out the ‘4’ product range with the Xperia M4 Aqua and the Xperia Z4 tablet, it’s a fair bet that the international release will coincide with the Japanese one. A word of warning, though: this dust-resistant and water-resistant phone is definitely on the high end of the smartphone spectrum, so we can expect the kind of price tag that’ll probably cause most of us to take a sharp intake of breath.
This slim and stylish glass-aluminium offering definitely has its attractions, at least partially justifying the price; like, for example, the 5.2-inch, 1920 x 1080-pixel, full HD display to make viewing digital content a pleasure, and a 20.7-megapixel rear-facing camera to complement the 5-megapixel front-facing one. If you’ve ever trashed a phone by accidently dropping it down the U-bend in a moment of maladroit haste, you can draw comfort from the Xperia Z4’s IPX5 and IPX8 ratings; this means that it’s not only splash-resistant but also able to live another day after being plunged below water for an indefinite time period. There’s even a waterproof USB port, obviating the need for sealed caps.
Under the hood, there’s a real workhorse of a battery (2,930mAh), 3GB of RAM, a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor and the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, 5.0 Lollipop. The standard Z4 will back a creditable 32GB of on-board storage, but there’ll be an option to expand that to 128GB via a microSD slot.
Ominously, there was no word on the price in the Sony announcement, which suggests that it’s going to make us wince a little. The phone will be available in a choice of four colours – aqua green, white, black and copper.
