Sony Xperia flagship rumor roundup

Even though Sony isn't doing all too well in terms of sales, its products are still bringing plenty of innovation so the Xperia phones are one of the most anticipated handsets each year. The next Xperia flagship from the company is coming tomorrow and it's time to have a look back at the rumors we saw to get an idea of what to expect.

First of all, we still don't know what the actual name of the next Xperia flagship would be. Some say it's called Xperia 1.1 others claim that it's a Plus variant of the Xperia 5 called Xperia 5 Plus. Of course, there's a possibility that these are the names of two different phones.

So, one of the first leaks we had was back in December depicting the front of the phone. According to a patent at WIPO, the device will sport a larger 6.6-inch OLED panel as opposed to the 6.5-inch diagonal on the Xperia 1. There's also going to be a punch-hole front-facing camera at the top.

OnLeaks came out with a different render showcasing a phone without any cutouts - just a small bezel on the top housing the selfie cam, earpiece and the usual set of sensors. That source still confirmed the 6.6-inch OLED panel of QHD+ resolution though.

The thickness of the chassis is supposed to be 8.1mm and there's going to be a headphone jack at the top. That's a fairly bold prediction since the Xperia 5 lacks the audio jack. The front-facing stereo loudspeakers aren't going anywhere too.

A few weeks later, detailed information regarding the flagship cameras surfaced. The selfie camera is believed to be 8MP while the back will carry a quad-camera setup. The main unit will be the Samsung-made 64MP unit and there will be a telephoto module, with optical stabilization.

The other two sensors are said to have 12MP resolution, one of which is going to stretch to 1/1.5" but we don't know what its purpose is going to be. Perhaps this is going to be the primary one while the smaller 12MP unit will be paired with an ultra-wide lens.

A 3D ToF sensor is also expected to make an appearance to aid with depth information during bokehs and other advanced camera features.

Lately, the rumor about 8K HDR video recording has been thrown around, which is a bit hard to believe in our opinion. 2020 flagship phones are seemingly keen to jump on the 8K bandwagon but the HDR bit seems like a stretch. After all, there are just a couple of handsets on the market capable of recording 4K HDR videos and even if Sony produces most of them 8K HDR would be a proper processing challange.

And, of course, it's safe to assume that the Xperia flagship will be rocking Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 865 chipset. We've seen it running Geekbench with 12GB of RAM - it's unclear if this is the base version or one of the more premium options.

Alongside its new flagship Sony will probably introduce a new midrange addition to its lineup - that one barely featured in the rumor mill so we'll have to wait for tomorrow's event to know all about it. It starts at 7:30am UTC and you'll be able to follow it straight from out homepage so stay tuned.