Sharp Aquos R8 and R8 Pro announced in Japan

Sharp is right on cue with its latest Japan-exclusive flagship smartphone release - the Aquos R8 and R8 Pro. Aquos R8 Pro builds on last year’s Aquos R7 with the latest generation flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset from Qualcomm.

Aquos R8 and R8 Pro

Aquos R8 Pro gets a 6.6-inch Pro IGZO OLED screen with 1,260 x 2,730px resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate. The panel also brings 10-bit color support and Dolby Vision as well as 2,000-nits peak brightness.

Aquos R8 features a 6.39-inch panel with a waterdrop notch the same core specs as the R8 Pro albeit with a 1,300 nits peak brightness.

Around the back, Aquos R8 Pro features a 47MP main cam with a 1-inch type sensor co-developed with Leica, an F/1.9 aperture and a 19mm focal length. There’s a 1.9MP depth sensor keeping it company but no ultrawide or telephoto lens. Aquos R8 brings a 1/1.55-inch 50.3MP main sensor alongside a 13MP ultrawide module.

Aquos R8 camera system (left) and R8 Pro cameras (right)

The other interesting bit is that the camera rings on both phones also double as passive coolers by dissipating heat away from the phones' motherboards.

Both phones are equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC which is joined by 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.0 storage. Aquos R8 Pro packs a 5,000 mAh battery while the vanilla R8 gets a 4,570 mAh cell.

Aquos R8 and R8 Pro are IP68 water and dust resistant and come with microSD card slots and headphone jacks. Both phones boot Android 13 with a promised 3 OS version updates and up to five years of security updates. The latter will be carrier dependent.

Aquos R8 comes in Blue and Cream colors while Aquos R8 Pro can be had in Black. Both phones are going on open sale in Japan from July 15.

Source (in Japanese)