Sony Xperia XZ Premium and XZs unveiled

Meet the future of Sony flagships - well, what will be future. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium and its 5.5” 4K are scheduled to land in “late Spring” while the smaller 5.2” Sony Xperia XZs will arrive earlier (in April) to dazzle us with its cool new camera, which Sony will be marketing as Motion Eye.

Sony Xperia XZ Premium

That’s what Sony calls the camera used on both the XZ Premium and XZs. Its crowning achievement is 960fps slow motion video - that allows to slow down time 4x slower than current cameraphones. It also features an “anti-distortion shutter” which minimizes rolling shutter. Both features are enabled by Sony’s unique memory-stacked sensor. The slow-mo video is captured at 720p, though, not 1080p.

Sony Xperia XZ Premium

But hold on, we almost buried the lede - the Xperia XZ Premium will be powered by a Snapdragon 835 chipset (we guess that’s the reason behind the delayed launch). The chipset is hooked up to 4GB of RAM and will run Android 7.0, natch.

4K screens are back, this time around with a much-improved 5.5” panel that supports HDR imagery. That’s a world first in a smartphone (but Amazon already has plenty of content you can enjoy). Besides the wider dynamic range, the new Triluminos display is 40% brightness than the Xperia Z5 Premium panel.

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium a “Glass Loop Surface” (Gorilla Glass 5, specifically) that wraps around the whole phone. The phone is waterproof (IP68) but prone to sinking - at 195g, it’s quite hefty for a 5.5” phone.

Anyway, inside the body is a 3,230mAh battery with QuickCharge 3.0 to fill it up and Qnovo tech to prolong it’s life. Charging happens over a USB-C port, by the way. The Power button will double as a fingerprint reader… though it will be disabled in some regions.

When asked about price, Sony offered only the evasive answer “Dependant on region and operators.” The color options are creatively named Luminous Chrome and Deepsea Black.

Sony Xperia XZs

We’ll keep the intro for this one short because we have so much more to say about Sony’s new camera. Basically, the Xperia XZs is an XZ with Motion Eye camera, which means a 5.2” 1080p screen and Snapdragon 820 chipset (but RAM was bumped up to 4GB). There.

The camera whose name references the webcams of Vaio laptops is built around a 19MP sensor (1/2.3”) sitting behind a 25mm (equiv.) f/2.0 lens. It’s backed by Predictive and Laser autofocus, plus an RGBC-IR sensor for natural color rendering.

It can record 4K video, of course, and features SteadyShot 5-axis digital stabilization. Also, we heare that Sony has improved the Panorama mode, increasing the resolution and improving the UI. There’s more, but we’ll leave it for the hands-on - the Motion Eye camera deserves more attention!

We’re not done talking about cameras, it’s just that we’re moving to the front. The selfie cam on both the Xperia XZs and the XZ Ultra is borrowed from the XZ - that’s the fairly impressive 13MP (1/3.06”) sensor with a 22mm wide-angle lens.

Now we’re done. Since it doesn’t have to wait for the S835 to become available, the Sony Xperia XZs will launch earlier - in April. Colors are Warm Silver, Ice Blue and... Black.

Oof, it was a struggle to keep this article at a decent length - those eager to learn more can jump over to the hands-on post. Would you believe we're still not done talking about the camera?