Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo



Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

BARCELONA, Spain—Mobile World Congress is well underway, and the latest flagship to pop up is Sony's Xperia XZ Premium. If the LG G6 is a rejection of the specs race in favor of a slick new design, the Sony Xperia XZ is the complete opposite—the same boring old Sony design with a monster spec sheet. How monstrous? How about a Snapdragon 835 and a 4K screen? Oh, and a camera that can record at nearly 1000FPS.

Despite the rumors that Samsung was hogging all the Snapdragon 835s for itself, Sony has brought a device with Qualcomm's top-of-the-line 2017 SoC to MWC. Of course Sony wouldn't give us a release date for this device; the launch could be months away, and the Galaxy S8 could still be the first for-sale Snapdragon 835 device ever. In the short time I had to try the XZ, it felt fast. Qualcomm promises "27 percent more performance with 40 percent less power" with the new chip. You'll need all that extra horsepower to pump out games and the occasional video in 4K.

The display is a 5.5-inch, 3840×2160 LCD, which works out to a ridiculous 801 PPI. This is actually Sony's second 4K smartphone, the first being its "premium" phone, the Z5 Premium. The screen looks gorgeous, and, no matter how close you look, you won't see a pixel. It's also insane overkill for a smartphone display—1440p displays look great, too. 4K probably only serves to burn through battery and lower the framerate of games. A 4K smartphone would probably make for a gorgeous display for Google's Daydream VR headset, but the XZ has a 4K LCD—LCD response times aren't fast enough for VR, and, therefore, the XZ Premium doesn't work with Daydream.

Sony claims this display is "HDR," but we aren't sure what that means. The XZ doesn't have the "Ultra HD Premium" certification found on many TVs , and Sony didn't provide hard numbers for brightness or color depth. There's also not much of a solution for HDR content...

The rest of the specs are 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 3230mAh battery, and IP68 dust and water resistance. The XZ ships with Android 7.1 Nougat.

Sony has been recycling the same smartphone design for about four years. That design is starting to show its age on the XZ Premium. The giant top and bottom bezels look dated compared to slimmer devices like the LG G6 and Xiaomi Mi Mix. Smaller bezels would be nicer, but the design is so minimal that we can't bring ourselves to dislike it too much. Sony basically cut a rectangle out of a slab of glass, stuck a screen in the middle, and minimally rounded the corners and edges.

The front and back glass panels (both Gorilla Glass 5, if you're wondering) are flat, with a rounded band joining the two together. The top of the band is metal while the sides are plastic. It's a shame Sony didn't opt for a metal back—more glass means a more fragile phone. On the plus side, Sony has given the device an IP68 ingress protection rating.

The color of the unit we got to handle was "Luminous Chrome." It was polished to such sheen that it was nearly a perfect mirror. It takes in the color of whatever is around it. It collects fingerprints in a matter of nanoseconds—every picture you see above is the result of vigorous cleaning. A set of white gloves would have made things easier.

Sony is a major supplier of cameras to much of the smartphone industry. With the XZ Premium camera, Sony brings a new feature to market: super-slow slow motion. The Sony 19MP IMX300 sensor on the XZ Premium can film at 960FPS@720p, a full four times faster than the 240FPS mode found on the iPhone 7 and many high-end Android devices. This means you'll be able to play back much slower slow motion than normal. We managed to grab a sample:

Getting ahold of a fast-enough camera sensor isn't the only big problem with high-speed video. Storing all the data you've captured is a real challenge. A 960FPS video would never make it through the 5Gbps bus that connects the camera to the Snapdragon SoC. So to work around this, Sony equipped the CMOS chip with 1GB of onboard memory. Writing to on-chip memory gives you a much faster 25Gbps bus to work with and allows the XZ Premium to save a whopping 5 seconds of 960FPS, 720p video. That's 5 seconds of playback, which works out to a very short amount of real time. In the video, I dropped my camera lens cap about a foot and tried to film it—there wasn't even enough time to let it come to rest.

The ultra-fast camera setup has the side effect of reducing rolling shutter artifacts . If you've ever seen video or pictures of fast-moving objects like cars or airplane propellers become distorted, you've fallen victim to the slow speed of a rolling camera shutter. Sony says the onboard memory lets the camera have a 5x faster scan time, which should result in less distortion in moving objects. The rear camera also has 5-axis image stabilization—that's X, Y, yaw, pitch, and roll stabilization. There's also laser autofocus and an RGB color sensor.

Here comes the bad news: We don't have a price or release date, which can often be a deal breaker for Sony devices. By now, the company has earned a reputation of overpricing their devices and having crummy US distribution. Sony's first 4K smartphone, the Xperia Z5 Premium, never launched in the US, while abroad it debuted at a whopping $960. On the company's newer but lower-end cousin, the Xperia XZ (the "not premium" version), Sony inexplicably disabled the fingerprint sensor for the US market and still wanted $700 for the device.