The new Sony flagship smartphone follows a year behind its predecessor, the Xperia 1 and looks to be an upgrade in all departments. It is certainly a handsome looking handset being tall and slim with very thin side bezels and not-too noticeable top and bottom ones. How have the specifications changed though? Read on to find out.
Although the dimensions of the phone have reduced all round, they have still managed to fit in the same 6.5” 4K OLED screen. Now though, this has 1 billion colors and a larger 84% screen to body ratio. As always with Sony smartphones, they benefit from the company being a leader in TV screens and so offers a very high 1644p resolution with 643ppi density.
Gorilla Glass 6 and a 20% bigger battery
The front and back are protected by Gorilla Glass 6 and these are held together with an aluminium frame. The whole thing weighs in at 181g, 3g heavier than the Xperia 1, but I doubt many people will actually notice that. The Xperia 1 II is IP65 and 68 dust and water resistant (up to 1.5m for 30 mins).
Inside there is now the top of the range Snapdragon 865 processor to support 5G. Currently, there is only one configuration available with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of expandable storage. The phone runs Android 10 in pretty much a stock version – always welcome. The battery is now a 4000 mAh one, some 20% bigger than the Xperia 1 as well as offering an improved fast charging rate of 21W.
Perfect camera combination
There is now a quad camera array on the rear. This is positioned in a black frame, vertically on the left with the flash above it. This array consists of a main 12MP f/1.7, 24mm wide with OIS, 12MP f/2.4, 70mm telephoto with 3X optical zoom and OIS, 12MP f/2.2, 16mm ultrawide and a 0.3MP Time of Flight depth camera. This combination is probably the Rolls Royce of lenses for 2020 and is likely to produce great images in all light conditions. Finally, it will shoot 4K video at 24/25/30/60 fps or 1080p at 30/60/120 fps.
On the front, the selfie camera is positioned slightly to the left of the centre in the very thin top bezel. It is an 8MP f/2.0 24mm wide unit that can also shoot 1080p video at 30 fps.
Worthy upgrade
Finishing off, there are stereo speakers and a 3.5mm headphone jack that supports 24 bit/192kHz audio. Strangely for a phone with an OLED screen, the fingerprint sensor is side mounted on a button, rather than under the screen. There will only be 2 colours initially, Black and Purple.
So, is it a worthy upgrade to the Xperia 1? Well, with 5G, a top-notch camera and a bigger battery it certainly seems that way. A lot will depend on the announced price though.
