Here’s All The Rumors About Sony’s Upcoming Xperia Z4 Flagship

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Here’s All The Rumors About Sony’s Upcoming Xperia Z4 Flagship

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Sony has been putting out some spectacular devices with the Xperia Z family, and their most recent Xperia Z3 is one heck of a device with plenty to offer those looking for a high-end phone with an elegant design and awesome specs. What about the next device in line though? Mobile World Congress 2015 is coming up and that’s when most of the interested world is expecting to see Sony unveil their next flagship device, the Sony Xperia Z4. There have been plenty of rumors about the next phone in the Xperia Z series and thus far none of it has been confirmed, but we wanted to gloss over all of the rumors and details we’ve heard about. This includes specs, prices, design, the release date and a couple of other details, so let’s get to it.

While Sony has been rumored to be unveiling the Xperia Z4 at next month’s Mobile World Congress, there is still no confirmation on this from Sony, nor have there been teasers that point to a MWC announcement. However, this is when Sony unveiled the Sony Xperia Z2 last year, so reason and logic would suggest Sony will follow suit with the Xperia Z4. As far as an actual release date goes, if they actually show off the Xperia Z4 at MWC 2015 we should see the device drop for purchase sometime in the following month or two, or at least before the summer. Price wise we’d expect it to follow the same cost as the Xperia Z3, which would be about $600-$650 here in the U.S.

The Design is something that may have caught a little more of people’s attention, as some rumors have been floating around that Sony would potentially be looking at some different designs for the upcoming flagship device. They already use an all metal and glass makeup for the outter body design, so they could keep things mostly the same while slightly tweaking the body, or they could come out with something new that we haven’t seen, like depicted in the concept image below showing the mirror front and back with a resin bezel. Going off of past designs though, Sony has never really strayed too much from design of previous phones, they have only improved upon past designs by making small changes. The display is another part of the design to pay attention to as it could stay at the modest yet sizeable, and acceptable 5.2-inches(honestly I feel this is a great size for the display and won’t mind if they don’t change a thing here)while some rumors speculate them upping the display size to 5.4 or even 5.5-inches.

When it comes to internal design, or rather the software and user interface, we’ll probably see it come running Android 5.0 Lollipop as the Xperia Z3 family is scheduled to start getting Android 5.0 next month, and it would make no sense for Sony to launch a phone that has older software than its predecessor. As for Sony’s Android UI skin, this is hard to visualize as we haven’t even seen what Lollipop looks like with their UI yet. It will most likely continue to be without much bloat though which is one of the finer points about their Xperia UI, and we’ll see some of the Material Design inspired changes like more bold animations and colors, as well as things like lock screen notifications and the new recents menu.

The one place where we’d like to see some improvements is with Sony’s choice of storage internally, and the processor that they use within the device. Following off of past releases, Sony hasn’t been using the most up to date processor, as the Xperia Z3 came powered by the Snapdragon 801 while other flagships came with the Snapdragon 805 and were released around the same time. If they follow this trend we could see the Z4 with the Snapdragon 805, although hopefully they’ll step it up and put in the rumored Snapdragon 810 instead. The 805 will be 32-bit and is already available to use, but the 810 would for the first time ever put one of Sony’s flagships in line to give the users some future proof performance wrapped up in a 64-bit processor.

For all the wonderful elegance that can be found within the Sony Xperia Z3, one of it’s selling points has always been the camera quality for stellar images, and the Waterproof and Dustproof capability, all of which we expect to make a comeback in the Xperia Z4. For the camera though, Sony is rumored to be stepping up the camera quality from the 20.7MP CMOS sensor camera to a 21MP Exmor RS IMX230 sensor with a 1/2.4 aperture and image plane phase detection autofocus. There is still a chance though that we could see the same camera from the Xperia Z3 inside of the Xperia Z4 as the new camera sensor stated above could reach production later than when Sony plans to release their next flagship.

We already talked a bit about storage, but let’s elaborate on it. With the Sony Xperia Z3, save for the T-Mobile model, users only got 16GB of internal storage with expandable storage up to 128GB via the microSD card. We can hope for at least 32GB of internal storage across the board this time, but it would be nice to see Sony offer a 64GB option to consumers even if it did cost a little more. When it comes to battery life, Sony may end up upping the battery a little bit, but there phones are already known for quite long lasting life throughout the day so we couldn’t see them going with a battery any higher than 3220mAh, especially if they’re planning on keeping the screen size the same.