And here we face a conundrum. On the one hand, the spec-whores in us are salivating over the guts in Sony’s Xperia Z Ultra. On the other hand, the screen on this thing is 6.4 freaking inches! That’s not a phone, that’s a tablet you talk into.
Ignoring that for a moment, this thing sounds awesome. It will come running Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) on Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at an absurd 2.2GHz. It has an 8MP camera with the Exmor RS for mobile sensor, LTE, NFC, microSD card slot and 2GB of RAM.
There’s some very impressive design going on with the body too. At 6.5mm, it is the thinnest smartphone in the world by our count. For comparison, the iPhone 5 is 7.6mm. That’s nuts. It’s also dustproof and waterproof (IP55 and IP58), so you should be able to drop it into a metre of water and leave it for a half hour with no problem. We tested that recently with the Xperia Tablet Z, and it worked as advertised. You can use any pencil (and a lot of pens) as a stylus, which would make us nervous about screen scratching, but sure, why not. Speaking of the screen, it’s 1080p, which gives it a very solid pixel density of 352 PPI, and it uses Sony’s new TRILUMINOS technology, which may or may not mean something.
But let’s address the elephant in the room. The elephant being the device, because they are roughly the same size. Samsung’s Galaxy S4, with its 5-inch screen, is a phone. The Galaxy Note II, with its 5.5-inch screen, is what has become known as a “phablet” (weep for the English language). The Nexus 7, however, with its 7-inch screen, is a tablet. Sony’s Xperia Z Ultra has a 6.4-inch screen. Now, let’s do some simple maths. The Ultra is 23mm bigger than the Note II phablet, but it’s only 15mm smaller than the Nexus 7 tablet. Thus, it’s more tablet than phone (or phablet, even). Just look at this thing in a normal person’s hand!
Yes, sure, it does possess other characteristics of a phone, like an ear speaker and radio bandwidths for voice communication, but come on. There is no way it’s going to fit comfortably into your pants pocket and there’s no way you’ll be able to do anything but read with it one-handed. We’d love to see these same guts in a smaller, more wieldy package, but it remains to be seen when such a day will come.
The Xperia Z Ultra launches globally in Q3 of this year. We look forward to going hands-on with it then. We anticipate needing both.