Sony has a thing for massive, massively powerful phones. Its 5.5-inch Xperia XZ Premium has a brand new chipset under the hood, just like Samsung’s Galaxy S8, and that means it’s one of the first phones capable at downloading at 1000Mbps over 4G.
Following in the footsteps of the Netgear Nighthawk X1, the XZ Premium will run a Qualcomm X16 LTE modem alongside its Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 quad-core CPU, and that means 1000Mbps — theoretical, at least — download speeds. You’ll actually get closer to 300Mbps download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds in the real world under ideal conditions, which we’ve already consistently hit on Telstra’s mobile network in the Sydney CBD. But that’s a hell of a lot faster than anything else out there at the moment; we’d currently call the Google Pixel our download speed king, topping 200Mbps at the best of times.
The new Sony XZ Premium excels in other areas, too — it’s the first 4K phone to have HDR support baked into its display, it’s built around a new 19-megapixel camera with a new lens setup, and it’s capable of recording slow-motion video at up to 960 frames per second at 720p resolution. That’s super slow-mo, and it’s great to have even if you’re not going to be using it very often.
The XZ Premium is water- and dust-proof, and has the most refined evolution of Sony’s ‘loop design’ architecture that we’ve seen — including the same ridiculously high-chrome finish as the previous Z5 Premium, either in silver or black. We’ll have full price and Australian release date details for you in the near future. [Sony]