Though they may have been history's most-leaked smartphones ahead of launch, Sony still managed to turn heads with the official unveiling of three new smartphones at IFA in Berlin.
Along with the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact, powerful phones with frosted-glass backs, and everything you'd expect from a flagship phone in 2015, the Japanese company brought out the big guns with the Xperia Z5 Premium: the world's first phone with a 4K display.
It's arguable whether the bump in display resolution makes any visible difference at all on such a small screen (5.5 inches is definitely phablet territory, but much smaller than a 65-inch TV), although for a phone brand suffering from a bit of an invisiblity crisis it's clear the huge, chrome, mirror-backed phone with a 4K display is designed to draw eyes to the whole Z5 family.
Other than size, screen resolution and the shininess of the backing glass, the family is virtually three sizes of the same high-end phone. All feature the same Snapdragon 810 processor and the same tiny side-mounted fingerprint scanner, as well as what Sony calls the finest camera it's ever made for a phone.
As a company that supplies camera sensors to almost all of its competition, that's a big call, and it's clear Sony has been keeping something to itself. The 1/2.3-inch Exmor RS 23MP sensor is surrounded by complicated-sounding terms. It's backside illuminated, features phase-detection pixels, is housed in a module with a closed-loop actuator and covered by a six-element 24mm lens with a f/2.0 aperture.
What this means for users, Sony says, is a camera that can auto-focus or re-focus in .03 seconds, can zoom up to 5x without losing noticeable detail and can offer low-light photography with unprecedented levels of clarity. Of course though the pedigree of the camera is obvious, those claims remain to be tested in the real world.
Elsewhere Sony is sticking with its commitment to offer a "2 day battery" in its phones, including a 2700mAh battery in the Compact, 2900mAh in the Z5 and 3430mAh in the Premium. Like their predecessors, the phones are also water resistant.
A 5MP front camera, 32GB of internal memory (expandable with a memory card of up to 200GB) and 3GB of RAM (2GB for the Compact, which has less demand owing to its lower-resolution screen) round out the hardware specs for the three phones.
The phones will run Android Lollipop 5.1.1 at launch, although Sony says it plans to jump to Marshmallow soon. Thankfully, the company is taking a hands off approach to the operating system with the Z5 family, ditching its custom skin for a virtually stock Android experience.
Colours to be available in October when the phones launch globally include black, gold and chrome for the Premium; black, white, gold and dark green for the Z5; and black, white, pink and yellow for the Compact.
