Sony Xperia XZ Premium: 4K HDR Display, 960 FPS Slow-Motion And Comes in Chrome

Sony announced a plethora of devices this year at MWC (again, like last year). A couple of mid-range devices called the Xperia XA1 and XA1 Ultra, and two higher-end devices called the Xperia XZs and Xperia XZ Premium.

The first two are around the $300 mark and are super nice looking thanks to their displays that go all the way to the edge on either side, but they’re not terribly interesting to me (again super nice but there’s a lot of other phones I might recommend in that price range instead).

The one phone that stands out as far as it’s features and specs are concerned is the Xperia XZ Premium. The phone comes in black and chrome. Yes, chrome. And I highly recommend it, it’s just unique and looks nice.

The phone has the long requested new octa-core Snapdragon 835 processor inside which makes sense since it needs extra power to run its 5.5″ 4K HDR screen. The screen most likely doesn’t run in 4K all the time like the Z5 Premium didn’t but regardless it’s a gorgeous display and a testament to what is possible with a phone screen.

Besides the sheer resolution, they have a HDR or High Dynamic Range built in. As I mentioned in the LG G6 Hands-On, you’re going to hear HDR a lot in the next year I imagine. Essentially it means better contrast, with brighter whites and deeper blacks and side by side with the Z5 you can see the difference (even if I can’t show it to you very well on camera).

The XZ Premium has 4GBs of RAM, 64GBs of internal storage, and a MicroSD card slot that’ll allow you to expand the storage by 256GBs if needed.

It has a USB Type-C port (so excited that so far most devices I’ve come across have USB-C, so sick of having to carry an adapter around, but I digress) and a 3230mah battery with QuickCharge 3.0.

The front camera is a 22mm wide angle 13MP camera and on the back we have the thing Sony is known for, their primary camera.

The camera on the back is a 19MP shooter that has, get this, 5 axis stablization built in, you know, like a real DSLR. So video shooting, which you can do up to 4K at 30fps but also has a neat little trick that allows you to record short bursts of super slow motion while filming. You simply hold down the button while in slow-motion mode and it’ll play back that short 0.2 second section, which it recorded in a crazy 960 fps, back as a super slow-mo section.

I’m assuming it only let’s you do this in short bursts for a reason, maybe the sheer size of the data needed for 960 fps (think about how much data 30fps takes up and then multiply that by 32), not sure. Regardless, it’d make for some potentially awesome videos of your friends looking ridiculous that you can then share to social.

Beyond that, it’s also IP 68 certified so pretty waterproof and, of course, runs the PS4 Remote Play.

There you go a quick run-down of the new Sony Xperia XZ Premium. It’s expected to be released in Spring sometime of this year and there’s no price available, but the XZs the slightly toned-down brother to the Premium that they also announced here looks like it’ll retail for $700 so expect the Premium to have a price tag to match it’s name.

Let me know what you guys think of the device itself or this hands-on below in the comments, love to hear from you and if you liked this article, please consider sharing it, it’s greatly appreciated!

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For more info the the specs or the other Sony devices listed, check out this article.