The rumoured mini version of Sony’s flagship Android smartphone may have broken cover today, as an image published on the Chinese website Digi-Wo shows the mini smartphone sat right next to its larger brother, the Xperia Z1.
The handset itself was leaked last week by Sony in a website blunder on the company’s main site, so the mystery of the new phone has somewhat been removed, but seeing the mid-range handset in the wild with its bigger sibling shows more of what we can expect from the new gadget.
The Xperia Z1S or ‘Z1 Mini’ as it may be called, is expected to come with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB RAM and the same 20.7 megapixel camera with G lens as the Z1 itself. It will come running the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean software as none of the Sony range is yet to upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat, but we can expect a upgrade soon after its release.
The handset will sport a 4.3 inch screen in comparison to the Z1 which has a larger 5-inch full HD display. The mid-range phone market is always a competitive one for manufacturers, but this year’s big trend in the smartphone market has been to “mini” or smaller versions of manufacturer’s flagship handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, HTC One Mini and the Nokia Lumia 520.
Sony has already released a smaller version of the Xperia Z1 in Japan called the Sony Xperia Z1F, though we’re not yet sure whether the two will be different in any way or if the Z1S is just a global version of the Japan-only Z1f. From pictures, the two look very similar the the rumoured specifications above do match up on paper to the Z1f, which would confirm that the 4.3-inch display will be a 720p HD panel.
Hopefully we’ll find out more about Sony’s incoming addition to the ever-expanding Xperia family.