After months of leaks and speculation Sony has officially launched the upscaled Sony Xperia Z Ultra, a rugged handset which sports an absolutely huge 6.44 inch Full HD screen and shares many of the flagship Xperia Z’s features, taking the fight to Samsung and its Note range.
The handset was officially unveiled (after more than a few images and spec leaks online!) at launch events in Shanghai and London where Sony showed off the a brand new 6.4-inch Android smartphone, and it’s a bit of a beast.
The 6.4-inch display is a 1920 x 1080 Triluminos screen which comes with a stylus to allow the user to draw, take notes or handwrite emails, just as Samsung offers on the Galaxy Note.
The Xperia Z Ultra (or ZU as it was known) will come with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2GHz processor and has 2Gb of RAM. Battery-wise there is a 3,000 mAh cell to support that large screen, which Sony claims will give you 11 hours of 3G talk time. The smartphone will also be LTE/4G enabled and will come with an 8-megapixel camera around the back, with features like face detection, HDR and burst shooting and there’s a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.
Internally there is 16GB of storage inbuilt and a micro SD card slot to expand the memory by up to 64GB. The handset also shares the Xperia Z’s ruggedness as the Z Ultra is both water-resistant to a depth of 1.5m for 30 minutes and can be subjected to ‘low pressure jets of water’. It’s dust resistant too – both IP55 and IP58 certified – and in a slight change from the Xperia Z, the Ultra’s headphone port is actually uncovered, in the same way Samsung has done on the Galaxy S4 Active.
The handset measures 179.4 x 92.2 x 6.5mm and shares the same design as the Xperia Z but much wider and it weighs just 212g, so it’s not too hefty to have in your pocket although it’s heavier than the hefty Galaxy Note II and Nokia Lumia 920 models, which are two of the heaviest phones around. The phone will be available in purple, white and black and will be running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean OS.
There is currently no pricing for the Xperia Z Ultra but we would expect around the £600 mark for a SIM-free version of the phone and Sony have said that the handset will be available from Q3 2013 globally.
It’s a bit of a beast but we love the Xperia Z and the Z Ultra seems to be bigger and slightly better version of its now little brother!