SONY yesterday became one of the few brands to unveil a new flagship smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, announcing the Xperia Z.
The new phone contains a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor, a 5-inch full HD 1080p display and a fine resolution 13 megapixel camera. It runs on fourth-generation LTE networks and will be launched globally in the first quarter of this year.
At its media conference at CES, Sony Electronics US president Phil Molyneux highlighted the phone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) touch capabilities. Touching an NFC-enabled speaker transfers sound from the phone to the speaker, and touching the remote control of the company’s new Bravia TV plays photos and videos stored on the phone on the big screen.
Sony also announced two new NFC-enabled headsets – one is a stereo Bluetooth headset and the other is wireless operated.
The Xperia Z and a designer-variant Xperia ZL will launch on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and will be upgraded to 4.2 shortly after launch, Sony said.
Huawei too has launched a phone at CES. It has a massive 6.1-inch HD display and, given that tablet computers start with 7-inch screens, barely qualifies as a phone.
Known as the Ascend Mate, the smartphone features a 1.5 GHz Hi-Silicon quad-core processor and a large 4050 mAh battery.
