Sony has announced that its recently-unveiled flagship phone, the Xperia XZ, will be available in Australia on October 20 with pre-orders opening today.
The XZ continues the Japanese company's strategy of frequent, iterative phone releases, supplanting the Xperia X Performance which was just released in June.
With curved glass and a subtly colour-changing metal body made with a proprietary alloy called ALKALEIDO, the XZ is a 5.2-inch phone that looks like a mix between the monolithic rectangle designs of the Xperia Z and the softer edges of the X.
It will be available in the red-tinged "mineral black" from Telstra, outright or on a plan, or from JB Hi-Fi outright. If you want it in an interesting "forest blue" colour, you'll have to buy direct from Sony. The RRP is $999.
Internally the XZ is very similar to the X Performance, with the same quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor, Adreno 530 GPU and 3GB of RAM. It does, however, pack a larger battery, better fast charging via USB-C and more resilient Gorilla Glass.
While it features the same 23MP camera and predictive hybrid autofocus seen in previous Sony phones, new sensing technologies promise to reduce blur and produce images with true-to-life colour. Sony is pushing the camera as a key selling point, and claims the phone can capture an image from standby in 0.6 seconds.
As with many past Xperia phones, the XZ is certified dust and water resistant to the IP65 and IP68 standards. Other expected Xperia staples, like the side-mounted fingerprint scanner, Hi-Res audio and remote compatibility with the PlayStation 4, are there as well.
With Samsung seemingly out of the race for now, the XZ will be going up against Google's Pixel phones directly in terms of new Android flagships at the vital holiday period. The XZ sits between the Pixel and Pixel XL in terms of size, although it is slightly less expensive and slightly less powerful than both. LG also plans to bring its massive 5.7-inch V20 down under late this year, although it hasn't announced more details than that.
One clear advantage the Pixels and V20 have is that they will launch with versions of the latest Android Nougat operating system, while the XZ will launch with Marshmallow. Sony says it will update the phone to Nougat at a later date.
