Sony Xperia Z5

For what seems like the first time in ages, Sony is announcing a trio of flagship phones at the same time. From big to small, we’ve got the Z5 Premium, the Z5 and the Z5 Compact. The trio share many attributes, but thanks to one spec, the Premium is by far the most interesting.

To say that Sony’s mobile division has had a tough time lately would be an understatement. As the company puts out half-hearted efforts like the Z3 and Z3+, sales have been dropping steadily. We’re now at the point where Sony is losing more than $1 million per day just keeping the division going. Something has to change. Sony has to take smartphones seriously, and this is its attempt to do just that. Meet the Xperia Z5 family, which includes the world’s first 4K phone display, “next-generation” cameras and some tiny, tiny fingerprint scanners.

I’m totally blitzed with the Premium’s display. It’s got a truly ridiculous, world-beating 5.5-inch 4K (3,840 x 2,160) panel, with rich colors and deep blacks. We’ll need to spend more time than the few hours we’ve had with the new lineup to give a proper verdict, but right now we can say for sure that it looks great. I’m not sure I want a 4K display in my phone, but I am sure that the allure of an 806-ppi display will be enough to win some over. Sony’s thrown down the gauntlet, and at least in pixel density, the Z5 Premium is the phone to beat.

Unfortunately, Sony’s saved all of its new screen tech for the Premium, with the regular Z5 retaining the same 5.2-inch 1080p unit as the Z3 and Z3+, and the Z5 Compact getting a slightly larger — 4.7 inches vs. the Z3 Compact’s 4.6 inches — but still 720p display.

Apart from their displays, the devices are almost identical.

As far as specs go, though, the displays are pretty much the only things distinguishing the Z5 Premium from the Z5 and Z5 Compact. All three have Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor inside, up to 32GB of internal storage (expandable by microSD), high-res audio chips and “up to two-day battery life.” That’s a cute way Sony found to say “you only need to charge this one once a day.” How they eke out that battery life differs of course, with the Premium having a 3,430mAh battery, the Z5 a 2,900mAh and the Z5 Compact a 2,700mAh. The only other differentiator is RAM: The Z5 Premium and Z5 have 3GB; the Z5 Compact only has 2GB.

Sony says that, thanks to the phase-detection pixels, the Z5 family can autofocus in as little as 0.03 second, claiming it’s the “world’s fastest autofocus in a smartphone.” All we can say is it’s very quick. The actuator helps with this by swiftly moving the lens to focus, and because it’s closed-loop, it’ll also offer better image stabilization, especially for video. As you’d expect, all three will shoot movies in 4K, although evidently the Z5 Premium is the only one capable of playing footage back natively on the phone itself. Sony says the new sensor is capable of oversampling images (PureView style) for digital zoom “without loss of image quality.” Take that claim with an ocean’s worth of salt, of course, but the zoomed images definitely seemed good enough for a Facebook or Twitter share.

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