Sony Xperia XZ3 Officially Announced With 6-Inch OLED Display

Sony has officially announced the Xperia XZ3, the company’s latest flagship Android smartphone for 2018. The XZ3 borrows a lot of its features from the Xperia XZ2 that arrived earlier this year, but the new handset comes with a larger OLED screen.

The Sony Xperia XZ3 comes with curved Gorilla Glass 5 up front and on its back. It’s available in four color options: black, white silver, forest green and Bordeaux blue. The XZ3’s design language is very similar to the XZ2 since it comes with the same curved edges for its body. However, the XZ3 has a 6-inch OLED display, which is probably the phone’s central selling point.

The OLED display comes with a quad HD+ resolution and it also supports HDR. Sony said in its press release that the technology used on the XZ3 OLED display is the same one that’s being used on the company’s Bravia OLED TVs, which are able to deliver deeper blacks, higher contrast and sharper images with more vibrant colors. Sony even included a technology called X-Reality on the Xperia XZ3 which is able to “up-convert” standard dynamic range content to HDR.

Keeping up with the latest smartphone trend, the Xperia XZ3’s display features a tall 18:9 aspect ratio. The handset also has very slim bezels on top and on the bottom of the display, while the side bezels are almost completely non-existent.

As for internals, the Xperia XZ3 comes with most of the same specs of the XZ2. The new Sony Android smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 3,330mAh battery. On the back, it has a circular rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and single 19-megapixel camera. The rear camera is the same as the one that’s found on the XZ2 and it can record 4K HDR videos and 960 frames-per-second slow motion at 1080p full HD resolution. Up front, it has a 13-megapixel camera with an f/1.9 aperture lens, according to 9To5Google. On the software side of things, the device is running Android 9.0 Pie straight out of the box.

Another thing that’s entirely new on the Sony Xperia XZ3 is a feature that’s called Side Sense. The new feature is actually a kind of user interface that is able to provide quick access to favorite apps. Users will be able to activate Side Sense by simply double tapping on any part of the side of the Xperia XZ3. Side Sense, which is powered by AI, will then open up a scrollable interface showing a list of apps that it thinks the user wants to use next.

Sony says that the Xperia XZ3 will be available starting in October for $900, but pre-orders will open on Sept. 24.