The Xperia Z was Sony’s flagship phone for 2013, and continued the screen size and resolution arms race with its 5in, 1,920×1,080 display, which compares well to contemporary rivals such as the Full HD-equipped HTC One. It also has all the specifications you would expect from a high-end smartphone, including a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and a camera with a huge 13-megapixel sensor. It’s not as old as its name makes it sound either, as Sony released both the Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z3 in 2014, with the original Z only dating back to Febuary 2013.
Sony is continuing to support all its powerful Z-series phones and tablets. The Xperia Z is currently running the latest Android 4.4 Kit Kat operating system, but that’s not the end of the road for it. Early in 2015 Sony is promising to update the Xperia Z to Android 5.0, effectively giving the phone a whole new lease of life. You can read all about it in our Android 5.0 review, but we’re yet to see what Sony’s take on the new operating system will be. Its Snapdragon Pro S4 chipset should be up to the task, but we can’t say for sure until the update rolls out.
The display’s Full HD resolution is the same as that of the HTC One, but the slightly larger screen size should make text more legible at this resolution. We found we could view web pages in desktop mode and still read all the page’s text easily without zooming in. This is a trick that the HTC One also pulls off, but we found the Xperia Z’s extra 1/3 inch screen size made reading more comfortable.
Browsing desktop web pages without zooming in is possible on the 5in 1,920×1,080 display
