Sony bigs up its 5in Android smartphone

Sony has unveiled its new flagship Android smartphone, the Xperia Z, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Xperia Z will come in two versions. The Z is made out of glass, yet Sony claims it's dust and water resistant and demonstrated dunking the phone into a glass of water while remaining fully functional. The ZL is a plastic version that isn't dust and water resistant, but is otherwise identical.

Read more: CES 2013 news; smartphone reviews

Sony has squeezed a full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels into the 5in screen of the Xperia Z. The 13 megapixel camera is apparently the first that's capable of recording HDR video. Photos and videos stored on the Xperia Z can be shared with other Sony products, such as TVs, equipped with NFC chips. For example, simply tap the phone against the remote of a compatible TV and the contents of the phone's screen will be mirrored on the TV.

Another use of this NFC sharing technology is the Personal Content Station 1TB NAS device, sold separately. Tapping the Xperia Z against it automatically starts a wireless backup of all the new photos and videos, but not documents, stored on the phone. In our brief hands on at Sony's press conference in Las Vegas the demonstration units on show clearly had a few bugs – it took several repeated taps before a TV remote recognised the phone, while photos backed up from the phone to a Personal Content Station showed up as blank.

The Xperia Z will have 2GB of memory, a 2GHz quad core Snapdragon S4 processor and support for LTE networks. The glass version of the phone will be just 7.9mm thick. The Xperia Z will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean pre-installed – the Sony representatives we spoke to weren't able to confirm when the Android 4.2 update would become available. 

We were also unable to confirm when the Xperia Z will arrive in the UK, for how much and whether there will be a price difference between the Z and ZL.