Sony's super slow motion Xperia XZ Premium now on sale for $1,099

Sony's latest flagship smartphone - the Xperia XZ Premium - is now on sale retailing for $1,099. Unveiled earlier this year as part of Sony's Mobile World Congress keynote, the Xperia XZ Premium is ostensibly a larger, shinier version of the Xperia XZ.

Despite the similarities, the XZ Premium has been upgraded with a couple of nifty features. The most impressive of these is a new optical system dubbed Motion Eye. Thanks to Motion Eye, the Xperia XZ Premium is able to shoot super slow motion video at 960 frames per second. This means you're essentially able to slow down video by a factor of 30.

There is a catch though: you're only able to capture about 0.2 seconds of super slow motion video at a time, which equates to six or so seconds. You can however put multiple slow motion bursts into one clip.

The Xperia XZ Premium is one of the first smartphones to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor, alongside the HTC U11. While the chip offers performance gains, it also means the device can theoretically achieve download speeds of 1Gbps on compatible 4.5G networks.

Sony's crammed a 5.5-inch 4K HDR display (running at 3840×2160 pixels) into the Xperia XZ Premium. This means theXperia XZ Premium is able to stream 4K HDR video through services such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, although you might end up with a hefty mobile bill if you try and do that over 4G. That and we're not quite sure why you'd want to watch 4K video on a phone. 

Other than a mirrored chrome finish and a slightly bigger body to accommodate the larger screen, the Xperia XZ Premium makes use of a very similar design to the Xperia XZ.

Key specifications include a 5.5-inch 4K display, a Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of expandable storage, a side-facing fingerprint reader, water-resistance, a 19MP camera, and a 3,230mAh battery.

The Xperia XZ Premium is on sale now through Sony and will be available through JB Hi-Fi from July 4. Optus, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone are ranging the phone on contract starting from today, and Telstra is set to join in at the start of July.

Alex Choros

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Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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