14 DAY TRIAL // Sony confirmed earlier this month that Xperia Z1 Compact will be available for purchase in Hong Kong in late April, but it looks like the smartphone arrived slightly earlier.
XperiaBlog reports the smaller version of the popular Xperia Z1 has just hit shelves in Hong Kong and customers can buy the smartphone for $555 (€400) off contract. The handset is available in multiple colors, including black, white, lime and pink.
Unveiled back in January at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 trade fair, the Xperia Z1 Compact has been confirmed to ship with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box.
However, Sony Mobile released recently an Android 4.4.2 KitKat upgrade for the Xperia Z1 Compact, which is why customers in Hong Kong will receive the smartphone with the latest version of Android out of the box.
Instead of calling it Xperia Z1 mini, Sony decided to go with the “Compact” tag attached to smartphone’s name in order to differentiate its product from other brands such as HTC, Samsung and LG.
The Xperia Z1 Compact comes with slightly lower specs than the original Xperia Z1, but not by much, hence the higher price in comparison with other brands.
For example, the smartphone is armed with a powerful 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, an Adreno 330 graphics processing unit and 2GB of RAM, which clearly puts it in the high-end category.
As the name suggests, the handset comes with a smaller 4.3-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports HD (720p) resolution. However, it still embeds Sony’ TRILUMINOUS and X-Reality Engine technologies, along with shatter proof and scratch-resistant glass coating.
Connectivity-wise, the Xperia Z1 Compact offers the full package, such as LTE Cat.4 (150Mbps download, 50Mbps upload), dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP support.
More importantly, the smartphone is IP58 certified, which makes it dust proof and water resistant over 1 meter and 30 minutes.
On the inside, the Xperia Z1 Compact packs 16GB of storage, but users can further expand internal memory up to 64GB via microSD slot card.
Another strong point of the device would be the impressive 20.7-megapixel rear-facing camera, which features autofocus, LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording. The phone’s camera also offers OIS (optical image stabilization) and HDR. There’s also a secondary 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.
Sony Xperia Z1 Compact is powered by a non-removable 2300 mAh battery, which should provide up to 670 hours (600 hours in 3G mode) of standby time or up to 10 hours of talk time (18 hours in 3G mode).