Sony's Xperia Z Ultra Officially Enters the Phablet Fray

The battle of the phablets - smartphones that are not quite phones or tablets - has just heated up. On Tuesday, June 25, Sony unveiled its 6.4-inch phablet variant of the Xperia Z, which they're calling the Xperia Z Ultra, boasting that it has the largest full HD smartphone display.

On paper, the Xperia Z Ultra is a lot like the Xperia Z - just more of it. Sony's flagship smartphone, which already had a substantial 5-inch HD touchscreen, is upped to a 6.4-inch full HD Triluminous 1920 x 1080p display in this phablet monster. While the Xperia Z boasted a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch, the phablet's display dials it back a bit with 344 ppi, though on such a big screen. But, assisted by Sony's X-Reality optimization, which analyzes each image and reproduces any lacking pixels based on pattern, outline, and color composition, every pixel is likely to look very nice.

The phablet is powered by a monster of a quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor at 2.2GHz - the fastest mobile chipset to make its way into a smartphone so far, compared to the Xperia Z, which had a still-respectable 1.5GHz four core processor. Just like the Xperia Z, the Xperia Z Ultra will be waterproof. Unlike the Xperia Z though, it will be made to IP55 and IP58 water and dust-resistant specifications, meaning that your 6.4-inch monster can take a dunk in the shallow end of the pool, deeper than the Xperia Z's 1 meter IP57 specification, and stay there for more than a few minutes without being ruined.

Sony boasts that you can even film full HD video underwater, which makes the Xperia Z Ultra the latest incarnation of Sony's long lineage of consumer home-video technology. Speaking of video, the Xperia Z Ultra comes with an 8-megapixel auto-focus camera with Exmor RS image stacking for higher quality images, but it's a step down from the 13-megapixel camera on Sony's flagship phone, and there's no LED flash as well.

The Xperia Z Ultra runs Android Jelly Bean 4.2 with Sony's custom UI and apps. Walkman, Sony's nod to its own past in consumer music, is Sony's all-around media center, offering features to discover, share, and play music and movies, including access to Sony's library of 20 million songs on their cloud, called "Music Unlimited" (which comes with a free trial), as well as "Video Unlimited," for movies and TV series. Other features of the 6.4-inch water-resistant phablet include a 3,000 mAh battery with battery-optimizing "Stamina Mode," meant to improve your phablet's standby time up to four times its normal capability.

Sony's Xperia Z Ultra is only 6.5 mm thick, rivaling Huawei's recently-debuted, and much less impressively stacked Ascend P6, which was hyped to be only 6.18 millimeters thick. However, the Xperia Z Ultra is almost half a pound heavy. A few other features include handwriting recognition, which means that you can use any pencil or pen as a stylus (or a regular capacitive stylus) to draw on the screen, 4G LTE wireless, HD Voice, and NFC.

With the Xperia Z, Sony has really pushed to become relevant in the phone market again. Launching the humongous Xperia Z Ultra phablet variant, Sony seems to be trying to test Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Mega, a 6.3-inch phablet, which is launching soon (as well as HTC's One Max phablet). The Xperia Z Ultra will launch in Q3 2013 in white, black, and purple.

Some details, like storage capacity, microSD availability, and pricing are still not known, so come back here for more updates as they come along.