This year’s MWC witnessed various exciting innovations while skipping on some of the most awaited tech device launches. But, GSMA, a pan-European organization which hosts the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona awards the best tech companies in various categories under the annual Global Mobile Awards or GloMo. And, this year’s Best New Smartphone award has been bagged by Sony’s latest flagship smartphone, Xperia XZ Premium.
While Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge was declared as the ‘Best Smartphone of 2016’; the curators at the honour ceremony expect Sony’s new premium phone to create a buzz in the market this year. Alongside the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, the Japanese phone maker debuted three more devices at the MWC — Xperia XZs, Xperia XA1 and Xperia XA1 Ultra. However, Xperia XZ Premium beat the competitors both in terms of features as well as design.
The Sony XZ Premium is a successor to Z5 Premium that was launched way back in 2015. The phone comes with a 5.5-inch 4K HDR display with screen resolution of 2160 x 3840 pixels. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit Snapdragon 835 processor coupled with Adreno 540 GPU and 4GB of RAM. It has 64GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded using a microSD card.
There is a 19MP rear camera with Exmor RS sensor, hybrid AF and 4K video recording support. On the front, you get a 13MP camera with Exmor RS sensor, f/2.0 aperture and a 22mm wide-angle lens. Sony XZ Premium integrates a new camera system called Motion Eye to record super slow motion video and supports interesting features like water resistance (rated IP65 and IP68) and a fingerprint sensor.
Other notable awards at the GloMo included Amazon’s Echo grabbing up the ‘Disruptive Device Innovation’ award while Niantic won ‘Judge’s Choice Mobile App’ for Pokemon Go and the partnership with the Reliance Jio. The award winning phone will not be available in the market until late spring for the fact Samsung’s dibs on the Snapdragon 835. Sony is yet to reveal the pricing of the device which will be available in Luminous Chrome and Deepsea Black color variants.