Sony's Flagship Xperia 1 21:9 Smartphone Gets a Launch Date: July 12th for $950

Sony has finally given its flagship Xperia 1 smartphone an official launch date and price. The handset, which features a large 21:9 OLED display that supports wide color gamuts, will arrive on July 12th for $949.99.

First introduced back at MWC 2019, Sony's new flagship smartphone is a very strong play for the high-end mobile market. Without a doubt, the key feature of the Xperia 1 is its 6.5-inch OLED display featuring a 21:9 aspect ratio with a 3840x1644 resolution. The screen supports the BT.2020 and the DCI-P3 color spaces with the D65 white point, and Sony says that it reproduces colors so precisely that that one of its movie studios used the Xperia 1 to review its work on set. To properly display HDR content, Sony is further adopting some of their display algorithms originally designed for their Bravia TVs. Meanwhile, the display is protected using Corning’s Gorilla Glass 6.

Under the hood, the Xperia 1 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, which is paired with 6 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128 GB of NAND flash memory (which can be augmented via microSD cards). Like other high-end 4G/LTE smartphones launched this year, this one supports Gigabit 4G/LTE, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, and other advanced features of the platform. The handset also supports Dolby Atmos via its USB-C headphone output, while its speakers were tuned by engineers from Sony Pictures Entertainment, according to Sony.

In addition to its advanced display, the Sony Xperia 1 also comes with a 12 MP triple sensor camera cluster, which is comprised of a 26-mm regular RGB camera, 16-mm wide-angle camera, and a 52-mm telephoto camera. The camera cluster incorporates several Sony camera technologies, including Eye AF technology to focus exactly to the level of eyes, burst shooting with up to 10 fps AF/AE tracking, and it can shoot in 4K HDR at 24 fps with different color presets. Meanwhile, there is an 8 MP camera for front-facing photos.

Overall, being one of the first 21:9 smartphones on the market, the Xperia 1 is unusually long, yet it still very comfortable to hold and use, as we discovered back at MWC.

When it hits the streets in mid-July, Sony will be offering the Xperia 1 in two colors: black and purple. All of the usual suspects will be carrying the phone, including Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo, and Focus Camera. Interestingly, the $949.99 price tag is actually a tad lower than the price Sony was floating in March, where at the time they were intending to launch it as a $999 phone.

As for international customers, it looks like they'll need to wait a bit longer; for the moment Sony isn't announcing a launch date outside of the US. But in traditional Sony fashion, it is likely that the company will try to launch its flagship smartphone across the world more or less simultaneously.

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Source: Sony