Sony Xperia Z Ultra goes up for pre-order for Rs 44,990

Been eyeing the Sony Xperia Z Ultra? Well you won’t have to wait too long to get your hands on it. Sony’s massive phablet has gone up for pre-order for Rs 44,990 at online retailer Flipkart. The Z Ultra is also listed on Infibeam for the same price and will ship in four to five days, but the launch price of the phone will be Rs 46,990 according to the listing.

The Xperia Z Ultra rightfully has gained a lot of buzz thanks to it being the first device to sport Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 SoC, which is expected to bring a whole lot of power to the smartphone. The four Krait cores in the chipset are clocked at 2.2 GHz and there’s the Adreno 330 GPU to deliver high-quality mobile graphics. Just to help things along further, there’s 2GB of RAM. Just like many of Sony's recent phones, this one too is waterproof and impervious to dust.

The Z Ultra’s 6.44-inch display should pretty much negate any need for a tablet on the side. And with a 1080p resolution, it’s not lacking for good image quality either. The TFT LCD in the Xperia Z looked much washed out to us and the viewing angles were poor. The Triluminos display of the Ultra supposedly does away with those two worries and some early impressions have called it on par with the much-praised Super LCD3 on the HTC One.

Massive display is perfect for viewing HD videos

Despite the weather-resistant body, the Z Ultra gets a microSD card slot (under flaps, of course), and that’s in addition to the 16GB of internal storage. The slot accepts cards up to 64GB in capacity.

The camera specs of the Z Ultra are slightly behind its smaller cousin Xperia Z. The 8-megapixel primary camera is endowed with geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, image stabilisation, HDR, 3D Sweep Panorama mode plus other shooting modes. The front-facing camera is a 2-megapixel unit. Both the cameras are capable of shooting 1080p videos at 30fps, but only the back camera gets video stabilisation and the HDR mode.

Can go out for a walk in the rain

The battery on the Z Ultra is non-removable thanks to the sealed design. The 3050 mAh unit sounds plenty, but we are not sure how much power will be hogged by the large full HD display and the high-end SoC. The battery is rated for up to 790 hours and 820 hours on standby on 2G and 3G respectively. It is rated for up to 14 hours for talk time on 2G connection and up to 16 hours on 3G. Sony says the phone should last up to 120 hours when playing just music.

The Z Ultra comes with the very best in Wi-Fi connectivity. This means it can go up to the ac band and also comes with dual-band support. In addition, there’s Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA for content sharing. Other connectivity options include Bluetooth and NFC.

Available in three colours

This is one of the most exciting (if intimidating) smartphones of the year and we are itching to get our hands on it. Let us know if you will be considering Sony’s latest phablet.