Sony's flagship Xperia 1 II will ship in July for $1,200
It offers 5G, pro photo features and a 4K HDR display.
Sony’s flagship Xperia 1 II smartphone will ship on July 24th for an eye-watering $1,199 in the US, the company announced. Pre-orders open up on June 1st and if you buy before June 28th, you’ll get a pretty nice gift: a free pair of Sony’s excellent WF-1000XM3 noise-cancelling wireless earbuds.
It packs a triple camera setup developed with the engineers behind Sony’s A7 III and other popular mirrorless cameras. The three 12-megapixel cameras (wide, ultrawide and zoom) can shoot at up to 20 fps in burst mode with autofocus and auto-exposure enabled, making it suitable for action and sports shooting. It can also do human/animal eye tracking and comes with pro photography and movie settings to give you full manual control.
The Xperia 1 II has a big 6.5-inch 21:9 4K HDR OLED screen and can server as an external display for select Sony DSLR or mirrorless camera models. Other specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 856 CPU and a 4,000mAh battery to keep that bright screen going, along with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The Xperia 1 II is Sony’s first 5G smartphone (sub-6Ghz) for Europe, but it only appears to support LTE bands in the US. However, Sony may soon unveil the Xperia Pro 5G with high-speed mmWave 5G tech that does work in the US. That phone would also have professional broadcast features including an HDMI input port and will no doubt cost even more than the non-pro model. As mentioned, orders kick off on June 1st with shipping slated to start on July 24th.
