Report: Sony Xperia Z to launch on January 15th, beating out next Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S IV

A report from Chinese website ePrice says that Sony will be beating out Apple and Samsung in launching at least one of its 2013 high-end, flagship handsets next month. According to the site, the Sony Xperia Z, formerly known as the Sony Yuga, will be launched on January 15th. That is exactly one week after the start of CES 2013 in Las Vegas, which is where Sony will introduce the model.

Image alleged to be that of the Sony Xperia Z

The Sony Xperia Z will be one of the new group of smartphones sporting a 5 inch, 1080 x 1920 panel with pixel density of 441ppi. These are the same specs found on the HTC DROID DNA and on some upcoming models like the ZTE Grand S, which also is expected to be made official at CES. The Xperia Z is said to have a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor under the hood with an Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB of RAM on board. A 13MP camera is on back and a microSD slot does come with the phone. The Sony Xperia Z sports LTE connectivity and Android 4.1.2 is pre-installed right out of the box.

By launching the phone in January, Sony is getting one of its 2013 flagship devices out in the market before the next version of the Apple iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S IV are launched. The specs of the latter are rumored to be another one of the new high-end handsets to offer a 5 inch panel, 1080p resolution and 441ppi pixel density.

source: ePrice (translated),