The Xperia 1.2 (5 Plus) may finally land a battery to match its 5G and 4K chops

There is now another piece of the Xperia 2 (or is it the Xperia 5 Plus or Xperia 1.1?) puzzle that hints at Sony getting back in the smartphone game big time - the battery size. That has been the Achilles heel of all Xperia flagships since, well, the very beginning.

Sony did have some exclusive display tech to eek amazing endurance out of smallish battery pack when screens were around the 1080p mark, but now that it uses true 4K resolution display on his high-end phones, the 3300 mAh battery in Xperia 1 delivers predictably terrible battery life.

Straight out of Japan, the Androidnext tech blog has tipped us that a Weibo account called Caybule has posted and subsequently removed the purported battery pack of the Xperia 1 mark 2, Xperia 2, 5 Plus, or whatever Sony names it, and it is of the whopping 4400mAh capacity - the largest that the company has ever put in its flagships.

Given that the Xperia 1 marked just seven hours of screen-on time on our battery test with a 3300mAh unit, this 30% larger pack should catapult the Xperia 2 past the 9-hour category which is where all our excellent marathon runners are.

Could Sony have made a two-day battery phone with 4K display resolution and 5G connectivity? If this battery pack that you see below materializes in the upcoming Xperia 2 next month, it could be the beginning of the end of Sony's handset division doldrums.

For those of you wondering how this fat battery may alter the physical size of the phone, the dimensions provided by Steve Hemmerstoffer from @onleaks suggest the Xperia 1.1 (168.2 x 71.6 x 8.1mm) won't be that much bigger than last year's Xperia 1 (167 x 72 x 8.2 mm). If anything, it should be a little more comfortable to hold because the width has been reduced slightly.

As a reminder, Sony's updated flagship design is completed by a boxier frame that's seemingly carved out of aluminum. It's home to the usual USB-C port on the bottom and a power key up the right side.

In addition to this, the Japanese brand has included a dedicated shutter button and a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. Most other smartphone brands have switched over to modern in-screen fingerprint scanner alternatives over the course of the past year despite the perceived reduction in accuracy, but Sony still appears to be putting quality first on the upcoming Xperia 1.1.

When it comes to specifications, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 is going to power the smartphone, complete with a 5G modem tacked on as standard. It should be coupled with Android 10, Sony's very minimal custom overlay, and has been leaked benchmarked with 12GB RAM leaving us to only wonder about the amount of expandable internal storage and the exact camera setup. 

So far, a hi-res main sensor, an ultrawide lens on the back and a telephoto snapper have been tipped, leaving us to wonder what are the other little openings in the elliptic camera isle at the back that you see here. 

In any case, at least in terms of battery capacity, the new high-end Xperia should cover all bases that the hungry 5G connectivity and the 4K display resolution throw at it.