One year after Sony unveiled the
Xperia A2 in Japan, what appears to be its successor just got unveiled. It's not called the Xperia A3, but the Xperia A4, mind you, and is a pretty similar to the Xperia Z3 Compact in terms of specs and design. As such, it's a pretty compact device - its dimensions are 128 x 66 x 9.1mm and it tips the scales at 129gr. Just like most of Sony's high-end and mid-range handsets, the new trooper is dust- and water-proof in accordance to the IPX5/8 and IP6X standards.
When it comes to specs, the Xperia A2 screams "2014". It is endowed with a quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset humming at up to 2.5GHz, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of native storage, and a microSD card slot.
At the front, we have a 4.6-inch 720p display. The photography capabilities of the handset are courtesy of a 20.7MP rear-positioned camera and a 2.2MP front-facing selfie snapper. There is a also a 2,600mAh battery keeping the lights on. Interestingly enough, if we judge from one of the product images, Sony might be claiming a three-day battery life for the device, but given its specs we suppose that it will be pretty much on par with the Xperia Z3 Compact, which achieved 10 hours and 2 minutes in our battery benchmark test.
In the connectivity department, it's nice to see that the Xperia A4 is an LTE-enabled samurai that sports all the bells and whistles you might expect - Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.0 with APT-X, NFC, GPS with GLONASS, and MHL support. Android 5.0 with Sony's own Xperia UI is powering the device.
The handset will come in black, white, blue, and pink; it will arrive on the shelves of Japan's NTT Docomo starting from the middle of June. Neither the pricing information nor the model's availability on other markets are known at this point.
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