Gadgetory

- Hey it's Chaim with The Verge, and I'm here at Sony's booth at IFA 2018, where the company just announced it's new Xperia XZ3 smartphone. It's Sony's latest flag ship and if you've seen the company's XZ2 smartphone that released earlier this year, it should look really familiar. There are a couple of new things on the XZ3. There's a new 6-inch OLED panel. There's some new gesture controls, some new swipe gestures and some new AI functionality. And it ships with Android 9.0 Pie, which is nice. But on a whole, it's very iterative. (techno sounds) The display on the XZ3 is great. It's a beautiful OLED panel, has really great blacks, really bright colors. And Sony's again borrowed the same curved glass from the XZ2, so it's really nice to hold in your hands. It curves around all the way and then curves around all the way in the front. It's really a seamless hunk of glass and metal. It's really nice to hold in your hands. The big change here is that Sony's updated the 5.7-inch LCD display on the ZX2, to a 6-inch OLED display on the ZX3. It's also shifted the form factor a bit, the ZX2 had a 2:1 form factor. This is an 18x9, so it's a little taller. They have the same Snapdragon 845 processor. The have almost the same battery life, or at least, almost the same battery size. There are some new AI features. So there's a new feature were you can double tap the side and have this little contextual menu slide in. It'll be populated with apps based on your location and what you use. So if you're commuting, on the morning it'll pop up your music app. If you're at work and you're in a meeting, it'll show you your calendar. Similarly, there's also a new feature where you can just take your phone out of your pocket and hold it up and it'll automatically give you a prompt. Just tap the screen and launch the camera. It's super slick when it works but I had a couple issues getting it to work in my few minutes with testing and, again, it's just a small update. The cameras are pretty much the same. There's an identical 19 megapixel sensor on the back for the rear camera, and the front camera has been upgraded to a 13 megapixel lens. There's also a new camera app which should make things a bit easier too. On the back of the phone, there's a fingerprint scanner, which is nice, considering that up until the XZ2, Sony's phones didn't really have them on the back and that's pretty much the natural place that you'd want a fingerprint scanner. And it's 2018, which apparently we've decided is the year of the smartphone notch, and Sony's not gonna get left out with a seemingly decorative notch on the back above the USB-C port. This isn't a new practice for Sony either. The company's historically been releasing two flagships a year. One at Mobile World Congress in the winter, and then one at IFA in the fall but these phones really just start to blend together. We already had this with the Xperia XZ2, which honestly there were three versions of it and they all just kind of blurred together. And at $900 for the upgrade, which is what the XZ3 will cost when it launches some time in October, that's a lot to be asking for such an iterative upgrade. It's not that the XZ3 is a bad phone, it's just that Sony's had so much trouble getting it's phones to, well, sell in the past, that this is such a small update that it's really hard to see how this will tip the scales in it's favor. Still, if you are interested, it'll be available for 900 bucks in the US, or 700 pounds in London, when it ships sometime in October. Hey, thanks for watching. Like and subscribe for more of our IFA coverage, it's on our channel. We're Youtube.com/theverge.