Sony Xperia Z available for UK pre-order

 

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By Dave Stevenson

Posted on 15 Feb 2013 at 17:34

Sony’s Xperia Z is available for pre-order in the UK at Vodafone and Phones4u, ahead of its release on 28 February.

Announced at CES in January, contracts for the Xperia Z will start at £21 per month for a contract including 100 minutes, unlimited texts and 100MB of data, on top of a £169 charge for the phone itself. A more generous contract including unlimited minutes and 1GB of data will cost £33 per month on top of a £99 charge for the handset.

The cheapest contract which includes the Xperia Z for free costs £37, and comes with unlimited minutes and 1GB of data. All of Vodafone’s contracts are for 24 months, but the first thousand customers will be rewarded with a pair of Sony MDR-1R headphones.

The Xperia Z is the first phone Sony has taken responsibility for designing in-house, as previous devices relied on the design experience of the Sony Ericsson team. The Dragontail glass body is claimed to be six times stronger than the Gorilla Glass used in Apple products such as the iPhone 5, and the Xperia Z’s weather sealing means it can resist 30-minutes’ submersion in water as well as being able to survive in dusty environments.

The 5in, 1,080 x 1,920 capacitive touchscreen has an iPhone 5-beating pixel density of 441ppi, plus a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcom CPU. Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) will be pre-installed, and PC Pro noted in its hands-on review at CES in Las Vegas that the operating system fairly "flew along" and made short work of intensive image processing tasks.

The Xperia Z will be the latest phone in the Vodafone stable to support 4G, although customers who opt for the cheapest Xperia Z contract should note that their phone will be capable of exhausting the 100MB data cap in mere minutes.