Sony's just-announced Xperia XA Ultra will certainly appeal to those who love to look at themselves. While many phones use a fairly basic sensor for their front camera, the new Xperia has a 16-megapixel sensor facing towards you. Now we've seen cameras before with some pretty serious selfie cameras but the Xperia XA Ultra goes well beyond those by also incorporating optical image stabilisation on the front-facing sensor.
Combine that with a Sony-made sensor (presumably one of the latest backlit CMOS designs, though Sony isn't saying) and you've got a selfie camera that should take some pretty great photos in all but the worst lighting conditions. You can also activate the shutter by holding up a hand, which then sets off a short countdown.
It doesn't end there, though, as the Xperia XA Ultra also has a gigantic 6in screen on which to frame your selfies and show them to others afterwards. That puts it well into 'phablet' territory and is a huge step up from the comparatively small 5in Sony Xperia XA we saw back at MWC this year.
Beyond that, details Sony provided are very thin on the ground. The handset is described as being mid-range, so we're presuming that the huge screen doesn't have a huge resolution to match, Full HD would be nice, though it's possible it matches the regular Sony Xperia XA's 1,280x720 resolution - we hope not, though. It will also have the edge-to-edge screen that we got so excited about back at MWC.
The chipset will likely be the same as that in the Xperia XA, after all there must be some common factors between the two handsets. Sony is using a quad-core MediaTek MT6755 chipset there, the same chipset we saw in the Xperia M5 , which got pretty middling scores in our benchmarks. It's not a big problem, just don't expect the fastest Android experience possible. The main camera also sounds impressive, with a 21.5-megapixel resolution.
The Sony Xperia XA Ultra is coming in July in three different colours and will be available from Carphone Warehouse, among others. We'll bring you a full review as soon as we can get our hands on it.
