Those who have been observing Sony over the past year and a half would have been puzzled about why the company is not doing better in the mobile phone market. It is not as if they have not come out with some very good devices — the Xperia Ion and Xperia SL were both good phones at the high end, while the Xperia Tipo showed that Sony could still make a phone for the masses. And yet, it has been a rough ride for the company, with its models getting criticised often for not being the spec and hardware beasts that were being served up by the competition.

The Xperia Z will certainly lay to rest complaints about Sony’s hardware not being on par with the competition (read Samsung, HTC and LG). It sees Sony join the quad core processor bandwagon, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.5 GHz processor, a brilliant 5-inch full HD (1980 x 1020) display, 2 GB RAM, 16GB of onboard storage which can be expanded, and a 13.0-megapixel camera. And running it is Android 4.1.2. All this in a frame that might not exactly turn heads, but has a lot going for it. And not just because it is waterproof (as long as you keep the ports shut). The design is smart, rather than spectacular, and is a definite step away from Sony’s standard Xperia look. It is encased in glass on both the front and back — scratch-resistant, we may add — and at 7.9mm, is really thin for a device with this big a display. Yes, we have a sneaky feeling that some of the panels covering the ports and slots on the slides will fall off, but until they don’t, the Xperia Z exudes slab-like solidity, especially with the metallic power button and volume rocker on the right.