Sony “Honami” is rumored to be announced on the 4th this month, and as we get closers we’re seeing more image and spec leaks. This time, the new leaks come from a system dump that reveals the new UI and some camera specs.
The system dump is showing that the phone will come with a Qualcomm S800 processor (finally, Sony is ahead of the pack with processors, instead of being 6 months late as usual) and a 20 MP camera (5248 x 3936 max resolution), with the ability to take “4k videos”. The resolution is a little strange however. It’s a 2:1 ratio 4000×2000 resolution. The way “4k resolutions” are established now is either 3840×2160, which means a perfect 4x scale of the 1920×1080 “Full HD” resolution (the “retina” version of 1080p), or in some cases it’s 4000×2160, presumably to actually make it “4k”. But that’s a pretty weird resolution, and I think the former is just fine.
However, this one 4000×2000 is even weirder, because while the 4000×2160 one at least allows for the same 4x 1080p scaling, with some letterboxing, this one doesn’t, and it cuts off at 2000. That’s very strange. I wonder why Sony made this decision. Is it simply because the camera module couldn’t take any higher than that? Or is it the GPU? But in that case making it 3840×2160, would resolve to around the same number of pixels as 4000×2000. Is Sony trying to establish a new format for videos – the 2:1 ratio, that’s closer to the 21:9 for cinemas? Hopefully they can clarify this at their event.
The camera also includes up to 12800 ISO, which means it should be great for low-light performance. It also adds other camera features such as Bokeh, Info-eye, Manual, Socialcast, Timeshift and Effect mode.
It also comes with an Augmented Reality mode, that adds virtual objects on top of real pictures, in real time:
As you can see there are multiple AR options to choose from:
Sony seems to have overhauled the UI also. I think it looks quite nice, but I wonder how this will work for them when Google will most likely overhaul quite a bit of Android’s UI with the Android 5.0. It could mean it will take a lot of time for them to upgrade Honami and other devices to Android 5.0 later – unless they already know how it will look like, and their new UI accounts for some of that. You can see below at how their new UI looks like:
[Via XperiaBlog]