We’ve been waiting quite a while for Sony’s latest flagship, the Xperia Z2. What started out as just the D6503 later became the Sony Sirius, and then finally the Xperia Z2 last week at Mobile World Congress. While Sony’s newest flagship phone isn’t quite out to market yet, the fine folks over at XDA-Developers, and in particular a member named DooMLoRD, has been able to get ahold of the Xperia Z2 long enough to create a full system dump of its firmware. Said system dump is the newest version of Android, Android 4.4.2 KitKat, and of course runs Sony’s newest user interface that’s shipping with the Xperia Z2. It’s unconfirmed whether or not this is the final shipping firmware, it’s much newer than anything available on any other Xperia phone, and that’s really what we’re looking at here. When a firmware dump is made available like this ROM chefs and developers work their magic and attempt to port as much of the features from the newest device over to older devices that might not otherwise see the light of day with these features. While there’s no time frame for such a work-in-progress, know that those of you with Xperia Z1 phones will likely be reaping the benefits of this firmware dump long before Sony gets around to updating your device to KitKat.
What sorts of features are we talking about here? Well for one remember that the Xperia Z2 is upgraded over the Z1, as the name well implies, and runs a slightly newer Snapdragon 801 processor. While this means Xperia Z2 users are going to experience more speed in every day tasks, the Snapdragon 800 processor inside the Xperia Z1 is still top-notch, and is only a hair under the 801 in performance. While the change to the Snapdragon 801 brought about hardware HDR modes in the Galaxy S5, Sony didn’t mention such upgrades, meaning that the software from the Xperia Z2’s camera will likely be ported over since the Xperia Z2 also uses the same camera sensor as the Z1. This means you should be getting 4K video recording as the LG G2 did recently with the KitKat update and a hack from XDA-Developers. Other software updates include a refined user interface that came along with the KitKat update, and like some other manufacturers there’s no telling if Sony is planning on bringing that new UI over to other phones, but this firmware dump should help get that ported as well. Overall if you’re a person who loves to flash ROMs you should be getting some nice ones out of this in the near future, and some of these updates may just make their way over to other Sony Xperia phones as well, so long as the hardware is capable of course. Just looking to upgrade that phone of yours to one of the newer flagships instead? We’ve compared the Xperia Z2 with the Galaxy S5 here, and of course there’s HTC’s all new One coming out in the next month or so as well if these potential new ROMs don’t satiate your hunger.