Sony’s Xperia Z3+ and Z4 have been in the news lately, but not in a good way. Rather than announcing the new Z4, which has already been released in Japan, proudly to the world as an upgrade to the Xperia Z3, Sony took their time about it and finally announced that the device would be called the Xperia Z4 in Japan, but for the rest of the world, it would be called the Xperia Z3+. Sony’s explanation for doing this: “The main reason for the name difference here is down to Sony being such a dominant force in the Japanese market [where] consumers crave flagship devices with the latest features as soon as they can be delivered. Xperia Z3 continues to perform well as our flagship device across the rest of the world. To address those customers that would like to have the very latest features and refinements, we have introduced Xperia Z3+ as a premium addition to our existing flagship Z3 series.” So, in other words, the rest of the world does not “crave flagship devices with the latest features as soon as they can be delivered?”
What is interesting to note is that there was more of an upgrade from the Xperia Z3 to Xperia Z3+ than there was from the Xperia Z2 to the Xperia Z3, yet they chose a ‘+’ rather than a jump from ‘3’ to ‘4’ for its new moniker. The Xperia Z3+ kept the same 5.2-inch FHD display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and 424 pixels-per-inch (PPI), although improvements were made in the display itself. Sony also did some minor cosmetic work on the outside edges, but the real news was the jump to the 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor with 3GB of RAM, which should substantially increase its performance.
The most recent benchmarks of the ‘new’ Xperia Z3+, however, are not very impressive, perhaps because of the adjustments in core speeds made by Qualcomm to keep the temperature readings down, although according to our source, they still reached 40.2º C or 104.36º F during testing, which is a little on the warm side. The tests results yielded an AnTuTu score of just under 51,000 – much better than the Xperia Z3 it replaced and just about on par with the Snapdragon 808 in the LG G4, but well under the 69,042 figure of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge and the 58,382 on the Galaxy S6. The Vellamo Metal test yielded only 1447, even lower than the Xperia Z3 at 1571, but not even close to the 2731 of the Nexus 6, the 2369 of the LG G4 or the 2616 of the Galaxy S6 Edge. The Vellamo Browser test also had mediocre results with a score of 3435, compared to the 3948 of the LG G4 and the 5745 of the Galaxy S6 Edge.