Mobile phone manufacturers are really having a tough time of secret-keeping at the moment. LG has itself either announced, or leaked a huge amount about the G4 and Samsung really struggled to keep the lid on the S6 and S6 Edge earlier in the year. Now it's Sony's turn though, and the Xperia Z4 has been announced in on the Japanese Sony Mobile site.

The phone is a bit predictable, and some might argue somewhat disappointing. But Sony has strengths that it plays to well with its Z Series phones, and while they don't enjoy the hype of Samsung or Apple, they are great devices that have a lot of good features. And that continues with the Z4, in particular waterproofing, which CNET reports now allows the phone to stay submerged for an "indefinite" period of time - the Z3 was certified for 30 minutes at 1m.

The power comes from an octacore processor with four cores running at 1.5GHz and four at 2GHZ - this is now a common configuration for the current crop of high-end phones, like the S6 and LG G4. The phones other functions, like 4G radios and Wi-Fi are provided by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 with 3GB of RAM. There is also 32GB of storage onboard too.

The disappointments are really about the camera, which remains at 20.7-megapixels. In fairness to Sony though, that is just about the highest pixel count for any camera on a phone these days. Sony has always brought some great image results though, so this isn't a huge worry. The screen also stays at 1080x1920, which is quite low resolution these days. Again though, while it's not a world-leading spec, Sony does understand that increasing the resolution of phone screens doesn't add all that much of value.

So, in conclusion, the Sony Xperia Z4 is a looking to be very capable indeed. It might not be the world's most interesting phone, but the waterproofing makes it a one-off, and enormously flexible if you have an active lifestyle. The real changes are likely to be around things that we can't yet see - like the user interface, and camera software updates.

The phone will launch in the summer over in Japan, but there's no news about when it will arrive in Europe. It's likely to be a similar time though.

Via: AnandTech