Your Galaxy Phone

Sony's smartphone relationship with the US is a tumultuous one, but it looks like the company is going to give the states another shot after all. Last year's Sony Z5 will finally be arriving at a steep $600, but the more exciting of the two is the $500 Z5 Compact, a small 4.6-inch smartphone with the guts of a top-tier flagship.

Originally announced at the IFA conference in September, the Sony Z5 and Z5 Compact are updates to Sony's usual glass slab-designed smartphones. The first one is a more traditionally spec'd and sized phone with a Snapdragon 810 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 5.2-inch screen.

The Z5 Compact on the other hand is something else entirely, a smartphone with a smaller 4.6-inch footprint but still housing some impressive guts, including the same Snapdragon chip as its bigger brother. We called the old Z3 Compact "Android's Best Kept Secret
," and we're excited to see it's coming to the States.

The critical piece of information missing from this news is whether Sony plans to bring its 4K superphone, the Z5 Premium, to the US. I'm still not convinced cramming a 4K display into a handset is worth the battery tradeoffs (yet), but it's certainly an intriguing idea. Sony's phones have a rocky history in the US, so a stand-out feature like a pixel-dense display could help them catch on. For now, all we know is that the more basic models will hit stores February 7th.

Contact the author at darren.orf@gizmodo.com.
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