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Sony’s first bezel-less flagship that’s been heavily rumored about in recent months had the majority of its specs leaked earlier this week, having been identified as bearing the model number H8541. The “H” in its name suggests that the device is part of Sony’s 2018 mobile lineup, much like all of the company‘s 2017 smartphones had model numbers starting with the letter “G.” According to the leaked spec sheet that originally emerged on Reddit yesterday, the Sony H8541 will be equipped with a 5.7-inch Triluminos Display and feature support for Sony’s X-Reality engine, with the screen itself having a 4K resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio. This particular characteristic adds more credence to recent reports that Sony’s upcoming “Mirai” design philosophy won’t follow the latest industry trend that advocates for the adoption of 18:9 (2:1) display panels.
The unannounced flagship is 149 x 74 x 7.5mm in size, thus being shorter, narrower, and thinner than the Xperia XZ Premium (156 x 77 x 7.9mm) which features a 5.46-inch screen, according to the same source. As Sony’s 2017 flagship also has massive bezels, the newly uncovered specs sheet implies that the H8541 will be a largely bezel-free offering since it offers more screen real estate in a smaller form factor. The high-resolution display of the unannounced handset is listed as being protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5, the same one used by the Xperia XZ Premium. Both single-SIM and dual-SIM variants of the Android flagship are mentioned by the leak, with the phone itself supposedly featuring 4GB of RAM and 64GB of UFS 2.1 memory, though no microSD card slot references are found in the revealed document. Bluetooth 5.0 support will supposedly be part of the package, together with a USB Type-C 3.1 port and a lightly reskinned build of Android 8.0 Oreo.
The Sony H8541 will supposedly sport a 3,420mAh battery that presumably won’t be removable and will be compatible with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 technology. Finally, the handset is listed as having the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm’s 2017 SoC. While launching an Android flagship packing a last year’s SoC wouldn’t be an unprecedented move in the industry, it would go against Sony’s historical product practices. Still, with the company revealing the Xperia XZ Premium this February and boasting about its latest chip, then having to wait four months before it finally got its hands on enough Snapdragon 835 stock to actually start mass-producing the device, it may have decided against repeating such approach next year in order to get its new high-end handset to the market sooner after its reveal.
LG used a similar strategy in early 2017 by releasing the G6 with the Snapdragon 821 instead of the Snapdragon 835 which allowed it to commercialize its phone by March while Samsung was still buying all of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 stock for the Galaxy S8 series. The world’s largest smartphone maker is now once again said to have pre-ordered all of the initial batches of the Snapdragon 845 for the Galaxy S9 lineup, leaving other manufacturers to either wait with releasing their 2018 flagships later in 2018 or equip them with older silicon in order to have them commercially available by early spring. The Sony H8541 is expected to be announced in the run-up to Mobile World Congress 2018 which is starting on February 26th.
