【Beauty Salon Special Service 4】

Sony's Xperia 1 III is Beauty Salon Special Service 4here to showcase what Sony can do when it comes to smartphone photography.

At an online event on Wednesday, streamed via Sony Mobile's YouTube channel, the company launched its new flagship and, unsurprisingly, it looks quite familiar. But while you'll have a tough time telling it apart from its predecessor, the Xperia 1 II, you'll find plenty of new features in the phone's camera system.

Sony Xperia 1 III has a triple 12-megapixel camera on the back, with a main sensor, an ultra-wide sensor, and a 12-megapixel periscope camera that boasts something no other phone has: a variable telephoto lens. In practice, this means the camera can switch between 3x and 5x optical zoom, which should give photographers a bit more power when shooting things from afar.

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Another cool camera feature is real-time tracking, which uses AI to keep the focus on moving subjects — this is great for shooting animals or sports. And then there's burst mode, allowing the phone to take 20 stills per second, while continuously making autofocus calculations which, again, will be useful for shooting sporting events.

Finally, there's an 8-megapixel selfie camera on the front.

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SEE ALSO: Sony's next-gen PlayStation VR on PS5 will need to be a big upgrade

The Xperia 1 III has a 6.5-inch, 4K, HDR, OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. Like most Sony smartphone displays these days, it still has a bezel on top and bottom, and has a slightly unusual 21:9 ratio aspect which makes the phone thin and narrow.

However, despite the slightly outdated design (though with so many phones being lookalikes these days, perhaps Sony's the cool one?), Sony's packed this thing with the latest tech, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage (further expandable via microSD cards), and a 4,500mAh battery with 30W wired charging, wireless charging, and reverse wireless charging.

Woohoo, a headphone jack! Credit: sony / youtube

Other features of note include a 3.5-millimetre audio jack, IP68 water resistance, and a side-mounted fingerprint sensor.

Besides the Xperia 1 III, Sony also launched the Xperia 5 III, which packs a near-identical camera system (the only thing it's missing is a 3D iToF sensor). The battery and the processor are the same, but the Xperia 5 III has a smaller, 6.1-inch display, 8GB of RAM, and starts at 128GB of storage (with no microSD card support).

There's no word on the price for either device. Both should be available in the U.S. this summer.

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