Sony Xperia XZ goes up for pre-order ahead of Oct. 2 release

Earlier this week Sony revealed that its Xperia XZ and Xperia X Compact were incoming. With the Xperia X Compact just a few hours from its Sep. 25 roll-out, the Xperia XZ is now up for pre-order on Amazon.

The Sony Xperia XZ is the firm's latest flagship and as such, retains that very typical -- but agreeable -- Sony design and form factor. Under the hood, Sony has adorned the XZ with Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon 820 chipset with Adreno 530 graphics, 3 gigs of RAM and 32 GB of expandable storage. Keeping the Xperia XZ running is a 2900 mAh battery that, as you may have caught in our Sony Xperia XZ Review, takes almost three hours to charge from nought to full.

The Xperia XZ also gets a 5.2-inch FHD display coated with Gorilla Glass 4 and a 23-megapixel main camera with 5-axis video stabilization -- a first or a smartphone. For you selfie lovers, there's a 13-megapixel wide-angle lens on the front.

The device arrives equipped with Android Marshmallow out of the box, but as we heard a short while back, the new Android 7.0 Nougat update shouldn't be too far behind the release. Amazon has the device up for pre-order at $699.99 in the blue in silver color variants while the black configuration, mysteriously, is listed at $717.59. Presumably, the latter is a technical glitch rather than an intended price hike.