When Sony brought its Xperia Z5 Premium to IFA last year, our jaws dropped a bit as we heard the manufacturer describe the hardware: a 4K screen … on a smartphone? It sounded like the sort of spec that landed somewhere between genius and madness, but as we learned when reviewing the phone, this early stab at mobile 4K wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be. This year at MWC, Sony’s back with another P-word variant of its latest Android, only instead of Premium, the label of the day is Performance: will the Xperia X Performance live up to its promise, or will we be looking at another good idea whose implementation under-performs just a bit? We went hands-on with both phones to see how they measure up.

The Xperia X Performance is still something of an enigma; Sony may not be launching any new full-on Xperia Z-series phones at MWC 2016, but if any had a shot of successfully wearing that crown, the X Performance sure feels like it could be that hardware.

And certainly, with a Snapdragon 820 powering it, the Xperia X Performance should be a performance beast: its SoC is already superseding the Z5 Premium’s 810 in flagship lineups everywhere. But will its mere 1080p screen (and a smaller one at that) be a hindrance towards its adoption? Does the new curvier look diverge too strongly from Sony’s signature design language? Take a look below to see what we had to say:

Pocketnow’s MWC 2016 coverage is made possible by dbrand. For the most precise skins on earth, visit https://dbrand.com/mwc.