Sony has been really quiet in the Malaysian smartphone market, but it just confirmed the availability of its mid-range device on our shores, the Xperia 10 II. Featuring a tall 6-inch OLED screen with a tall 21:9 aspect ratio and an IP65 / IP68 rating, it’s quite an interesting mid-range smartphone.

That’s right, unlike most mid-rangers in the market, the Xperia 10 II – pronounced as the Xperia 10 Mark II – actually has dust and water resistance. It’s a feature that’s only typically found in flagship smartphones, so it’s nice that you don’t have to worry about water damage with this device.

Besides that, the Xperia 10 II also comes with a rather unique 6-inch 1080p OLED screen with a 21:9 aspect ratio. Smartphones don’t typically come with such a tall display, which certainly gives the phone an unconventional look. Then again, it does mean the phone is narrower than other devices, making it easier to use with only one hand.

Given that the Xperia 10 II features an OLED screen, you will get vibrant, punchy colours with this display, along with good viewing angles. More importantly, OLED panels can produce true, deep blacks as well, which makes content consumption that much more enjoyable. You can even enable dark mode to improve battery life – OLED panels don’t consume as much power when displaying blacks.

Speaking of which, the Xperia 10 II has a 3,600mAh battery with support for 18W fast charging. It’s not an awfully large capacity, but for a phone this size, it’s certainly big enough. We reckon it will be able to return reasonably good battery life on a single charge.

In the camera department, the Xperia 10 II features a pretty good triple camera system. It’s made up of a 12MP primary sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide angle shooter, and another 8MP telephoto lens that can do 2x optical zoom. It’s a versatile camera array with three different focal lengths, which isn’t something many mid-range smartphones offer.

Other specifications of the Xperia 10 II include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 chipset paired with 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD card slot, an 8MP front-facing camera, a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as Android 10 out of the box.

The Sony Xperia 10 II will be available for purchase in Malaysia sometime in July 2020. It’s quite some time away, but Sony Malaysia did reveal that the phone will retail at RM1,799 once it arrives here. That’s quite a steep price tag for a mid-range phone with a Snapdragon 665 chip, but you do get a number of other neat features.