The pic you see above represents the Sony Xperia Z4 that will supposedly make an appearance in the next James Bond movie, Spectre. In the hack that involved Sony Pictures Entertainment and its CEO (Michael Lynton) and his emails, there is a talk between him and the Sony’s executive vice president of consumer marketing, George Leon, discussing things about Daniel Criag using the Z4 in Spectre. You know, the various fees and all that — it’s costing Sony cool $5mil to get Danial Criag hold the Z4 in his hands in the movie!

Anyway, the Z4 looks great for sure, and we certainly hope that the launch product really looks like what we are seeing. And it that’s the case, it looks like a fitting upgrade over Z3 to us.

We’ve already seen the Z4’s LCD touch digitizer, which apart from telling us that it would measure about the same size as Z3, also hints about the speakers used to be similar to Z2, which is a good thing.

The Z4 would line up against the Galaxy S6, LG G4 and HTC One M9, not to forget the already-out superbeast, Nexus 6 — a real benchmark for many releasing even 6 months later than it.

You can safely expect the Sony Xperia Z4 to launch with Android 5.0 Lollipop, but what will be more interesting is the upgrade that Sony’s custom UI will get. The stock Android 5.0 is the best UI ever we’ve seen on a mobile device, and it’s certainly given truckloads of design problems to OEMs who would now need to update/rethink their custom UIs over Android 5.0.

We think Sony would do good –it’s custom UI in Z3, Z2, etc. is far better than Samsung’s TouchWiz, is better than LG G3, and somewhat at par with HTC M8 (though very different). But it will be a challenging task and even a big factor for sure — if not a make or break deal — for Sony to redefine its custom UI on Android 5.0 design concepts for the Z4 and other Sony devices.

Simply put, in 2015, UI of a given device with given specs would look far better with stock Lollipop on it compared to Lollipop plus OEM custom UI.

With the design already looking good courtesy of the leak, the Z4 will be a phone to beat if Sony gets the custom UI alright. Z4 Specs are not a worry, as Sony’s flagships have indeed come up with dominating specifications over past few years.

Via XperiaBlog