Sony recently announced Xperia Z3+ ( international variant) which will be available to global users from June on wards. The same flagship was released in UK today and the pre-orders were already up. Last month Sony released this flagship with the next iteration name-Xperia Z4 in Japan rather than Xperia Z3+

So, why there’s another name for the same flagship ? Does Sony trying to follow the Apple strategy ? well, Sony made a statement with “The Inquirer” regarding this issue. Here’s the official statement taken from the source.

“The main reason for the name difference here (UK) is down to Sony being such a dominant force in the Japanese market [where] consumers crave flagship devices with the latest features as soon as they can be delivered. Xperia Z3 continues to perform well as our flagship device across the rest of the world. To address those customers that would like to have the very latest features and refinements, we have introduced Xperia Z3+ as a premium addition to our existing flagship Z3 series.”

Before getting into conclusion, let’s see what are the upgrades comparing to Xperia Z3. Well, there’s a new snapdragon 810 chipset, flapless USB port and it’s location shifted to bottom, faster LTE support,dual SIM capability,32GB on-board storage and less weight comparing to the Xperia Z3. These are just little upgrades for Xperia Z3, so Sony made a right decision in calling the new flagship as Xperia Z3+ rather than Xperia Z4 for international market.

As already mentioned in the statement, Sony has good market share in Japan and the users quickly acquire the new flagship devices as soon as they are launched, so its better to call the new flagship from Sony as Xperia Z4 while for the rest of world it is treated as Xperia Z3+. Before the MWC, the rumors suggested that Sony is trying to come up with a new build, design and a complete new smartphone but they were false rumors and the name Xperia Z4 for the new flagship won’t fit as there wasn’t much change in the specifications, design and hardware.Even from past few years, the design and build wasn’t changing but Sony keeps on releasing the smartphones with iterations. As per Xperiablog, the next iteration (coming in IFA 2015) won’t be named as Xperia Z4 ( for international market) , it may be named as Xperia Z5 which might have new build.