The Xperia Z is not just another 5-inch smartphone as Sony would like us to believe. Sony CEO Kuni Suzuki defines its new baby as the new super phone packed for TV, imaging, film, music, and gaming.

This new Android handset will serve as a small window to showcase the vaunted Sony content built through decades of great success and disappointments, the latter hobbling the Japanese firm in the past few years. The Japanese firm might be on track for redemption.

"With Xperia Z, we are bringing over half a century of innovation in TV, imaging, music, film and gaming to create a superphone experience that truly stands out," Sony Mobile Communications chief executive Kuni Suzuki told ITWire.com in an interview.

This new-found bravado is based on Sony's conviction that given the appropriate and interesting gadget, a field that the company seems out of sync lately, global consumers would start retuning their attention to everything about Sony. Maybe, relive too the glory heydays that the company saw in the 1980s.

The new Xperia Z, according to TechCrunch, appears focused on convincing consumers that Sony's own ecosystem is exciting by itself. The mobile phone is touted as the reincarnation of the glorious Walkman - not a gadget anymore but reconfigured by Sony as a music service that offers over 80 million tracks for download or streaming.

Of course, games, movies and social networking activities are also within the radar of Sony engineers right at the start of developing the Xperia Z, which TechCrunch said was previewed in early January as Yuga.

Unabashedly, Sony is following the business model that propelled Apple to the top of technology food chain. "We intend to offer a unified experience across multiple Sony products. This is about providing a consistent Sony entertainment experience across multiple devices," Xperia Marketing chief Calum MacDougall told TechCrunch.

It took some time for Sony to figure out how to tackle the iPhone onslaught but this time around, the company believes it has the hardware to measure up with the Apple smartphone.

The Xperia Z is a multimedia delight, brandishing a pixel density display of 443ppi, thanks to its Reality Display technology that obviously is the right fit to the Mobile Bravia Engine 2, responsible for the gadget's HD video rendering that is optimised for a 16:9 aspect ratio viewing.

Beneath its fibreglass unibody is a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, teaming up with a 2GB of RAM to ensure that the Android JellyBean 4.1 on top of the Xperia Z is functioning with all the snap and breeze. By the way, Sony promises that shortly after the device's March 2013 launch, it will have the latest JellyBean flavour and probably chew in Google's Key Lime Pie later in the year.

Based on first take appraisal published by Wired, the Xperia Z is a breakthrough phone in terms of bringing HRD move for video capturing via its Exmore RS-powered 13MP camera sensor, likely exceeding the PureView camera technology made popular by Nokia on it Lumia phone series.

Taking images and video clips underwater is possible with the water-proofed Xperia Z, but Engadget reminds that users should not stretch the phone's water immersion prowess beyond depths of one metre and no longer than 30 minutes.

Out of the box, Sony's new smartphone is equipped with 16GB of maximum internal storage with expansion option of up to 32GB. Operation time is expected to last much longer than the competition, thanks to the Xperia Z's Battery Stamina mode, which automatically shuts down "battery-draining apps whenever the screen is off and starting them up again when the screen is back on."

The handset, Sony hints, will begin rolling out sometime in March this year but tech watchers are expecting that more details about the Xperia Z will filter out via the Mobile World Congress that is set to show off more gadgets to grace the 2013 in Barcelona on late February.