Today, Sony has officially announced that its latest flagship Android smartphone, the Xperia Z1, will be available to purchase on China’s largest nationwide operator, China Mobile, before the end of the month. sporting some pretty major design differences when compared to its International counterpart, however, it still packs much the same beefy internals apart from the built-in storage which is 32GB as opposed to 16GB on the global version.

The China Mobile Z1 variant features a stunning 5-inch Triluminos display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 powered by Sony’s X-Reality engine, a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, the latest Adreno 330 GPU, 32GB of internal storage (expandable up to 64GB via microSD), a very impressive 20.7-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus, a fairly mediocre 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 3,000 mAh non-removable Li-Ion battery.

However, things start to get a little interesting when we look at the design of the China Mobile Xperia Z1, which carries the model number L39t more closely. The frame that’s in place around the outside of the handset is reportedly plastic like the Xperia Z and Z Ultra, not the very appealing metal frame that’s found on the International version.

Furthermore, the position of the headphone jack is bit more centralized, and the noise-canceling speaker can now be found behind a small hole in the centre of the reinforced glass back.

The handset will ship running the latest build of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean skinned with Sony’s Xperia custom user interface, but the device is expected to receive the 4.3 update in the not-too-distant future.

The China Mobile Z1 will retail for 4,499 yuan ($724) in both black and purple colorways, and will be available to purchase sometime before the end of this month. Sadly, no official launch date has been specified.

• SourceXperiaBlog