Verizon has a bad habit of taking the best phones from Sony’s Xperia line and making them into weirder, less-lovable siblings. And earlier this week, it did it again: it announced the Xperia Z4v, a custom version of the Xperia Z4 that, at first glance, seems to change the device for the worse by making it thicker and less stylish. I was hoping that the story would be different in person, but it’s about what you’d expect.
While Verizon’s publicity photos of the Z4v make it look like a soft and friendly take on the Z4, it’s not actually like that. It’s basically just a thicker Z4 that looks a bit rougher for the changes — you might think of it as a hybrid with the Z2, or like a poorly made mockup of a huge iPhone 4.
