It's actually one of several Xperia X phones Sony's launching this year, as there's also the mid-range Xperia XA, the huge, Xperia XA Ultra selfie phone, and the Xperia X Performance - an even more high-end version of the X that sadly isn't confirmed for the UK at present.
In a way, it's strange that the Xperia X has top billing, as it's the Xperia XA which has Sony's gorgeous edge-to-edge display.
This makes the X's cheaper sibling the more desirable-looking handset out of the two, and it leaves the X feeling rather dull by comparison.
That's not to say it doesn't have its own sense of style, as its curved, rounded corners feel great against your palm and the metal (not glass) back provides plenty of grip.
It's just very familiar, and very safe, for a flagship Sony phone, and at a distance (ignoring the rather icky Lime Gold colour on my review unit) you could almost mistake it for the Xperia Z5.
It even has the Z5's side-facing fingerprint sensor built into the home button. It's rather narrow compared to your typical fingerprint-sensor, but it's exceedingly fast, and far more convenient than other sensors I've tested that have been incorporated into the home button.
As the Xperia X has NFC built into it as well, you'll be able to use this with Android Pay, which has finally launched in the UK to let you to make con-tactless payments with your phone much like current iPhone users.
About Display
In fact, the Xperia X has far more in common with the Z5 than just its initial looks. Yet again, Sony's decided to give it a 5in, 1,920x1,080 resolution display rather than join the rest of its competitors with a 2,560 x 1,440 panel.
Admittedly, those extra pixels make little difference to the overall sharpness of the display, and the sheer quality of the screen more than makes up for any shortfall in specification.
The display looks utterly fantastic, delivering almost AMOLED levels of depth and richness without appearing over-saturated. Likewise, the contrast ratio ensures that highlights and low-lights have plenty of visible detailing and shadow gradation.
It's also exceptionally bright. This not only makes it extremely easy to use outside, but it also makes images pop out of the screen.
About Battery life
Of course, having the screen constantly set to maximum brightness won't exactly do the phone's battery many favours, but much like the Xperia Z5 and Z5 Compact, the Xperia X packs a surprising amount of usage into its relatively small battery.
With just 2,620mAh at its disposal, the Xperia Z lasted an impressive 12h 04m in our continuous video playback test. This puts it ahead of both the Z5 and LG G5, each of which had larger 2,900mAh and 3,000mAh batteries respectively.
You'll be able to squeeze even more juice out of the Xperia X by enabling one of Sony's energy-saving modes, too, although this will also limit some of the phone's functionality in the process, such as GPS-tracking, haptic feedback and background data syncing.
Still, twelve hours is pretty good going for heavy media usage, so you should always get a full day's use out of it before putting it back on charge.
About Performance
Another slightly odd decision Sony's made for the Xperia X is to go with a hexa-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor instead of the more powerful Snapdragon 820 that powers its rivals.
The X still has 3GB of RAM, but it naturally fell quite a long way behind rivals like the HTC 10 and LG G5 in our benchmark tests.
In all fairness, though, the Xperia X still feels exceedingly fast, and its Geekbench 3 scores actually put it on par with the Xperia Z5, which had a Snapdragon 810 chip.
This is no doubt partly down to Sony's redesigned Android 6.0.1 interface, which was always one of the most streamlined and slickest versions of Android around. Here, it feels even faster, as menu animations were silky smooth and menu settings opened almost instantaneously.
It became a little jerky when browsing the web, particularly on media-heavy pages, but scrolling was smooth once it had fully loaded. Otherwise, it handled images and adverts reasonably well, and simpler, text-heavy articles were absolutely fine.
The Xperia X is also a pretty capable gaming machine. It's perfectly able to play games like Hearthstone, and Sony's PS4 Remote Play feature is particularly good news for PS4 owners as well, as it means you can use your phone as a portable display when you want to stream your games around the house.
About Storage Capacity
The Xperia X comes with 32GB of storage as standard, but there's a microSD card slot hidden away underneath a slot on the side in the SIM card tray, so you'll be able to expand it by up to 200GB if you have the requisite card.
About Camera
You might need more storage if you plan on taking lots of pictures, as the Xperia X's 23-megapixel sensor can produce some pretty large images.
However, I wasn't overly impressed with the quality of the photos I took, as the final images looked far too sharp and over-processed.
Admittedly, our outdoor lighting conditions weren't great, but there was an awful lot of noise and visible artifacts when viewed at its full resolution, which rather spoiled the rest of the shot.
Its colours and exposure judgement was pretty good, but it lost so much fine detail that smaller objects were practically reduced to a single block of colour.
Indoors wasn't much better, as even in bright lighting conditions the over-sharpening continued.
Colours had plenty of punch, but there was a lot of noise and some very smeary-looking textures, putting the camera as a whole dead-last compared to the LG G5 ,Samsung Galaxy S7 and HTC 10 .
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