The past several Sony smartphones have ended up being outed ahead of their official announcements thanks to their inability stay away from the rumor mill, and it looks like the upcoming Xperia Z1s is no different. Just a couple of days after popping up on Sony's own global website, the miniaturized version of the Sony Xperia Z1 has now posed for a handful of "in the wild" photos.

Posted to Russian site Mobiltelefon, the images show a device that looks fairly similar to the Sony Xperia Z1, just smaller. Shocker, I know. The photos show that the Xperia Z1s features the Omnibalance design that Sony has used in its past several Xperia releases, complete with a rounded power button, physical camera key and a large speaker on the bottom of the unit. Some screenshots that allegedly came from this Xperia Z1s show that its model number is D5503 and that the device is currently running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean.

The Sony Xperia Z1s is expected to be the international version of the Xperia Z1 f, which was introduced by Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo in October. That means that the Z1s could come to market with a 4.3-inch 720p display, 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage and a 20.7-megapixel rear camera. If that is the case, the Xperia Z1s could be a nice option for consumers that are in the market for a handset that bucks the "small phone = low-end specs" trend that we've seen quite a bit of recently. Stay tuned.

Via XperiaBlog, Mobiltelefon