Electronics manufacturer Hisense has been making waves in South Africa of late by not only bringing in some budget smartphone goodness, but also bringing real jobs to the Western Cape town of Atlantis. Today the news from Hisense is that the company’s latest flagship smartphone, the Hisense Infinity MAXE X1,  is now available in South Africa.

At 6.8 inches the display in the Hisense Infinity MAXE X1 is much closer to a phablet than a smartphone, even managing to eclipse Sony’s gargantuan Xperia Z Ultra with it’s 6.4 inch display. Speaking of Sony’s beast, the MAXE X1 matches the Xperia Z Ultra’s specs with a quad core 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage. It even runs on the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, KitKat.

The MAXE X1 manages to outdo the Sony on two crucial fronts: imaging, with a 13 megapixel main camera and a 5 megapixel front camera, and battery with its almost comically-large 3 900mAh battery pack.

Hisense may have also eliminated the looks you’ll get holding the slab of a phone up to your head during calls: they’ve included a Bluetooth accessory that looks like an old-school feature phone that you can use to make calls and send texts through the MAXE X1 while it lies comfortably in your bag.

The Hisense Infinity MAXE X1 is already available from Kalahari.com – where it is currently sold out – and will be available from Takealot.com for a wallet-friendly R4 999 within the next week.

We’re in the process of getting one in to review and will let you know our thoughts as soon as we’ve spent some time with it.