Sony Xperia 1
Don’t be blinded by the 21:9 screen: you’ll find a wealth of interesting features if you dig a little deeper
SCORE ★★★★☆ PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/299sony
If there’s one thing to take away from this year’s phone launches, it’s that smartphone displays are always changing. With flexiblescreened phones cresting the horizon and Samsung paying particular attention to HDR 10+ panels, manufacturers are focusing on innovative display technologies to stand out from the crowd.
Sony’s Xperia 1 continues this trend but its USP is a 21:9 aspect ratio display. That results in a very tall phone that will peep out from the top of most pockets, and it can make the phone awkward to use at first.
For example, accessing the phone’s notification tray by dragging your thumb from the top of the screen is usually easy, but it’s a stretch with the Xperia 1. It’s only a one-handed task if you call in Sony’s excellent Side Sense feature: this lets you access a special app tray when double-tapping a specific spot on either the left or right-hand edge of the screen.
Side Sense also adopts Sony’s “Xperia Intelligence Engine”, which uses AI to improve app suggestions based on location and time of day. It works well, too. Plus, it allows you to access the phone’s Wi-Fi, auto-rotate and toggle Flight mode on and off.
Why the long face?
So why include such a bizarre aspect ratio? Well, movies are generally recorded natively in 21:9 format, so Sony says its screen allows you to stream films exactly as their creators intended. In fact, 69% of Netflix content is already available in 21:9, making the Xperia 1 a solid choice for the morning commute. Certain games also support 21:9.
As for the screen’s technical specifications, the 6.5in OLED display is a 4K (3,840 x 1,644) HDR unit and benefits from Sony’s Bravia X1 enhancement technology, which is capable of upconverting SDR (standard dynamic range) movies to “near HDR”. This works with all types of footage, from home movies to YouTube videos.
Investigating further with our screen calibrator, we found that the Xperia 1’s display delivered a practically perfect 96.2% of the DCI-P3 gamut, with a total recorded volume of 97.7% in the phone’s Standard display setting. Colours looked accurate across the entire palette, with only a few exceptions of oversaturation in dark grey tones.
You can also enable “video image enhancement”, which supposedly improves video quality with sharper and clearer-looking footage. In reality, I found it just dialled up the saturation; fine if you prefer a more vivid image, not great if you’re after realistic pictures.
This is a high-quality screen in just about every area. The resolution translates to a dot pitch of 643ppi, and everything – including text, images and video– looks pin-sharp as a result. A perfect contrast ratio helps boost readability in all sorts of lighting conditions, while the polarised coating reduces sun glare, too.
Finally, hidden in the phone’s settings menus is a toggle to switch on the screen’s “Creator mode” colour profile. This targets the BT.2020 colour gamut, commonly referred to as Rec. 2020, which defines the colour space in many forms of 4K, HDR content.
Weirdly, despite the impressive CineAlta certification, HDR didn’t look quite as impressive as I’d hoped, with some scenes in the Netflix TV show Marco
Polo looking too dark. It’s a decent first effort at introducing the BT.2020 colour profile to smartphone displays, but improvements must be made before it becomes mainstream.
Let’s get physical
Away from the 21:9 ratio, the Xperia 1 matches other flagships. The screen stretches to the edge on the left, right and bottom edges, although there is an asymmetrical forehead bezel that sits above the display; this incorporates the Xperia 1’s 8-megapixel selfie camera and earpiece speaker. It’s also IP68 dust and water resistant, with the body sandwiched between protective layers of Gorilla Glass 6.
This isn’t a purely practical measure– it also helps make the Xperia 1 Sony’s best-looking phone to date. You can pick it up in a variety of colours, including black, purple, white and grey, and each shimmers when light bounces off the rear of the phone. Sony’s harsh-edged sides remain in purgatory, too, with the Xperia 1 equipped with curved edges to ensure the phone sits comfortably in the hand, despite its large size. The right edge includes the phone’s volume rocker, power button and dedicated camera shutter key, along with the fingerprint sensor for secure unlocking. I much prefer this side-mounted approach over the new trend of awkwardly placed – and often unreliable – in-display sensors. But I have bad news if you like a fingersfree approach, because the phone can’t be unlocked using facial recognition.
The microSD and nano-SIM tray can be accessed from the top edge, and you’ll spot a USB-C port and solitary speaker grille if you cast your eyes towards the bottom of the phone. There’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’ll either have to make do with the supplied audio dongle or invest in a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
“A perfect contrast ratio helps boost readability in all sorts of lighting conditions, while the polarised coating reduces sun glare”
Power on
Sony, like so many of its rivals, powers its flagship phone with Qualcomm’s most up-to-date mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 855. It doesn’t go overboard with RAM, supplying 6GB, but that’s ample for multitasking. The phone also packs 128GB of built-in storage, which can be expanded up to a further 512GB via microSD.
Performance is every bit as rapid as you would expect from a smartphone in this class. In the Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, the Xperia 1 achieved a single-core score of 3,538 and a multi-core score of 11,325. In realworld terms, this means the Xperia 1 is ludicrously quick and will easily launch, run and switch between even the heaviest applications.
Likewise, you shouldn’t encounter any problems when it comes to gaming. Despite the demanding 4K screen, the Xperia 1 still managed to reach a practically perfect average frame rate of 60fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen test, and even managed a respectable 33fps in the GPU-straining Car Chase benchmark.
Sadly, things begin to fall apart when it comes to its stamina. That fancy 4K resolution display, as nice as it is, drains the Xperia 1’s 3,330mAh capacity battery, which only managed 12hrs 29mins in our video-rundown test. That’s not abysmal, but you’ll be topping up the Xperia 1 more often than rival phones.
Triple camera
On the back of the Xperia 1, you’ll find a vertically aligned triple camera arrangement, which incorporates a collection of three 12-megapixel camera units. One is a standard RGB lens with a wide aperture of f/1.6, while the other two are wide-angle and 2x telephoto zoom sensors.
These specs may not sound special, but the Xperia 1’s co-development with Sony’s Alpha camera team brings welcome upgrades. There’s more advanced RAW noise reduction, along with 10fps burst shooting. It’s also the first phone to introduce eye autofocus tracking.
The interface is simple to use, allowing you to switch between the cameras and tweak shooting settings with a couple of taps. The scene recognition also does a good job, successfully identifying whether you’re taking pictures of, say, scenery or food, then adjusting the camera settings accordingly.
In our test shots, the Xperia 1 was capable of capturing more fine details from our reference scene than Apple’s iPhone Xs. The phone’s default auto HDR shooting mode also did an excellent job of lifting shadowy areas of the image, while automatic exposure levels were perfect. The 2x telephoto zoom and wide-angle sensors enhance the experience, too, effectively allowing you to zoom right into the scene and squeeze more into the frame.
As for video, Sony has incorporated some of its CineAlta post-processing techniques into a preinstalled Cinema Pro camera app. This means that editing and recording footage is more straightforward than ever, allowing you to apply themes depending on the footage you’ve captured, as well as cinema-grade colour profiles.
The resolution and frame rate options are limited, though. 4K resolution recording is restricted to 30fps, and you can’t enable HDR at 4K or 1080p 60fps. And, while the image quality is superb, footage suffers from a juddering effect when panning across a scene, which I suspect has something to do with the image stabilisation. I hope it can be fixed in future updates.
The 1 and only?
Despite a few issues, the Xperia 1 does an excellent job of bolstering Sony’s smartphone reputation. After a troubling couple of years, there’s enough innovative tech on offer here for the Xperia 1 to stand out from the flagship crowd.
The question is whether it does enough to justify that high price. Here, it’s jostling with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and Huawei P30 Pro. Like both of those, the Xperia 1 is a highend phone that’s filled to the brim with positives. The 21:9 OLED screen is a joy to stare at, the camera brings unique advantages, and performance is up there with the best. Weak battery life and video stabilisation wobbles hold it back, but the Xperia 1 remains a superb phone.
SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.84GHz/2.42GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 6GB RAM Adreno 640 graphics 6.5in OLED screen, 1,644 x 3,840 resolution 128GB storage dual SIM microSD slot triple 12MP/12MP/ 12MP rear camera 8MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 3,330mAh battery Android 9 72 x 8.2 x 167mm (WDH) 180g 1yr warranty