Sony XA1

LOW PRICE, ULTRA-HIGH MEGAPIXEL COUNT.

SONY HAS ACED this phone’s design in a few respects. It looks and feels slick, with metal used in the right places. This is also one of the cheapest phones you’ll find with a camera that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a flagship a year or two ago. Inside, you get an ample 32GB of storage, and there’s also a microSD card slot (next to the nanoSIM) in the pull-out tray. Colour reproduction on the 720p screen is respectably rich and vivid, and the display is also super-bright with superb contrast. Max out the backlight and outdoors visibility is excellent. In Geekbench 4, the Sony Xperia XA1 scores a solid 3,628 points, around 200 less than the 3,824 score the Moto G5 Plus achieved in our tests. Don’t read too much into that, though. This phone is very much in the same league as the Moto G5. The XA1’s rear camera is among the very best at this price, using a 23MP sensor of 1/2.3-inch size, the same scale as some dedicated compact cameras, and produces images with great detail.