Sony Xperia 1
SONY’S NEW MOVIE POWERHOUSE.
THE PHONE ISN’T ACTUALLY THAT MUCH LONGER THAN YOUR AVERAGE PLUS-SIZED HANDSET, IT’S JUST TRIMMED A FEW MILLIMETRES OF WIDTH. COMPARED TO SOME PHONES IT FEELS A LITTLE HEAVY, ALTHOUGH OTHER PLUS-SIZED DEVICES CAN BE UP TO 20G HEAVIER THAN THIS.
SONY’S INTENTION IN making phones with 21:9 screens is to make them the best handsets available for viewing movies, which are typically 21:9, unlike TV shows, YouTube videos and streaming platforms’ originals, which are all in various other dimensions. If you watch movies on the Xperia 1, as with the Xperia 10 series, you won’t get any black bars on the top or bottom.
Sony has made some improvements over the Xperia 10 range for the Xperia 1, which it claims makes it even better for viewing movies. These include Dynamic Vibration, which causes the handset to vibrate slightly when viewing media in order to replicate the effect of booming audio in a cinema, and Creator mode for the display, which slightly alters the RGB makeup of the screen to resemble the colors of a theater screen.
Sony claims 70% of content on Netflix is 21:9, which may be true, but that doesn’t mean 70% of viewed content on Netflix is in that aspect ratio – TV shows and Netflix Originals are much more popular for commutes or bedtime viewing, and these aren’t in 21:9, so in reality you might not get as much out of the aspect ratio as Sony hopes.
MAKING MOVIES
Perhaps you won’t be watching 21:9 content all the time, but Sony also wants to appeal to the crowd who’d be tempted to create such content it themselves, and so it’s equipped the Xperia 1 with high-end video recording features in the new Cinema Pro app.
You can record 21:9 content and alter key settings like resolution, frames per second, white balance, shutter speed, lens size and color filter – it’s based on the tech in Sony Alpha cameras, and with it you can capture footage that’s barely discernible from content shot on high-end cameras in terms of quality.
There is one problem though, which could ruin the film-making experience – the Sony Xperia 1’s display has a very limited max brightness, as we’ll get into later, which means footage you shoot on the Xperia 1 may look great on the phone, but when you transfer it to another device it looks far too bright. When we shot films then imported them to our computer, we needed to use post-processing tools to darken the footage down to match how it looked on the phone.
DESIGN
As with all Sony’s new 21:9 phones, the Sony Xperia 1 looks rather long, thin and lanky, and people often commented on its unusual dimensions when they saw the handset.
Those dimensions are 167 x 72 x 8.2mm, with a weight of 180g – so the phone isn’t actually that much longer than your average plus-sized handset, it’s just trimmed a few millimetres of width. Compared to some phones it feels a little heavy, although other plus-sized devices can be up to 20g heavier than this.
The phone has Corning Gorilla Glass on the front and back, with a metal frame between the glass. Despite these premium materials, and its weight, the handset feels a little delicate, both because its long thin body feels like it could bend if you applied pressure, and also because when you tap the rear of the handset it vibrates slightly – the phone didn’t get injured in our time with it though, so hopefully it’s more durable than it appears.
DISPLAY
The Sony Xperia 1’s screen is one of the phone’s big stumbling blocks, which is a shame – and a surprise given that the handset is supposedly optimised for the content you’ll watch and record on it. In short, the Xperia 1 display has a surprisingly low max brightness.
It was hard to see the screen when we were out and about, even if it wasn’t a particularly sunny day, which made it challenging to take pictures, record video, or use everyday phone functions. When the screen brightness was at max and adaptive brightness off, the handset didn’t even come close to matching the brightness of other phones we compared it to, like the Huawei P30, even when viewing the same app.
The display is a 6.5-inch OLED, with a resolution of 1644 x 3840 and pixel density of 643 pixels per inch – that’s a pretty impressive spec for a smartphone screen, and content viewed on it looks great, if you can look past the dim screen.
Content looks even better thanks to Creator mode, an option in the settings that replicates the RGB setup and image processing of cinema screens. This is designed to display content in the way creators intended it to be viewed – in effect it gives a slight red tint to the display, as opposed to the bluer look of Standard mode.
BATTERY & PERFORMANCE
In our battery test, in which we play a 90-minute video at full brightness with accounts syncing over Wi-Fi in the background, the phone dropped to 81% – we turned on Creator Mode for the display and repeated the test, and found it dropped to 83%, so this option will save you a little juice. Both of these results are fairly poor, however, as most handsets at this price point only lose between 10% and 14% charge, so a lengthy movie-streaming binge is likely to eat up significant amounts of battery. It’s also worth noting that our test video is in 16:9, so there were black bars to the side of the display, and a 21:9 video would have drained even more power.
For a handset that’s sold as being great for shooting 4K footage and playing intense games, among other things, you’d expect the Sony Xperia 1 to have some pretty hefty processing power on board, but even so we were impressed by the phone’s performance in benchmark tests. When we ran the device through a multi-core test it returned a score of 11,192 – for some context, that’s almost the best score we’ve seen in a smartphone, with only the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max beating it.
VERDICT
The Sony Xperia 1 has a few minor issues, and a similar number of small perks – for every flawed fingerprint sensor there’s a Cinema Pro app, and the low max brightness is countered by the various display and sound features that make viewing content a treat. On the whole, though, it’s a decent smartphone.