Sony Xperia 10 III

That’s tall, folks!

The most unusual thing about the Sony Xperia 10 III is its shape. It has a 21:9 aspect ratio screen, which is something of a rarity with phones. Sony claims this is perfect for streaming films on the move, because 21:9 is the ratio Netflix uses to produce its content. However, you’ll find it requires thicker-than-average black bars on the edges to show regular 16:9 content. As a result, the design is narrower and taller than most phones.

The 6in 2520x1080 pixel OLED panel is impressive, covering 97.9 per cent of SRGB colours with perfect contrast. It’s not particularly bright, though, only reaching 329cd/ m² in our tests.

It uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 690 processor, which is disappointingly underpowered for a phone at this price. In our performance tests it was slower than many cheaper phones. For example, our current favourite Android phone – the Xiaomi Poco F3 – costs £279 ( www. snipca.com/38395), but has a Snapdragon 870 processor. In our performance benchmarks, the F3 left the Xperia 10 III trailing in its wake, both in general Android and gaming performance tests.

Sony makes many of the cameras you’ll find in other manufacturers’ phones and the cameras here are decent for the price, but they aren’t enough to win us over.

SPECIFICATIONS

Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 690 • 6GB RAM • 128GB storage • 6in 2520x1080-pixel OLED screen • 12-megapixel main rear camera • 8-megapixel 2x zoom camera • 8-megapixel wide camera • 8-megapixel front camera • Android 11 • 8.3x154x68mm (HXDXW) • 169g • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/38411

With stiff competition from the likes of Xiaomi, Sony simply isn’t offering enough with this model to make it stand out from the crowd.