Sony Xperia is back with a bold new look and price to match
Finally, a redesign. But will you stump up the cash?
Sony used to make some of the best-looking and more forward-thinking Android phones, but even in its mid 2010s heyday the firm wasn’t great at changing its smartphones’ design language. Xperia phones had big bezels at the top and bottom and were somewhat monolithic - pretty, though.
This decade, the firm’s sales have shrunk along with the Xperias’ bezels, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the Xperia 1 II and Xperia 1 VII, released in 2020 and 2025 respectively.
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That’s all changed with the Xperia 1 VIII (that’s ‘one mark eight’), the new flagship Xperia Sony has announced today. The firm has radically changed the design from previous generations, producing a slab with three cameras on the back in a protruding square camera bump, leaving behind the thin line of cameras from older models.
Sony says the look is inspired by “rough stone” and “raw gemstones”, hence the textured finish found on the Graphite Black, Iolite Silver, Garnet Red, and Native Gold colour options.
Perhaps the gemstone nod is why this phone is so expensive. The Xperia 1 VIII will be available to pre-order today for £1,399. This gets you 256GB storage and will also net you a free pair of Sony’s excellent WH-1000XM6 headphones.
If you want a 1TB model, it only comes in gold and will set you back £1,849.
Around the front, the screen is still tall, and there’s still no cut out or notch for the front facing camera, making Sony one of the only smartphone brands to offer a clean display in this way.
Sony is hyping its new AI Camera Assistant that debuts on the Xperia 1 VIII, which gives you AI generated suggestions in the camera app before you tap the shutter. It’ll display suggestions as tiles, to change the lens, filter or composition of a shot. In this way, it’s similar to Google’s Camera Coach on the latest Pixel phones. The feature can be turned off.
Sony has updated the lenses on the Xperia, most notably the telephoto lens, which is no longer has true optical zoom. Sony countered this saying it was no a technical regression, as the new telephoto lens in the 1 VII is “a 1/1.56‑inch image sensor that is approximately four times larger than that of the previous model”.
All lenses have RAW multi-frame processing applied, which Sony says expands dynamic range and helps reduce noise.
Sony phones have not leant into computational photography where the phone’s software processes images to tune them, anywhere near as much as practically all other Android firms. Instead, Sony leans on the quality of its hardware, treating phone cameras more like actual Sony cameras.
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This has meant the Xperia 1 range is liked by knowledgeable, professional photographers, but appeals less to buyers who want to tap the shutter and get a great photo. Generally, Xperia phones make you work hard to get a great shot.
Elsewhere, Sony said the 1 VIII has better speakers than before, and can last twop days on a charge.
I hope to get the new Xperia 1 VIII in for review, as I am very interested to see if the design change and camera tweaks add up to an overall improvement in the line up.
But £1,399 is a tall ask, even if the phone has the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 12GB RAM.
