Sony Xperia 1 VII battery life revealed
No new silicon-carbon battery tech, but can a new processor squeeze more juice out of the 5,000mAh battery?

If you've forgotten that Sony still makes smartphones, we can forgive you. Sony's last Xperia flagship, the VI, was not officially sold in the United States, and the recent announcement of the Xperia 1 VII was so quiet that few even noticed.
It doesn't help that the Xperia 1 VII looks and feels almost exactly like the previous model, and we were disappointed to see no improvement in battery size either with a 5,000 mAh capacity.
So, can the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset boost the battery life of this new Xperia 1 VII? And are we all sleeping on a camera super phone?
Well, we have the answer to the first question — we have just finished our battery tests on the Xperia 1 VII, and for the second question, well... you'd have to stay tuned for our full review which is coming soon.
PhoneArena Battery Test Results:
On our web browsing test (this is our lightest test, where we cycle web pages with a script), the Xperia 1 VII scored 20 hours and 37 minutes, which is encouraging as it's nearly an hour and half more than the previous Xperia version.
For YouTube video streaming, however, the 1 VII drops the ball with a score of merely 7 hours and 19 minutes, one of the lowest scores we've seen this year.
And finally, for 3D gaming the Xperia got a very solid score of 13 hours and a half.
Overallm, we estimate that you can get around 7 hours and 25 minutes of total screen time on the Xperia 1 VII. That is actually not a bad score, beating the Google Pixle 9 Pro XL, but falling slightly short of the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
In our overall battery rankings, the Sony Xperia 1 VII ranks number 45 for phones we have tested in the past couple of years, so it's right in the upper middle part of the charts.
Imagine if Sony actually used the new silicon-carbon technology for an even larger capacity... Well, unfortunately that didn't happen.
As we mentioned, our in-depth review is coming soon, so stay tuned for more info on the camera and all the rest.
Things that are NOT allowed: