Sony Xperia 1 III Review

Design and Display

A Sony phone is instantly recognizable partly because the design hasn’t changed much in the past few years and partly because of those extra tall and narrow dimensions. Yes, this phone looks much like a remote control rather than a phone, and that’s a double edged sword. On one side, yes, 21:9 movies on Netflix look great on it and you don't get letterboxing, but it's not so optimal for... well, everyday stuff. Instagram stories have big black bars on the top and bottom, and the narrower screen makes texting far less comfortable than other phones.

As for the build quality itself, though, it's premium throughout: the frosted glass on the back is soft and nice to the touch, plus it doesn’t catch fingerprints. On the downside, the phone is as slippery as they get. The buttons are all on the right handside and there are lots of them: a volume rocker on the top that we wish was a bit larger, and then a recessed power key with the fingerprint scanner embedded in it, then you have a dedicated Google Assistant button that is not remappable, and finally towards the bottom right of the phone you have a dedicated 2-way camera shutter button, a signature for Sony phones. That's a lot of buttons, and again, most people don't need all of them, but Sony has not made this phone for most people.

IP68 water and dust protection is present, as you’d expect on a modern flagship, and as we've already said: it has a headphone jack (whoop whoop)! Hold your breath for this one: it even has a notification LED light!

One more thing that yours truly loves about it is that this phone feels so liberatingly light-weight: it tips the scales at just 187 grams, nothing compared to the nearly 230 grams on both the iPhone 12 Pro Max and Galaxy S21 Ultra.



Moving to the screen, it's an OLED display with beautiful colors, nothing short of other flagships. In fact, Sony adds a cherry topping: it is stubbornly the only company that uses 4K resolution in a phone form factor. We can’t complain about this, but at the same time, we should be realistic about it: 4K is an overkill that really doesn’t make much sense on a tiny smartphone screen, it's mostly good as a bragging point for tech nerds. Great for specific users, but probably not really something that would make a difference for the average person (unless you look at this screen with a magnifying glass).

Still, not only is the display plenty sharp, it also finally adds support for 120Hz fast refresh rate that makes scrolling and animations just so much smoother. Sony was late adding this feature, but we're glad it's finally here and it is a night and day difference, we love it. Of course, you can go into settings and switch to 60Hz to eke out a bit more battery, but you’d miss on the fun of using this phone.

Performance and Storage

And this brings us to the performance. The Xperia is indeed a very fast phone: powered by the Snapdragon 888 chip coupled with 12GB of RAM, you get top-level specs and tasks just fly, and everything moves super fast. The clean interface certainly helps for that, and we can see how it can feel liberating if you come from the slightly cluttered Samsung UI for example, which does stutter here and there.

One particular area of excellence is multitasking: it just makes a lot more sense on such a taller screen and Sony’s implementation is spot on. It’s super easy to have a floating window on top of your home screen, the gestures are well implemented, the Side Sense feature where you tap a button on the side to quickly get to multitasking pairs and commonly used apps is neatly implemented, and heavy multitaskers would love it.

At the same time, we have to go back to what we said in the beginning and bring up the issue of overheating. This is the hottest phone to handle among all flagships and unfortunately, we mean this in a quite literal sense. Watch a video? Phone gets hot. Check your email? Phone still gettings warm. Even sometimes just resting in a pocket, the Xperia would push notifications and still get warmed up! We don’t know if that’s due to the thinner design of the phone or something else, but it’s seriously annoying. We haven’t noticed it actually affecting the speed, but having your phone overheat with just basic tasks is not acceptable, especially when that phone costs way more than all the competition.

As for storage, you get 256 gigs on board and the most easily accessible microSD slot: you can just chop it off with your fingernails, you don’t need one of those needle-like SIM tools to get to your microSD card. Hugely convenient, and that SIM tray is still insulated so it doesn’t leak water, so great job on that front.

Fingerprint scanner and haptics

To securely unlock the Sony, you have a side mounted fingerprint scanner that is fast and accurate, and this would have been just a great one-sentence explanation if not for the fact that it kept on misfiring while in a pocket. It was a common occurrence to take the phone out of a pocket, only to see that it has made a few unsuccessful and totally unintentional unlock attempts. That is a big and constant annoyance and we wish there was a fix.

As for the haptics, or that vibration feedback, it's fine, meaning that it doesn't feel like you have a can of bees in your pocket, but we have to admit that it's also not quite as refined as the Taptic Engine on iPhones or the precise vibration feedback you get on say recent OnePlus phones. It's just okay here.

Camera

But the real star of the show, Sony says, is the camera: you get the usual with a main snapper and an ultra-wide lens, but then you get Sony's special treat, a brand new variable zoom camera. Whoa! “Variable” zoom? We haven't seen that in a phone before! So what is that fancy "variable zoom" anyway? Well, truth is we don’t know for sure, but judging from Sony’s marketing materials we've got a periscope style, folded lens where magnets move the glass elements inside between two positions: a 2.9X zoom level and 4.4X zoom level, so instead of having a separate 2.9X and 4.4X lenses, it’s just one lens with moving elements that does this job.

But just before we jump into the images, let us clarify something important: we used this camera mostly in the "Basic" mode (no, that's not an insult, and yes, that's really what it's called). You can do a lot more with it: you can shoot RAW photos, you can play with shutter speed, ISO, metering, white balance, and you literally have control over every little toggle you can imagine. And then you can take your photos and videos in post and edit them to your liking. You won't find this below, but we are planning a separate article to explore those differences.

So with all that in mind, let's see what Sony's innovative tech actually means for image quality for "basic" folks that don't use manual controls for every single shot, and let's see if this phone brings a camera revolution to shake up your iPhones, Pixels and Samsungs from their comfortable positions.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is a quite obvious "no", this phone can capture decent shots, but you don't get anything remotely close to revolutionary. Photos look soft, often a bit overexposed, and lack the dynamic range you get on mainstream flagships. We definitely expected a bit more after all that marketing hubbub and especially out of a $1,300 phone.

The difference in color rendition is quite striking and you can see how much bleaker colors on this phone often turn out.

And here are a few pictures captured at night to see how good the Xperia handles low light:

This is definitely one of the weakest points of this phone: it just cannot capture enough light at night and everything looks way too dark.

On this next shot we see the same thing, even though this building was lit by neon signs, it appears too dark on the Xperia.

This is a constant trend with low light photos, as you can see in the image above.

Sony advertizes a few features that it brings from its Alpha camera series and the biggest one has got to be the "Eye AF", which guarantees that focus will be right on the eye of a person or even a pet. We found that this works well in real life and you can capture rapid-fire burst shots with a person moving and have most of the photos in focus. There is a disclaimer to all of this though and that is that Eye AF is great when you have a real camera with an f/1.8 lens or similar that gives you a nice bokeh, and a very narrow focus plane. In that case, it's critical that focus stays on the eyes. The Xperia 1 III, however, is not a real mirrorless camera and most of the time, you shoot with a wide lens that has almost no bokeh, so the real-world benefits of Eye AF on such a format are way less pronounced. Put simply, this is fixing a problem that rarely manifests on smartphones where your photos are in focus most of the time anyway.

As for that zoom lens, you get nice looking photos at exactly 2.9X and 4.4X zoom levels, but everything in between and further looks very soft and lacks in sharpness. This camera is a nice addition and it has some futuristic tech that makes the magic happen, but it’s not on par with the zoom lens on a Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Even at its native 2.9X zoom level, we can see the softer detail compared to the Galaxy and the iPhone, and not only that, but the bleaker colors really don't do this colorful landscape justice.

You also get portrait mode that also works with the zoom lens, so you can capture a portrait at 2.9X and 4.4X which allows some nice looking face shots. At the same time, for some reason turning on portrait mode resulted in photos getting consistently overexposed, with clipped highlights.



When it comes to video, this is where using the camera app gets very frustrating. Once you start recording with the main camera, you cannot zoom out to the ultra-wide or switch to that fancy periscope lens, an inexplicable omission that even budget phones these days don’t suffer from. Video quality is well stabilized, but looks far from great with muted colors and issues with dynamic range like clipped highlights in the skies. It’s nothing to write home about.