Sony Xperia 1 Review

The Xperia 1 was Sony starting over. The old Z and XZ naming went, the camera team from the Alpha division took over the imaging, and the phone was built around a shape nobody else used: a 6.5-inch 21:9 OLED at 3840x1644, the first 4K OLED on a phone, with a Creator Mode calibrated by the people who make Sony's cinema monitors. Held in the hand it was narrow and tall enough to use one-handed despite the size, and films played without letterboxing.

The panel's colour accuracy was superb; its brightness was not, peaking well below Samsung's flagships, and it ran at 60 Hz in the year OnePlus made 90 Hz normal. The three 12 MP cameras at 16, 26 and 52mm brought Eye AF and 10 fps bursts with continuous focus, and the Cinema Pro app shot 21:9 video with looks derived from Sony's Venice cinema camera. Ordinary auto-mode photos, though, trailed the Pixel 3 and the Galaxy S10, and there was no night mode at launch.

The 3330 mAh battery gave an unremarkable day with 18W charging and no wireless option, and the side-mounted fingerprint sensor misfired often enough to be a running complaint. The Snapdragon 855 with 6 GB of RAM was as fast as anything of its year. Android 9 Pie was updated to 10 and then 11. At 949 dollars in the US from July 2019 it was a phone for a specific person, and that person mostly worked in film.