Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Sony shifts its pro phone course

For five years now, Sony has been treading its own path through the flagship phone market. The Japanese brand’s Xperia 1 phones have all been unusually tall and media-focused, with pro-level manual camera controls and a high price tag to match.

All of those boxes are ticked here except one, but it represents a shift in the approachability of this decidedly niche phone range. Something’s clicked into place here, and if you’ve got £1,300 to spend on your next phone, the Sony Xperia 1 VI deserves to be part of the conversation.

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: What you need to know

In many ways, the Sony Xperia 1 VI continues the brand’s iterative approach to flagship phones, with the same industrial design, pairing a flat-but-ridged frame with a textured glass rear. We’ve also still got an impressive triple-camera system – complete with a bolstered variable zoom function –  that begs you to get a little more hands-on than other phones.

The screen is another beautiful 6.5in 120Hz OLED, but Sony has moved away from its signature 4K resolution and switched to a more regular 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

That may sound like a downgrade, but it has a number of knock-on positive effects, not least of which is battery life. While you get the same 5000mAh cell and 30W wired charging support as before, this is the most energy-efficient flagship smartphone Sony has ever produced.

It’s also the most powerful, with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 running the show alongside 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The latter’s a bit of a shame – this is a pro-level phone after all – but at least you also get a microSDXC slot for up to 1.5TB of expansion. It’s nicely accessible without a SIM tool, as well.

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Price and competition

Unfortunately, Sony hasn’t made the Xperia 1 VI any cheaper, nor has it provided any more storage options. The solitary model, with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, still costs an eye-watering £1,299, making this one of the most expensive non-foldable phones on the market, just like its predecessors. 

As I noted in my Sony Xperia 1 V review, however, Sony may not have made its phones any cheaper, but rivals have gradually made their flagship phones more expensive.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra starts at £1,249, while the cheapest iPhone 15 Pro Max is £1,199. Meanwhile, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra costs the same £1,299 as the Xperia 1 VI, albeit with double the storage and 50% more RAM. Among such company, the Sony Xperia 1 VI is still too expensive, but not ridiculously so.

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Design and key features

At first blush, the Sony Xperia 1 VI looks and feels a lot like its predecessor, and several models before that. The house style is all in the name of unimpeded media playback, with the extended bezels housing the selfie camera and stereo front-facing speakers. When you watch movie content on an Xperia 1 phone, there’s nothing to get in the way of either the visuals or the crystal-clear audio, which marks it out as unique.

Gorilla Glass Victus 2 again covers the front, with etched Gorilla Glass Victus on the rear and a ridged metal rim. The texture of the latter two elements makes it easy to grip the Xperia 1 VI, which is handy given the inherently less secure camera grip you’re encouraged to adopt.

Once again, Sony has included a two-stage physical shutter button low on the right-hand edge, which gives the phone the feel of a particularly flat point-and-shoot camera. The power button is elongated and slightly recessed, which serves its secondary purpose as a fingerprint sensor. Sony is pretty unique in sticking with this over an in-display alternative, but it remains quick and reliable.

It’s good to see the 3.5mm headphone jack, too, as it’s a vanishingly rare provision in modern flagship phones. It again speaks to Sony’s single-minded media focus.

I was sent the drab Black model for review, but there are also Khaki Green and Platinum Silver options. An above-and-beyond IP65/68 rating helps the Xperia 1 VI retain its dominant position as the most water-resistant flagship phone on the market.

So far so familiar, but there is a fairly massive design change to discuss. The phone’s proportions are completely different to any previous model, now measuring a shorter and wider 74 x 8.2 x 162mm (WDH).

This fundamentally alters how the phone feels in the hand. You might find it tougher to reach across to the other side of the screen with your holding thumb, but the phone overall feels way more balanced.

READ NEXT: Best Android phones

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Display

Some die-hards might say that Sony is compromising its media-focused vision with this shift to a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, but I disagree: this simply gives other forms of media content their due. 21:9 material is still relatively rare, whereas most movies, TV shows, online videos and games are served better in this stouter aspect ratio.

The other major departure is the FHD+ (1080 x 2340) resolution, with Sony finally giving up its vigil as the sole 4K torch bearer in the mobile space. While this means that Sony has lost a USP for the back of the box, and native UHD content no longer looks sharpest on a Sony phone (not to mention 2K content), this feels like a net positive.

It was always questionable whether you got the full 4K experience at this size, and most of the time the Xperia 1 family would render content at FHD+ anyway. Plus, the pixel-packed screens usually had relatively low average brightness and often middling battery life.

Brightness has taken a step up in the Xperia 1 VI, hitting a peak of 808cd/m² during testing – 177cd/m² higher than the Xperia 1 V. Sony has implemented a new Sunlight Vision feature that bolsters brightness in direct sunlight, and overall it claims that the screen gets 1.5 times brighter than the previous model.

It’s more colour-accurate, too: Using the phone’s Creator display mode, I recorded an impeccable Delta E colour variance of 1.03, as well as an sRGB gamut coverage of 96.9% against a volume of 98.9%.

READ NEXT: Best smartphones

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Performance and battery life

We’re back to top-end specifications, with Sony fitting the Xperia 1 VI with the latest and greatest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform – the same chipset used by fellow super-flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and the Xiaomi 14 Ultra.

Together with 12GB of RAM, it crushes through tasks, apps, and games with contemptuous ease. High-end 3D games like Wreckfest run flawlessly on maxed out graphical settings, though in truth, that’s been the case for a couple of years now. There isn’t a game on the Google Play Store that really challenges modern flagship hardware.

Despite the series-first vapour chamber cooling system, the Xperia 1 VI still warms up more than I’d like, which seems to result in the phone being throttled under load. Running it through the 3DMark Solar Bay Stress Test, which simulates a sustained high graphical load, the Xperia 1 VI scored a fairly poor stability score of 56% – most popular flagship phones will hit above 70%.

In use, the Sony Xperia 1 VI is extremely fluid, with instantaneous booting and speedy fingerprint authentication. In Geekbench 6, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra eked out an 8% lead in the multi-core results but otherwise, the Xperia 1 VI performed admirably, scoring near-enough identically to the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Battery life for the Xperia 1 family has always been OK in general, but extensive media consumption often drained them faster than I would have liked. Sony has nailed that issue with the Xperia 1 VI, despite fitting it with the same 5000mAh cell as before.

In our looped video test, the Xperia 1 VI lasted 30hrs 40mins. That’s a massive 18 hours longer than the Xperia 1 V, and it also comfortably beats the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the OnePlus 12. Only the mighty Galaxy S24 Ultra outlasts it.

It’s a shame Sony hasn’t given the Xperia 1 VI’s charging provision similar attention. At 30W, it took 30 minutes to get the Xperia 1 VI to 50%, and 1 hour 25 minutes to secure a full charge. This was using an Asus 30W charger I had to hand, as Sony doesn’t bundle one in.

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Software

The Xperia 1 VI runs Android 14 with its own light skin layered on top. Sony has tweaked the notification shade slightly, with new squarer control toggles. It doesn’t look as nice as the rounder stock form, but it means that more can be squeezed in with that wider screen.

My biggest UI annoyance was a repeated ‘Preventing accidental operations’ message that popped up whenever I fished the phone out of my pocket to take a quick snap using the physical shutter button as a camera shortcut. This can be turned off in the Settings menu, but the implementation feels clunky. 

Sony promises three years of Android upgrades and four years of security updates, which falls way short of the seven years offered by Samsung and Google. True, those are still outliers, but when you’re charging more than either of those companies for your flagship phone, such details matter.

Third party apps are mercifully few here, with just Facebook, LinkedIn, and Call of Duty: Warzone preinstalled. Alongside them, we’ve got Sony’s own content-focused apps, with Music Pro and Video Creator letting you put together more advanced music and video productions, respectively. Sony’s three distinct photograph apps are also bundled into the one main Camera app this time around, which represents a welcome step up in clarity.

READ NEXT: Best phone battery life

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Cameras

Sony has kept with the same 1/1.35in 48MP main sensor as the Xperia 1 V. Together with its consolidated camera app and a new emphasis on AI processing, Sony is clearly looking to make the Xperia 1 VI a better point and shoot tool than previous models.

It has succeeded, but only to a certain degree. The Xperia 1 VI remains one of the best in the business at focusing, locking on with often uncanny speed and precision. Sony’s natural colour science also avoids the trap of making shots look gaudy and unrepresentative.

In general ‘fire and forget’ shooting conditions, however, I would still take an iPhone 15 Pro or a Pixel 8 Pro out with me over the Xperia 1 VI. It’s not that they have better cameras as such, but rather that they routinely return more consistently pleasing snaps when it comes to dynamic range, low noise levels, and exposure.

This largely comes down to the fact that Sony, as a respected camera maker, prefers to not go overboard with image processing. If you’re willing to go hands-on with the vast array of controls in the camera’s now built-in Pro mode, that makes for a brilliant photography tool.

But if you’re looking for, say, a nicely balanced out shot when shooting an intermittently shady area on a sunny day, the Sony won’t perform so well. The same applies to night shots. I took an iPhone 15 Pro out with me one evening alongside the Xperia 1 VI, and Apple’s flagship captured markedly sharper, cleaner, less noisy low light images. Sony’s phone also seems way more prone to lens flare.

Ultrawide shots are decent, with what appears to be the same 12MP sensor as before, and a comparable colour tone to that main sensor. But the main advance here is a new 12MP telephoto camera that can shoot anywhere between 85mm and 170mm – that’s 3.5x and 7.1x zoom, in smartphone camera lingo.

This increased zoom performance makes the Xperia 1 VI a pleasingly flexible tool. Besides nice sharp zoomed-in shots (in decent lighting at least), Sony has implemented a neat telephoto macro mode. Rather than getting right up close to your subject, you can stand at a further remove and use a manual focus slider (activating the focus peaking tool is recommended) to bring the desired area into focus. This feature can also get you some nice creamy background bokeh on your close-ups.

You can even capture 4K video at this zoomed-in macro range. Indeed, the Xperia 1 VI is a strong video performer all round, extending right up to 4K at 120fps. I was particularly impressed with the sound quality in the footage I captured, though zooming whilst shooting isn’t the smoothest experience.

Sony Xperia 1 VI review: Verdict

With the Xperia 1 VI, Sony has taken a small step towards the mainstream without sacrificing its hardcore Pro credentials. While part of me is a little sad that the range has lost its unique 4K 21:9 display, the FHD+ 19.5:9 replacement is just plain better in most scenarios.

While it’s a more balanced, usable phone than its predecessors, the Xperia 1 VI’s familiar design offers no compromise when it comes to the media focus. Battery life is also greatly extended and the innovative optical zoom camera has been improved with even greater range and a cool new macro function. The main camera is more pleasant to use, too, though it’s still mostly geared towards photography enthusiasts.

Further improvements in the camera’s point-and-shoot credentials, together with a lower asking price, improved cooling, and an extended software support promise, could be all Sony needs to enter the flagship big leagues.