Sony Xperia 1 VII Review: End of the line?

Introduction

For many, Sony’s continued production of Android smartphones is a puzzle with no obvious solution. 

Very few people buy them. They’re not widely marketed. And they continue holding on to traditional physical tech like expandable storage and 3.5mm audio ports. All the while charging an absolute fortune for a phone with underwhelming specs and features in some areas. 

In some ways, it feels a bit like the end of the line for the Xperia, because I’m not sure Sony’s done enough this time to convince even the most passionate Sony fans to cough up the £1399 to own the Xperia 1 VII. 

Design 

• Same look and feel as Xperia 1 VI
• MicroSD card slot, headphone jack remain
• Noticeable bezels around the screen

In 2024, Sony made the decision to switch from its traditional-but-unusual 21:9 ratio phone screen to a more standard 18:9. It did two things: it meant the phone didn’t quite feel as unique as it used to, but at the same time, made it significantly more practical. And that’s important for a phone with so many other seemingly practical features. 

It’s got a grippy textured back panel, and ridged sides that prevent it from slipping off any surface, and, while not impossible to drop, it’s certainly easier to keep hold of than most shiny, smooth glass slabs. 

It is hard to tell exactly what the difference is between this and last year’s Sony Xperia 1 VI though. Seemingly… nothing. 

Without looking at them side by side in fine detail, you’d struggle to see anything new. It doesn’t feel as though Sony has made it any more sturdy. It still creaks a little when you twist it, as if it could crack and bend with enough force. 

Still, the practicalities, and largely the only reason this phone exists, are still there. You can still remove the SIM card tray without a special tool or paperclip. And that tray still has a slot for a microSD card on the other side. 

It still has bezels on the top and bottom of the display. Where so many other manufacturers have got rid of them, Sony holds on stubbornly; simultaneously giving you a display with no hole-punch cutout or notch for the camera cutting into that valuable screen real estate, while also making sure there’s space for stereo speakers that fire towards you and not out of the edges. So you get proper stereo sound. 

And – of course – there’s a 3.5mm audio port with improved wiring and electronics for a supposedly even better audio experience. The phone is also water-proof to a high level, protected against both submersion in water and splash resistant, carrying a dual rating IP68 and IP65 rating – just like the last one did. 

Apart from that, there’s not much to say on the design front. If you’ve seen the Xperia 1 VI, you’ve seen the Xperia 1 VII. It’s thin, lightweight, grippy, and comfortable to use. It’s practical – and with so many manufacturers adopting shiny, slippery designs, it’s refreshing. Just like the last one was. 

Display 

• 6.5-inch FHD+ screen
• Bright, detailed and easily usable outdoors
• Plenty of customisation options

As FHD+ displays go, the 6.5-inch panel on this Sony phone is about as good as it gets. Sure, you don’t get the super crisp details and fine lines of those with quadHD+ displays, but in this day and age, those resolutions are few and far between with manufacturers seemingly focusing more on refresh rates, brightness and energy efficiency. 

At arm’s length, the detail still looks crisp enough, and the image processing – thanks to Sony’s Bravia TV experience – is super. Blacks are pretty stunning with that inky dark experience you’d want, thanks to excellent contrast levels. 

Colours look fantastic too, regardless of the type of content you’re viewing. And it holds its own when viewed from different angles as well. 

Brightness is the one thing I noticed as a clear upgrade from the previous model. I didn’t have to squint or strain to read the screen when outdoors in bright light, or any bright reflections cut across the display. It’s perfectly visible in most conditions, to the point where you can even keep your sunglasses on when outdoors. 

Using the phone in the car, with bright beams of sunlight cutting across the surface of the display, it automatically ramps up the brightness and ensures it’s still perfectly visible. 

It’s difficult to fault, and there are plenty of settings that you can tweak to change how the colours appear. Leave the image quality in its ‘Recommended’ setting, and it’ll adjust itself automatically to cater to the content you’re watching. But if you want to dive in and get your hands dirty, there are completely custom modes available. 

Pick ‘Creator mode’ and it’ll give you the most neutral, accurate tone available for when you’re shooting video or want to watch movies with the profile intended by the filmmaker. You can even adjust the white balance manually if you want to. 

Personally, I was perfectly happy with it stuck in its out-of-the-box recommended setting, and let it do its thing automatically. But if you don’t want that, the option is there to do your own thing. 

Cameras

• 48MP main, 12MP telephoto and 48MP ultrawide cameras
• No real hardware differences compared to last year
• Can take a good photo – but you need to work for it

Just like the phone before it, the Xperia 1 VII comes with a pretty unique triple camera setup. Like so many others, it has an ultrawide, a primary and a telephoto zoom lens. Except unlike so many others, that zoom has a moving lens element to allow it to physically zoom between 3.5x and 7.1x, and it serves a dual function as a macro lens. 

To be fair to Sony, it has worked the past couple of years on making its camera app easier to use and less reliant on professional camera knowledge. So, if you want to, it’s easy enough to just point, shoot, and take a photo. Even at nighttime, there’s a night mode algorithm of sorts that gets rid of any minor unsteadiness while shooting low-light handheld photos. 

Sony being Sony, there’s still an effort – for the most part – to stop images from looking over-processed in any way, so you won’t find the nighttime shots looking super bright and vibrant. It still very much looks like it’s nighttime. And in the daytime, the HDR effects and colour saturation are toned down compared to almost every other smartphone. 

For a lot of people, that may just be a bit of a turn-off. For others, the fact that it’s not super colourful or unnaturally vibrant and over-sharpened makes it the ideal camera phone. Still, being critical, it’s far from a perfect system. 

Switching between the three lenses, the colours are pretty consistent – at least they are if you stick to the main and ultrawide lenses. Plus, the ultrawide camera is actually one of the better ones I’ve used in most conditions. It’s not the obvious weak point that it is on so many phones, and it hasn’t got that noisy, grainy, distorted look around the edges. It’s clean and pretty sharp. 

In automatic mode – which we use on all the phones we test – photos can seem a little lifeless and flat in terms of colour, compared to many others. Almost as if, in an attempt not to be too saturated, the colours become a little dark. Until you switch to the zoom, when they swing the other way and they’re a little over-exposed and pale.

But to get the best results – as always with Sony – you need to use the professional or manual modes, take your time, and tweak the settings. And that clearly isn’t going to appeal to most smartphone buyers. 

As for the zoom camera, when used to actually zoom in on objects in the distance, I did sometimes find its anti-shake or stabilisation ability wasn’t entirely on point. I’d sometimes find it produced photos with motion blur. Either that, or it’s just generally quite a soft-looking lens. 

It’s also not as strong as the other two lenses at nighttime. Possibly for the same reason it needs to be kept super steady in the daytime, its night mode images are much darker than the photos from the primary and ultrawide cameras. 

In general, there are a few instances like that, especially when using the macro, where easily snapping a photo with the zoom lens is tricky. 

Still, the camera is chock-full of features you tend to find on cameras. The eye-tracking when taking photos of people and animals is sublime. I still think Sony’s system is among the best if you want natural photos of people, or portrait shots. 

These are the instances when the 3.5x and 7.1x zoom range really comes into its own. The best photos I’ve taken of my pet cat have been with Sony phones. And while I don’t always appreciate the extra work required to get them – especially when using the zoom and tele-macro features – the efforts are generally rewarded, as long as you make peace with the fact that you’ll have a lot of failed attempts before you get a shot you’re happy with.   

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite performance
• Handles everything you can throw at it
• Single 256GB storage option

Xperia phones have rarely been known for their raw power and speed, but because this one’s equipped with the top Snapdragon 8 Elite processor available on the market, a decent-sized vapour chamber – and because it only has a fullHD display – its ability to maintain high frame rates in graphically demanding apps and benchmarks is up there with the best of them. 

That means, regardless of what you use it for, it’ll load apps swiftly, and if you do settle into longer sessions of any game with high frame rates and fast animations, it’ll keep up with them without any real trouble. 

It’s only available with 256GB of storage in the UK and EU, but with expandable storage via the microSD card slot, it’s nowhere near as much of a problem as it’d be for most top-end flagships. 

Software

• Simple, stock approach to Android 15
• Looks a little bit boring and dated
• No AI features

Sony keeps its software simple. For the most part, the Android skin is untouched and has zero additional unnecessary bloat. But, at the same time, it feels a little lazy from Sony. Beyond the camera and music creation apps, Sony hasn’t added anything, not even a weather app. 

I only say lazy because it looks and feels like it’s largely unchanged for the past few years, and looks the same as the Sony software has always looked, beyond some Pixel-like animations for things like unlocking and charging the phone. And, it has to be said, it’s starting to look a bit basic and dated. 

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Sony isn’t all that invested in its smartphone business. But by the same token, I would much rather this quite basic, stripped-back version of Android with zero redundant or duplicate apps than the opposite end of the scale. Android skins like Xiaomi’s HyperOS, which has so much bloat and so many ads built in that it feels messy, cumbersome and frustrating. 

Still, in an era when so many other manufacturers are leaning so heavily into generative AI – whether it’s for things like generating images, summarising notes and voice recordings, or trying to build useful tools for everyday organisation – Sony’s software is mostly devoid of any of it. 

There’s an argument to be made here – again – that this is a sensible decision. It’s best to leave it to the companies like Google, OpenAI and Perplexity, since they’re the experts with seemingly bottomless bank vaults of cash to plough into such efforts. 

You can, after all, just install any AI-based apps you want from the Play Store, and it’ll likely be better than anything Sony could come up with. But it does make the software feel a bit empty. 

Battery life

• 5000mAh cell
• Worse battery life than Xperia 1 VI
• More than enough for a day’s use

One of the best things about last year’s Xperia phone was the battery life. 

That was down to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset being super efficient, and the display being 1080p, which meant that it was, in my testing, one of the best-performing phones on the market. For my own light use case, it was easily a two-day phone. It wasn’t even a struggle. 

Sadly, the same can’t be said of the Xperia 1 VII. Almost certainly because of the more power-hungry processor, it can, at a stretch, get me towards the end of a second day, but it’s not as easy to do. 

For heavier users, getting it to the end of a full, busy day on 5G is definitely doable, and relatively easy to achieve. But it’s definitely not as good as the outgoing model, which had arguably the best battery life of any phone in 2024. And that was always going to be a hard act to follow. 

Still, using it on Wi-Fi, with three hours of screen time mostly spent in casual use cases like Mario Kart Tour, watching YouTube, scrolling through social media and sports news feeds with some camera use thrown in, it could very easily get to bedtime with around 45-50 per cent left over.

Should you buy it?

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