Sony Xperia 1 VII review: great hardware...

Phone Arena

2 days ago

Another year rolls by, another new Xperia comes out to try its hand in the high-end smartphone market. The Sony Xperia 1 VII continues the valued tradition of Xperia phones — high-end camera specs, slim body, and no hardware element omitted. The good old headphone jack is still here, the microSD card slot is not a thing of the past, and the true zoom camera is even zoomier.
Alongside some camera upgrades, we have the new Snapdragon chip — of course — and the return of fan-favorite hardware shutter button. There is some bad news, though.
For one, the Xperia 1 VII is not coming to the States. Secondly, it's pretty pricey wherever it does launch. In Europe, it'll cost you €1,499 — that's a big bill! Is it worth it?
The Sony Xperia 1 VII scores pretty well for its price class in design, display quality, and performance. It lags behind in photo and video quality, as long as software update commitment and reputation so far. The Price Class Average score is there to help you quickly identify how it compares to its peers in the premium flagship phone area!
Here's an overview of the newest Xperia 1 VII and how it compares to the predecessor:
The Xperia phones barely change shape and size, but you won't find us complaining about that. They are slim, elegant, with thin bezels and grippy frames. The Xperia 1 VII is no exception. There are ribbed accents running across the aluminum frame, making it extremely easy to grip, the Gorilla Glass back has fine dimples all over, giving it a unique feel, and the forehead and chin around the display on the front are extremely thin, considering they hold front-firing stereo speakers.
The right frame of the phone holds a volume rocker, a power buton with an extremely fast fingerprint scanner, and the two-step shutter button. This is not a sensor-equipped camera button like Apple recently started to make them — it's a classic camera key that feels just right and is placed where you'd expect one to be on a camera.
The three colors, Sony official image
It comes in three colors — Moss Green, Orchid Purple, Slate Black. The green and purple ones look quite fun, and we'd be lying if we said we aren't slightly disappointed that our test unit is the black one. That being said, we also can't deny that it looks incredibly stylish and elegant.
Box contents? What's that? OK, some good news and some bad news here. The bad news is that, by default, the Xperia 1 VII comes with a lot of nothing inside the box. Phone and cable — that's it. The good news is that, in some markets, you can order it now bundled with the excellent Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones. That'll surely help that salty price tag go down easier.
Sony does place a lot of importance on its display quality — it's proud to market the Xperia phones as devices for visual content creators. The OLED panel comes out with saturated, punchy colors out of the box, but if you want to tone them down and go "realistic" — pick Creator Mode. It looks soft on the eyes, the colors turn mature and lifelike and it's great not only for editing video but general long sessions on the phone.It's a 120 Hz panel, of course. Unlike other manufacturers, Sony doesn't flaunt "peak brightness" numbers, which often means nothing. But that's fine, we usually do our own measurements. Here they are:
20% APL measures screen brightness when about 20% of the pixels are firing at full instead of having a white image over the entire screen. Basically, it more closely simulates looking at actual images or video, and a result north of 2000 nits is excellent here. We are also pleasantly surprised by the minimium brightness this time around — 1 nit or below is optimal for bedtime use. You will also notice that color reproduction drifts much less than the other expensive flagships shown here.
Despite its impressive hardware, the Xperia 1 VII didn't quite score as high as other flagships on our camera test. Common issues were inconsistent exposure, some visible sharpening artifacts, no HDR preview, and no super stabilization solutions for video (though there is an AI mode to follow subjects in action). Let's get out of the lab and take some photos out in the real world:
Sony prides itself in making exceptional sensors (most smartphones out there use Sony sensors), and for years it wanted Xperias to deliver "natural" photos and let the user do the post editing on their own — like they would with pro cameras. But that method didn't work out, the reality is that small phone sensors and small lenses can only lift so much of the weight. Expert work needs to be done by software after the shutter has been pressed — companies like Google, Samsung, and Apple are well known to have excellent post-processing.
Sony has recently buckled — it stopped including 3 different pro camera apps in the Xperias and put extra work into the auto mode of the one Camera app. But it's visible it's a bit behind in the game. For example — the bird in sample 3 became doubled due to the HDR algorithm not stithching the images together properly (or maybe the shutter was too slow?). That's an issue we haven't seen in years, and only expect to spot on entry level phones nowadays. Sample 4 looks extremely weird with the leaves in the background that are out of focus — they look way too hazy. The zoom may be optical, but at 5x and beyond looks soft and noisy.
The good news is that the ultra-wide camera does take great photos. Apparently, the lens isn't exactly... ultra-wide, it shows as 0.7x in the app. By our calculations it should be something like 0.65x by smartphone standards. In any case, the lens itself has distortion correction in its design, so very little software work is required. And it's visible — ultra-wide shots look epic and crispy, even towards the edge of the photo.
The Bokeh mode (Sony's Portrait mode) is pretty unconvincing and we strayed away from it. And the selfie camera is OK? A bit overexposed and with some pink-ish cast thrown in there.
In general, the camera may have super-impressive hardware and may produce OK images... but OK is not good enough for a €1,499 phone.
Don't you wish we had some PlayStation expertise here? No surprise that the Xperia 1 VII uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite — pretty much the best CPU you can get on an Android phone right now. Built on a 3 nm process, it's fast and powerful and does demand good thermal management. The Xperia 1 VII has that, trading punches with the Galaxy S25 Ultra on the benchmarks. And in real life? It's a snappy demon!
On par with modern smartphones, the Xperia 1 VII hits 3,000 and above on Geekbench — you know, the casual beast. It scrolls through and opens apps as fast as the modern competition, no complaints! GPU Performance
And in the graphics department, you can definitely enjoy those modern titles that are launching right now — Delta Force, Warframe, what a time to be alive! Sony Xperia 1 VII Software The Xperia 1 VII is coming with Android 15 out of the box. The user interface is pretty "vanilla" with only minor Sony improvements on top. For example, the quick toggles menu doesn't have these huge, ridiculous Wi-Fi and Bluetooth buttons that modern Android has — Sony kept the clean small buttons from before. And there's the sidebar handle which also has quick toggles and shortcuts to your favorite apps.
Sony promises 4 years of Android updates with 6 years of security patches this time around, which is an improvement over the 2 / 4 year commitments of the past. Still, how fast those updates come to the flagship Xperia also matters. So, we'll be keeping an eye on that.
Other than that, the software is pretty clean of any AI shenanigans. You've got Gemini, so it's all up to Google. The only place you will find AI is in a new camera mode for subject following. And it's arguable that the phone needs AI for that since they've been doing it for years now, but I digress. The Xperia 1 VII is quite compact by today's standards but still rocks a 5,000 mAh battery. And, speaking of standards — it performs comfortably, with an endurance somewhere between the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
It doesn't charge back extremely fast — about 50% in half an hour, and you need an hour and a half on the wire for a full charge. This is not bad time, not at all, but if you are spoiled by a current flagship that can get 50% in 10 minutes, you will find yourself needing to plan charging sessions ahead of time.
I USB-C a microSD card tray on the right there
The haptics are pretty great — quick, accurate, but a bit subtle. They work great as feedback when interacting with the phone, but not amazing for vibration when the phone is ringing through thick layers of clothing.
The sound through the front-facing speakers gets decently loud and has a surprising amount of bass. They can be a bit muddy in the mids out of the box, but activating the Dolby Sound option from the settings cleans that up proper. In general, among the better-sounding smartphone speakers out there for sure, but not quite the best (crown still belongs to the old ROG Phone 7).
The Sony Xperia 1 VII is not a bad phone. On the contrary — it's pretty good. The design and feel in the hand is great. The bloat-less software is a breath of fresh air as ever. The screen is good and the speakers are well above decent. And you get a headphone jack and microSD card slot, which are considered luxury nowadays.
There are two points that make this phone hard to recommend.
One is the price — £1,399 / €1,499 for 256 GB is quite the asking price. Yeah, sure, some markets get the Xperia 1 VII bundled with Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones, which are excellent and quite expensive on their own. But what if you don't want the headphones or don't get them in your area?
Secondly, the one serious selling point of this phone is the camera. And, sorry, but it's just not that fantastic. It's OK, but I wouldn't recommend an OK camera phone for €1,499.