For a company that has innovated so much in mobile phones, Sony really doesn't get a lot of appreciation. They were the first with a waterproof phone, they were the first with a phone with a 4K display, and now they seem to be basically the only premium phone maker left that is still delivering features that used to be ubiquitous on Android phones, things like expandable storage, headphone jacks, and of course the latest and greatest processors. So, this is the Sony Xperia 1 III full review.
It's got a six-and-a-half-inch display, but remember when Sony made those mini phones that had flagship-class specs but were still very one-hand handleable? Even with small hands, because it's so skinny, it's actually got a 21:9 aspect ratio. It is pretty easy to reach across. It's got a quad-camera system. Three of them are megapixels. So, that's the wide, the ultra-wide, and the telephoto, and then it has a 0.3-megapixel time-of-flight sensor in here as well. It's got NFC, obviously. Got the logo on the back. It has wireless charging, fast wireless charging as well as reverse wireless charging. So, if you have some Sony earphones, you can recharge them up with your phone. And then this is really important. Right there, totally toolless(don't have to use sim ejector), either dual SIM or micro SD tray. You've got a 4500 mAh battery built-in. So it turns out you can still put a big battery in a slim phone design and have expandable storage, and a headphone jack. It's gone back to the traditional top-mounted location instead of the bottom that became more popular towards the end of the headphone jack era. Over on the other side, we've got far more hardware buttons than I'm used to seeing on modern devices. We've got our volume rocker as well as our lock button which doubles as a fingerprint sensor, nice. As well as a dedicated button for pulling up Google assistant. And a dedicated button, that's right, for pulling up your camera. It's almost like Sony has a rich heritage as an imaging company. They're actually using Zeiss Optics for the cameras. And apparently, they worked with the same team that worked on the Alpha 9 to develop the camera for this. I mean, that's not to say that every phone that was built in collaboration with a cinema camera team was a success, But it's pretty good. One of the things that really stand out about what Sony's done here is the depth of their camera app. Obviously, you can get third-party camera apps if you don't like just the one-click operation of your start camera app, Everything is right at your thumb tip. So, you can adjust which camera you want to use, adjust your zoom levels, all that good stuff they've got. So you can change the ultra-wide to prioritize either correcting for the distortion or overall image quality. then, if you don't want that, you just flip over to manual exposures, shutter speed priority, you could play around with whether you want to focus on or off, you can change your shooting formats. So, raw, raw and JPEG, JPEG. For video, they actually worked with the Venice team to create a more flat cinematic shooting profile. You can shoot in 24 FPS. They have put a ton of attention into this and the work really shows. And just because it's a 12-megapixel main shooter, don't underestimate it. There's a lot more to life than megapixels. And shockingly, it doesn't even have a super thick camera bump. There's a dedicated shutter button and a dedicated button for launching the camera, it's more about capturing the moment. So, if this thing's in your pocket, you're going on your way out of your pocket, hold the button. your camera app is launched, now you are ready to go. Super responsive... You're not gonna have the same kind of crazy zoom that you find on some other cameras. Okay, yes, that's fair enough but this is more than enough for what most people would need.
It's got a Snapdragon 888, 12 GB of RAM, and then 256 or 512 GB of storage. It's an OLED display and the horizontal resolution here is actually 3840. So, it's a 4K-class display, but obviously given that it's only 1600 megapixels wide, the overall pixel count is quite a bit lower. It's OLED, so you're gonna get nice, fast response times, perfect blacks, all of that good stuff that's great for everything. And it can do up to 120 Hz. But one of the things that most about this phone actually is how incredibly configurable it is. They've got what is basically the equivalent of filmmaker mode built into the phone. Everyone should just do this so stuff looks like it's supposed to. It looks so good. And there's no notch, they just put a little bezel on it, And it's not like they're making good use of it because it has an amplified earpiece for stereo audio. This is the kind of device which isn't to say that it's absolutely perfect. But for whatever reason, Sony doesn't allow you to switch the location of the Back and Multi-task View button. They just don't have that option in spite of how configurable it is in other ways. Like they do have battery management features built-in that allow you to take care of your batteries. So, you can set custom times for when you leave it to charge, you can tell it to have a charging limit so that you're not fully charging it all the time which is really stressful on the battery. Sony provides a lot of documentation that is built right into the phone as you are using it. That is not something that you can take for granted. They actually explain what all of this does. Explain battery charging curves and stuff like that. They're not treating you like a child, they're just trying to educate you as an adult that just might not know these things. But Sony expects their customers to care about them in return because this phone is gonna run you a whopping 1299 US dollars. There's even more cool stuff like they have an equivalent of Shadow Play for gamers. So, you can actually go back and playback the last few seconds of play. Victus Glass on the front, Gorilla Glass 6 on the back. There's this cool side sense thing so you can quickly launch apps, you can open up multi-window. Because the display is so tall, you can actually do two apps, top, and bottom. So, if you'd like to watch YouTube videos while you're browsing Reddit or whatever, that's something you could do. It's actually a pretty good use case for the tall screen.