Sony Xperia 1 II review: Sony finally made a phone I’d love to keep in my pocket

Sony is a huge electronics company. It makes TVs, cameras, headphones, game consoles, and pretty much anything else you could imagine with a circuit board. It’s also a market leader in many of these categories. Its Bravia OLED TVs are best-in-class, its headphones are some of the most popular on the market, and you can’t walk down the street in 2020 without seeing a Sony digital camera.

With all this as background, it only seems natural that Sony would be one of the most well-positioned companies to make a killer smartphone. Our phones are now TVs and music players. They’re game consoles and cameras. They do almost everything. And Sony makes almost everything. It should be a match made in heaven.

But we’ve been waiting for years for Sony to nail it. Every year, it seems like the new Xperia phone lacks the best-in-class quality of the Sony items it is replacing. The screens have been good but not incredible, the cameras have frequently underperformed, and on the last Sony phone I reviewed, the Xperia XZ2, there wasn’t even a headphone jack. None of this makes sense.

So the question that needs answering is this: After all these years, has Sony finally made a phone as good as its reputation?

Find out in the Android Authority Sony Xperia 1 II review.

Design and display: Boldly simple

Sony’s phone designs have always been unique, all the way back to the feature phones of yesteryear. The Xperia 1 II continues this trend. It’s a phone that, while incredibly simplistic, is bold in its own right. It’s a very squared-off device with a flat display, back, and sides. There are curves around the edges to keep the phone from feeling too sharp, but it’s still very boxy, which I appreciate quite a lot. Funny how making a non-curved phone is unique in 2020, eh?

Making the phone so flat on all sides allowed Sony to include some interesting additions. You’ve got the standard volume rockers on the right side of the phone, sitting right above the power button. But this power button is also a fingerprint reader, as we’ve seen in Sony phones of the past. I had a hard time getting this fingerprint reader to register my prints consistently, but the reviewer who had this device before me said it was among the most accurate he’s used. Your mileage may vary, depending on your finger, I guess?

Below the fingerprint reader/power button there’s a dedicated shutter button for the camera, which is nice to see. This is also a two-step shutter button, meaning you can soft press it to acquire focus, then press it all the way to capture an image. This is the same way most dedicated cameras work, and it’s nice to see Sony add a unique interface for taking photos.

The top of the phone houses a headphone jack, something which was curiously missing from the Xperia XZ2 I reviewed a couple of years ago, as well as the Xperia 1 from last year. Considering Sony makes some of the best headphones on the market, wired and otherwise, it makes sense for it to include the jack on its flagship smartphone. While I would have liked to see a quad DAC in this device as we see on many of LG’s flagships, the presence of the port is still a big win.

The left side of the phone is mostly clean, excluding the SIM card/microSD card slot. Sony has always been fairly unique with these slots though, allowing you to extract the tray with your finger instead of requiring a SIM tool. I really like this design, and it makes it easier to swap out SIMs or SD cards on a whim. As a phone reviewer, I’m almost constantly looking for SIM tools, so it’s nice that I don’t need one for this device.

The design of the Xperia 1 II is super minimalist but still stylish.

The bottom of the phone simply houses the USB-C port. The back and front glass are Gorilla Glass 6, and the frame is made of aluminum.

The Sony Xperia 1 II doesn’t have a notch or hole-punch for its selfie camera. Instead, it opted for some tried-and-true bezels. Opinions on bezels are split, but they are quite thin, and including them allowed Sony to use front-facing speakers on this phone. I love front-facing speakers, and they make music and videos sound great while consuming content. These speakers get quite loud, though they do get slightly distorted at maximum volume. That being said, they’re quite good for a smartphone.

One of the defining aspects of the Xperia 1 series is its 21:9 4K HDR OLED display. Sony rocks a 6.5-inch panel on the Xperia 1 II, and while that screen size isn’t quite as large as some other flagships, the unique aspect ratio gives it a very particular feel. It’s a bit weird at first when you’re not used to holding something so narrow and tall. But I grew to like it really quickly. It’s fantastic for multitasking, and Sony has a built-in multi-window tool that lets you run two apps at once to take advantage of the tall display. The 21:9 aspect ratio means you can also watch most movies in the same format you’d see them in the theatre.

The Xperia 1 II uses an incredibly dense panel, with a resolution of 3,840 x 1,644. On most devices, I can’t notice the difference between a 1080p and 1440p display unless I look at the pixels closely. With this device, I can’t even discern individual pixels with my eyes right up against the display. It’s wildly sharp, and icons often look like they’re floating off the screen. The screen tuning looks great in its default mode, but Sony also includes a Creator Mode which supports the BT.2020 color gamut and 10-bit HDR color.

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I should note that this is a 60Hz panel, not a 90 or 120Hz display you may be used to seeing on flagships in 2020. But that’s a trade-off Sony had to make to use a 4K display in this thing. I’m fine with it. But if you’re a high-refresh die-hard, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Overall, I think Sony nailed the design of this phone. It’s minimalistic and feels great, but it’s also unique and does a great job recalling the popular Xperia devices of the past. I’m impressed.

Performance & battery: Fill this in

The Xperia 1 II is a true flagship device for Sony. That means it sports the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, with optional microSD card expansion. It has IP68 water and dust resistance. It has wireless charging. Honestly, it kind of has it all. And that came through in day-to-day use as well.

I didn’t see any performance issues or frame drops while using the Xperia 1 II. Sony uses a streamlined skin of Android which likely contributed to the great performance, but the latest Snapdragon processor and 8GB of RAM helped the Xperia 1 II blow through any tasks I threw at it.

In benchmarks, the Sony Xperia 1 II performed very, very well, and came out near the top on all phones we’ve tested.

The Sony Xperia 1 II notched 4,248 in Geekbench 4 single-core and 13,102 in Geekbench 4 multi-core, for example, while the OnePlus 8 Pro scored 4,195 and 13,142 in Geekbench 4 single and multi, respectively. That’s an incredibly tight race and shows both devices can trade punches. Either way, you shouldn’t experience any performance issues with either device.

We should also note that the Sony Xperia 1 II scored the highest of any phone we’ve tested in Speed Test G. It finished the benchmark in one minute and 26 seconds. That’s quite impressive.

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Battery life on the Sony Xperia 1 II was almost exactly average in real-world testing. I got about six hours of screen-on time, which lasted a bit more than a day. This was about the same battery life as I experienced on the LG Velvet, which is impressive considering this phone uses a 4K display and has a smaller 4,000mAh cell compared to the Velvet’s 4,300mAh battery.

Camera: A phone in name only

The camera system on the Sony Xperia 1 II is far and away one of the most advanced we’ve seen on a smartphone. It may not produce the highest quality images, but Sony was targeting a different metric with this camera system: speed.

The Xperia 1 II features three distinct cameras on the back of the device. There is a wide 12MP camera with a 1/2.6-inch sensor and dual-PD autofocus, a main 12MP camera with a 1/1.7-inch sensor, dual-PD autofocus, and OIS, and a telephoto 12MP camera with a 1/3.4-inch sensor, PD autofocus, and OIS. In making this camera system, Sony wanted to offer two things: the “holy trinity” of zoom lenses, and the same 20fps burst mode of the Sony Alpha A9 mirrorless camera.

In photography, the holy trinity of zoom lenses refers to a wide-to-medium zoom, a medium-to-telephoto zoom, and a telephoto-to-super-telephoto zoom. Here, Sony went with a 16-24mm, a 24-70mm, and a 70-200mm lens. This range covers most subjects, unless you’re doing ultra-wide landscape or astrophotography, or if you’re doing super-zoomed wildlife photography.

Of course, these aren’t optical zoom lenses. It’s still just a 16mm, 24mm, and 70mm. But Sony was still very deliberate with these focal lengths, choosing them specifically to try and emulate the holy trinity.

Like I mentioned before, Sony wanted to mirror the 20fps autofocus-capable burst mode it sports in its A9 series of cameras. This is extremely impressive, especially considering the phone will check for focus three times per frame before it decides where the focus will be. So if you take a full second of burst images, the phone will take 20 images, with focus calculated 60 times.

To do this, Sony couldn’t use the biggest or highest-resolution sensor it has available. I would have loved to see the Sony IMX 689 sensor in this device – the same which was used in the Oppo Find X2 Pro and OnePlus 8 Pro. But when I asked Sony why it didn’t use this chip, it said it had to use a slightly smaller, lower-resolution sensor to achieve the 20fps burst mode, and a smaller telephoto sensor helped them achieve the 70mm lens. While I understand Sony’s reasoning here, I think a wider audience would be satisfied with better image quality as a trade-off to a fast burst mode. That being said, Sony is clearly targeting this phone at pro photographers and videographers, as I’ll discuss more later.

The main 24mm lens is by far the best of the bunch, due to its fairly large 1/1.7-inch sensor. It has great color and clarity in good light and does fairly well in low-light circumstances as well. Sony is very subtle with its color processing in the standard camera app, not applying any super aggressive color shifts. Lower-light circumstances do take a couple of seconds to process, but they generally look great once it’s done processing.

The telephoto lens is similar in its great color profile, but it’s certainly softer than the main sensor. I believe this is due to the sensor being fairly small at 1/3.4-inches, which causes the phone to use a higher ISO and therefore more noise reduction. That’s not to say it’s bad though – it’s still better than a crop.

The wide lens is great as well, but it’s a bit more washed-out color-wise than the other lenses. It’s still very sharp though, capturing a good amount of detail, even around the edges, where wide lenses generally get the softest. Either way, the color profiles are fairly consistent over the range – something that can’t be said of many smartphone camera systems.

The selfie camera on this phone is probably the Achilles’ heel of the system. It is extremely soft even in good light and looks terrible in low light. It also tended to capture lens flares, which look pretty bad when the selfie camera is already very soft. This is an 8MP sensor and extremely small at 1/4-inch, so it’s no surprise that it’s pretty bad.

If you want to see these sample photos and more in full resolution, I’ve uploaded them to a Google Drive folder here.

The standard camera app on the Xperia 1 II is okay, but it’s not very intuitive. The button to switch to the selfie camera is on the top, which is pretty difficult to reach on a tall display like this. You can still swipe down to switch to the front camera, but it feels like the button should be where the Mode button is, which has settings for things like portrait selfies and color filters. There is also no HDR in the main app – it can only be found in the Camera Pro app. If anything, the standard app is where HDR should be, since those who don’t care about having full control of their image make particular use of the feature.

The phone also won’t switch to the correct lens when you zoom all the way in on the main app. The only way to switch to the next lens is to tap one of the three lens options at the bottom of the screen. It would make a lot more sense if Sony seamlessly transitioned between the wide, standard, and telephoto lenses as you zoomed.

I initially wanted to title this review “The Alpha phone” because of the “pro” photo and video apps Sony made for this device. One is called Photo Pro, and the other is called Cinema Pro.

Both of these apps are built to work as similarly to a dedicated Sony digital camera as possible. It effectively looks like Sony’s menu system is seated right up against its viewfinder. For people who are new to the Sony menu system, including me, this can be fairly confusing to navigate. But once you get the hang of it, these apps give you an incredible amount of control over the phone’s cameras.

The Photo Pro app pushes the concept of the holy trinity of lenses by giving you digital zoom rings for each lens. The 16mm can zoom up to 24mm, the 24mm zooms to 70mm, and the 70mm lens zooms up to 200mm. While I love the style and attention to detail Sony put into this app, it does have some weird quirks. I would like to be able to continue zooming and the phone to automatically switch to the next lens, for example, though I understand that Sony wants people to feel like they’re physically switching lenses. I understand the sentiment, but the fact remains that smartphone cameras aren’t the same as dedicated cameras. If you can seamlessly switch leases, do it. Don’t restrict that just because this is a smartphone.

The Cinema Pro app is similar to the Photo Pro app, but instead of being based on a Sony Alpha camera, it’s based on the Sony FS series of cinema cameras. It offers an incredible amount of control, all the way down to shutter speed, resolution, and even shutter angle. Sony also included many of its picture profiles from the camera line, which are well-known and respected. The Cinema Pro app works in a project format, allowing you to jump back into a project and retain all the same settings.

Both of these apps have one big issue though – they only work in landscape mode. While I’m sure most people won’t be shooting video in portrait orientation through Sony’s Pro app, it would be nice to have it included. Especially on the Photo Pro app, it would be nice to have portrait orientation support.

If the Photo Pro and Cinema Pro apps were the only camera apps on this phone, I would say that they are much, much too complicated for the average user. And they probably are. But Sony offers them as options for those who want extremely fine control of their phone’s camera. And because the default camera app is still a mostly standard smartphone camera app, I applaud it for making these Pro apps, even if I don’t envision many people using them to their full potential.

Software: Wonderfully practical

The Sony Xperia 1 II runs Android 10, and it does something that I wish more OEMs would do: use Google apps as defaults. Immediately when booting up the phone, you’ll see Google Phone, Google Messages, Chrome, and Google Photos on the dock. Sony doesn’t try to make many proprietary apps for things Google can already offer, and that makes for a much nicer experience.

Sony’s skin on top of Android is also incredibly lightweight, and it doesn’t feel like it adds things unnecessarily. This skin is very similar to Pixel UI, and that’s something I can get behind. There’s a Google Search bar at the bottom of the screen and a Google feed when you swipe left.

Sony does have some cool apps that work well with this device, like the PlayStation app which lets you attach a DualShock controller natively. This is great for people that love PS4 Remote Play and want to play on their phones.

Sony Xperia 1 II specs

Value and competition

• Sony Xperia 1 II: 8GB RAM, 256GB Storage — $1,199.99

There’s no doubt that $1,200 is a lot to pay for a smartphone. It’s certainly up there in price, but the Xperia 1 II also sports almost all the specs and features you’d want out of a device. With the latest flagship processor from Qualcomm, ample RAM and storage, IP68 water and dust resistance, expandable storage, and even a headphone jack, it’s got almost everything. A notable exception is 5G, if you live in the US, or other markets where it’s not offered.

At its pricing tier, the Sony Xperia 1 II is effectively in direct competition with phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus. Compared to the Galaxy S20 Plus, the Sony Xperia 1 II has more storage, a headphone jack, and a taller, higher resolution display. Its cameras are arguably slightly worse than Samsung’s but they still perform well. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S20 Plus has a higher-refresh 120Hz panel.

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If you want to spend a bit less cash, the OnePlus 8 Pro starts at $899. Like the S20 Plus, the OnePlus sports slightly less storage than the Xperia 1 II, but has a slightly better main camera sensor and 120Hz refresh rate display.

Ultimately, I think the Sony Xperia 1 II offers a lot, even at its top-tier price point. While many devices have one big feature they’re missing, the Xperia 1 II does almost everything fairly well. While it might not have the best out-of-the-box camera system on the market, it’s certainly versatile.

Sony Xperia 1 II review: Should you buy it?

The Sony Xperia 1 II is a great example of what can happen when a mega-company like Sony pulls together all its resources to make a smartphone. With a wildly high-resolution 21:9 OLED display, a versatile camera system, and even a headphone jack, Sony has finally made a phone I’d love to keep in my pocket.

If you’re looking for the best image quality straight out of the camera, you won’t get that here. Sony was focused on making this phone a mobile A9 camera, with 20fps shooting with autofocus. Because of that, it couldn’t include its biggest and best sensor. While I wish it aimed for image quality instead of image speed, I can understand what it was going for.

While the camera system might be frustrating to everyone except the most dedicated photographers, the other parts of the phone make up for it. The display is unique and fantastic, the UI is minimal, and it has all the bells and whistles like wireless charging, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. That makes this a wonderful phone for everyone, regardless of how much you care about the camera.

So should you buy it? I would say yes. Sony has made one of my favorite phones of the year in the Xperia 1 II. And that’s saying something.