OCTOBER 2019 • TECH ADVISOR 31REVIEWIt doesn’t help that the Xperia 1 is one slippery
customer – there are slippery glass phones, and then
there is the Xperia 1. Put it on any hint of a non-flat
surface – sofa arm, book, glass table – and the thing
visibly slides towards doom.
Despite the dimensions, I found I grew to really
like the Xperia 1’s odd form factor. Going back to the
iPhone XR made Apple’s phone looks comically short
and chubby, rather than the Sony too tall and thin.
ThepurpleunitI reviewedis nottoeveryone’s
taste,butis a deliberateharkbacktotheoriginal
XperiaZ of a similar hue that Sony dropped after a
while. It’s the boldest choice of Xperia 1 – otherwise
you can go for black, white or grey.
Cameras
WhereSonyexcelswithitsactualcameras,it
hasusuallyfallen short with the quality of its
smartphone cameras. It supplies hardware to many
other manufacturers, but these days smartphone
photography is also defined by the software processing
that complements great hardware.
The Xperia 1 is the first Sony phone with triple rear
cameras: 12Mp f/1.6 main sensor, 12Mp f/2.4 telephoto
and 12Mp f/2.4 ultrawide. This is welcome given the
XZ3onlyhadoneandletsyougetbetterzoom,but
theultra-wide lens’ fisheye warping of the edges of
images is off-putting enough to never bother using it.
Untilnow,imagingonSony’sflagshipXperia
phoneshave lagged noticeably behind. The
Xperia 1 rightsthiswrong– partly– byproducing
outstandingphotos in many conditions. It just feels