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- Highly accurate and punchy screen
- Headphone jack and microSD slot
- Generally good photo quality
- Extremely expensive
- Zoom camera has lost its competitive edge
- Wear-prone design
The Xperia 1 VII needs to answer the question of whether Sony can still compete in this rarefied air, alongside the best smartphones from Samsung and the Chinese giants.
For many, it is going to be a bit of a tough sell. The Xperia 1 VII is expensive, does not bring all that many meaningful improvements, and suffers from some technical issues, too.
It’s still a great phone, and one that offers plenty of features that others do not – like expandable storage, a headphone jack and physical camera button – but at £1,399, the value for money simply isn’t there.
Sony Xperia 1 VII: What you need to know
Compared to last year’s Xperia 1 VI, this generation has only a few upgrades. It runs on a newer Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and has a higher-resolution ultra-wide camera, but otherwise, it feels very similar to its predecessor.
Key draws of both of these generations are in the way Sony does things differently, by not adopting the same trends and norms as the other brands.
The Sony Xperia 1 VII has a headphone jack, expandable memory and does not have a punch hole front camera or any kind of notch. This just isn’t the stuff you’ll find in the Samsung Galaxy S25 series or an iPhone.
Price and competition
The Sony Xperia 1 VII is one of the most expensive Android phones going. Unlike most other flagships in this price range, there is only one storage configuration here, with the sole 256GB model priced at an exorbitant £1,399.
That’s £150 more than the equivalent variant of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which starts at £1,249 for the 256GB model. It is also more expensive than Google’s closest alternative, the Pixel 10 Pro XL, which starts at £1,199 – again with the same 256GB of storage.
Design and key features
The Sony Xperia 1 VII sticks to the same design principles that Sony’s higher-end Android phones have adhered to for years, pairing flat front and rear panels — bar the camera bump — with relatively squared-off side walls.
The lack of curves does nothing to mitigate the heft of this phone but at 74mm wide and 8.2mm thick, it’s thankfully not too bulky in the hand.
A layer of Gorilla Glass Victus 2 sits over the display and the back is coated with a matte piece of original Victus, embossed with a miniature texture of friction-increasing dimples. I’ve found the rear wears better than the front, which, despite the high-end glass, has picked up numerous micro-scratches after two months of testing.
Sony doesn’t include a screen protector or a case but the use of both is highly recommended – particularly the latter.
The relatively sharp-sided design means the same tiny areas take the brunt of any friction. Within a month of use, very noticeable sections of the paint on the camera housing had worn away, leaving the bare metal underneath. And the effect is seen in the sidewalls’ paintwork, too.
Still, if you’re going to buy a phone this expensive, you’d hopefully take care of it with a case too, right?
Typical of Sony, the Xperia 1 VII carries an IP65/IP68 dust and water resistance rating, which means it is dust-tight, able to withstand jets of water from any direction and made to survive submersion in fresh water at a depth of up to 1.5m for up to 30 minutes. That’s all well and good but the little rubber seal around the SIM tray felt a little flimsy in my testing, so treat it well if you want to keep that durability intact.
Said SIM-tray is also home to one of the Xperia 1 VII’s more unusual parts, a microSD slot. Though standard on Xperia phones, this feature is very rarely seen on other top-tier phones. The same holds true for the 3.5mm headphone jack that sits on the top edge.
If you don’t fancy that, the speakers are decent, too. They form a stereo pair, with respectable volume and weight, though they are not class-leading in either aspect.
Where most flagships use an under-display fingerprint scanner, the Xperia 1 VII sticks with keeping its sensor in the recessed power button on the right edge. It’s also pickier than most: just a little excess moisture means it’ll refuse to recognise your finger. This can be particularly annoying when cooking or at the gym – though this extra sensitivity can probably also be spun as a security benefit.
There’s a familiarity to the Sony Xperia 1 VII’s design that’s mirrored in its software too. The phone uses Sony’s custom interface atop Android 15. There’s nothing too ambitious or dramatic going on here, just a practical and conventional front-end. But in 2025 it may seem refreshing in the way it does not shove AI down your throat too violently.
Far less commendable is Sony’s software support proposal: with just four years of OS updates and six of security patches planned, the Xperia 1 VII is quite a ways behind the likes of Samsung and Google, which both offer seven years apiece for their (considerably cheaper) flagships.
Display
Years ago, Sony was known for using ultra-long and extremely high-resolution phone screens: 2023’s Xperia 1 V had a 21:9 4K display, for example.
Was it necessary? Not really, but it did stand out, at least. By comparison, the Xperia 1 VII’s 6.5in, 19.5:9 1080p panel seems downright ordinary. Still, most people aren’t going to feel that it lacks in pixels, and fewer still are likely to miss the old super-elongated style.
Even without that longer form, Sony has kept the larger-than-most top bezel, which handily houses the selfie camera, meaning that there’s no hole-punch notch eating into the display.
Otherwise, all the usual high-end benefits are here: the refresh rate tops out at 120Hz and there’s support for HDR, too. Moreover, my testing confirmed that this display has both the brightness and the colour chops to do such content justice.
On manual brightness, I recorded a peak of 803 nits, while displaying HDR content saw it rise to an impressive 1,504cd/m2. HDR brightness is used in the photo gallery too, letting those highlights in clouds really pop off the screen.
As in any OLED phone, the Sony Xperia 1 VII delivers excellent colour depth. Calibration of the standard, vivid-looking, mode is very good, but it reaches truly exceptional heights when you switch to the Creator mode, where accuracy is favoured over eye candy.
Performance and battery life
The Sony Xperia 1 VII is fitted with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor – the current favourite for Android flagships and the generational successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that powered the Xperia 1 VI.
This is a high-powered Android device that can play games well, loads apps quickly and feels smooth, nippy and responsive in general use. Our testing has not been without issues, though.
Twice during testing, the Xperia 1 VII has turned itself off, as if the battery has inexplicably run out. For 10-20 minutes, no combination of button presses will do anything to rouse it. And while it will switch back on after a while, it’s not ideal.
Sony has acknowledged this issue, and is currently undergoing a recall programme. Having checked the IMEI number, however, this review sample isn’t even among Sony’s affected batch.
The phone would occasionally get quite warm, as well, and drain a fair amount of battery when merely streaming audio over Bluetooth – this happened intermittently with no identifiable trigger, which only makes it more confusing.
The Sony Xperia 1 VII has a 5000mAh battery and Sony says it can last for two days of real-world use – but my testing did not support this claim. After a day of moderate use, it will typically only have a small amount of battery left each night, while busy travel days abroad capped off with a night out necessitated a brief pitstop at the hotel for a charge before heading out again.
There’s no bundled charger but, if you have a compatible plug, the Sony Xperia 1 VII supports up to 30W charging, meaning a full charge takes a little under 90 minutes.
While this counts as fast charging by the original standard – when we finally jumped beyond 10W – it won’t feel like it if you’re upgrading from a Chinese phone. Brands like Xiaomi and OnePlus have been fitting 60W-plus charging into relatively affordable Androids for years now, with the fastest charging phones around able to go from empty to 100% in well under an hour.
Slow charging and slightly disappointing battery life is not a desirable combo. The Sony Xperia 1 VII does at least offer wireless charging, but again this only operates at up to 15W. Handy enough for a desk wireless charger at work, but not great for general charging.
Cameras
The Sony Xperia 1 VII has, on its surface, the best kind of phone camera array. We get a large 48-megapixel primary sensor, a 48-megapixel ultrawide — an upgrade from the last generation’s 12-megapixel sensor — and Sony’s signature 12-megapixel telephoto.
The latter is one of very few phone cameras that has a moving lens, with optical zooms that can span between 3.5x and 7.1x, and it also doubles as a macro camera.
Having a zoom camera like this opens up all sorts of shooting opportunities; I took it with me to a music festival and several standalone music gigs, and its versatility proved to be very handy for these sorts of situations.
Images can be noticeably soft, however, especially at the further reaches of the range. The moving lens is a quirky enough inclusion but is it an effective one? Especially when we see better zoom shots from the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, which simply includes two separate telephoto cameras instead.
There are a few other issues too. The Sony Xperia 1 VII has a habit of freezing when you attempt to switch camera modes, solved by leaving the app and returning. It’s also often a little slow to update the preview image to account for HDR processing. You might call these niggles, but in a phone this expensive, they become grating fast.
Other than that, the Sony Xperia 1 VII is a great phone camera. The main camera’s images often look less overly processed than those of some rivals, and there’s a good level of tonal consistency between the wide and ultra-wide cameras.
Video quality is impressive too, even if the mode selection is arguably not. The Sony Xperia 1 VII can reach up to 4K resolution at 120fps regardless of the field of view chosen, from ultra-wide to zoom. But there’s no 8K mode, seen in plenty of rivals, and the super-slo-mo mode Sony used to make headlines years ago is absent.
The 12-megapixel front camera is solid enough and takes fairly natural-looking selfies, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary in terms of image quality, tech or field of view.
Verdict
The Sony Xperia 1 VII is a powerful and capable phone, and a flagship quite unlike any other, thanks to Sony’s continued commitment to doing things differently.
In the same breath, however, it also ends up being the culmination of Sony’s ever-weakening position among smartphone-makers.
The high price suggests the Sony Xperia 1 VII should be at the cutting edge of tech in all areas – and it simply isn’t. Rivals have long since caught up on the photography front and, despite Sony admirably continuing to offer features that are hardly ever seen on flagships, you’ll get far more value for money from the likes of Samsung and Apple, too. There’s a lot to like about the Xperia 1 VII – but nowhere near enough to justify that price tag.
