Sony’s back with its latest flagship, the Xperia 1 VII! This phone represents the seventh generation of Sony’s premium smartphone line, and it continues the company’s tradition of blending advanced technology with a unique, almost old-school, approach. What can you expect? This year, Sony has tweaked the display, enhanced the audio, included a new chipset, and upgraded the ultrawide camera.
In this Sony Xperia 1 VII review, we’ll go into every detail this phone has to offer. We’ll explore its design, display, performance, camera capabilities, and battery life to help you decide if it’s the right phone for you.
Design and Build: A Familiar Yet Refined Look
The Xperia 1 VII maintains a familiar rectangular shape that’s been a signature of Sony’s Xperia line. The back is constructed from Gorilla Glass Victus, offering a rough, grippy texture that feels secure in your hand.
The aluminum frame has been subtly redesigned with a ribbed texture. This enhances grip and gives the phone a premium feel. Overall, the design prioritizes practicality and comfort.
The phone retains its IP65/IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. What does this mean for you? It means the Xperia 1 VII can handle splashes, rain, and even being submerged in shallow water for a limited time.
Display: Brightness and Smoothness
The Xperia 1 VII boasts a 6.5-inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, protected by Gorilla Glass Victus 2. While earlier Xperia flagships featured 4K displays, Sony has opted for a more practical 1080p resolution in recent models.
Why the change? This likely comes down to balancing visual fidelity with battery life and cost. The 1080p display is still sharp and vibrant, providing a great viewing experience.
The display supports 10-bit color depth and HDR10 video playback, ensuring rich, accurate colors and excellent dynamic range. Unfortunately, Dolby Vision isn’t supported.
The 120Hz refresh rate makes swiping and scrolling incredibly smooth. It’s also adaptive, meaning it can scale down to as low as 30Hz when you’re not actively interacting with the screen. This helps conserve battery life. The display can reach up to 800 nits with the manual brightness slider and can boost to over 1,470 nits in auto mode, exceeding the previous model’s brightness.
Audio: A Mix of Old and New
In a world where headphone jacks are becoming increasingly rare, the Xperia 1 VII stands out by including a 3.5mm port. Sony emphasizes that the headphone experience is “Walkman-powered” and features high-end circuitry. This is designed to provide superior sound quality. If you are a music lover, this is likely to appeal to you.
The phone’s stereo speakers are front-facing. Surprisingly, they seem to be a bit of a downgrade from the previous model. They earned a “Good” rating for loudness, rather than “Excellent.” While the quality is still good, some competing flagships offer better audio performance. For the best sound quality, using headphones is recommended.
Biometrics and Storage: Nostalgic Touches
The Xperia 1 VII uses a side-mounted fingerprint reader for biometric authentication. It’s responsive and conveniently located on the power button.
Another welcome addition is the microSD card slot for expandable storage. This allows you to add more storage as needed. The only onboard storage option is 256GB.
Software: Android 15 and Sony’s Minimalist UI
The Xperia 1 VII runs on Android 15, and Sony’s software experience remains relatively conservative. Sony keeps modifications to a minimum.
One of the more noticeable customizations is the square, uniform quick toggles in the notification shade.
Another Sony-exclusive feature is the Multi-window switch. It’s essentially two task switchers stacked on top of one another, allowing you to easily navigate between apps in split-screen mode.
Side Sense is another useful feature. A handle on the edge of the screen opens a menu of customizable shortcuts. You can set these shortcuts to launch apps, access settings, or even create split-screen pairs.
You can connect the phone to Sony Alpha cameras. This allows you to use the phone as an external monitor, which can be useful for photographers and videographers.
The phone also includes a gaming interface called Game Enhancer. It provides various gaming-related options, accessible through a standalone hub or as an in-game overlay.
Surprisingly, the Xperia 1 VII lacks prominent AI-based features. While it includes Google Gemini, you won’t find a suite of custom AI tools like those offered by Samsung and other manufacturers. Sony claims that AI is used behind the scenes for camera processing.
Sony promises four major OS releases and six years of security patches, ensuring that the phone will stay up-to-date for years to come.
Performance: Snapdragon 8 Elite and Thermal Throttling
As expected for a flagship device, the Xperia 1 VII is equipped with a cutting-edge chipset: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. In benchmarks, the Mark 7 clearly outperforms its predecessor. However, the scores are on the lower end of the spectrum for Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phones, suggesting that it may not be as optimized as some competitors.
Sustained performance is also an area of concern. In prolonged stress tests, the phone experienced significant thermal throttling. Performance dropped sharply, with CPU performance dipping to about half of its peak within the first eight minutes.
Battery Life: A Step Backwards?
The Xperia 1 VII is powered by a 5,000 mAh battery, the same capacity as last year’s model. The previous model offered excellent battery life, making it a tough act to follow.
The Xperia 1 Mark VII earned an active use score of 14 hours and 44 minutes in GSM Arena’s tests. While still a respectable score, it falls short of last year’s model, which achieved around 17.5 hours.
Charging: Stuck in the Past
Sony hasn’t made any improvements to the charging speed, which remains at just 30W. To make matters worse, a charger isn’t included in the box. Using Sony’s own adapter, the phone charged from 0 to 51% in half an hour, and a full charge took around an hour and a half. This is quite slow by today’s standards.
The phone does support wireless charging and reverse wireless charging, offering some added convenience.
Camera Hardware: New Ultrawide Sensor
The camera setup includes the same main cam and continuous zoom telephoto as before, but the Xperia 1 VII features a new, larger sensor 50MP ultrawide camera. This is the biggest change for this year’s model.
As always, you get a dedicated two-step shutter button for the cameras. It’s now slightly larger and offers better tactile feedback. Since last year, Xperia phones have used a single camera app for a more streamlined user experience.
Main Camera – Daylight Performance
Daylight photos from the Xperia’s main camera generally look great. Detail is excellent overall, with a nicely natural rendition of random textures and little to no noise. The look is expressive and contrasty, yet the phone maintains very good dynamic range with well-developed extremes.
Photos of people are decent, but the rendition of facial detail isn’t the best. The so-called bokeh mode can be a little too liberal with the background blur by default.
Main Camera – 2x Zoom
The two-time zoom results from the main cam are very good in most cases. I had a bit more success outdoors, while indoor shots were a little softer. All things considered, the two-time zoom level is more than usable.
Main Camera – Nighttime Performance
At night, the main cam continues to produce high-contrast images that still manage to deliver very good dynamic range. It strikes a really nice balance between highlight preservation and shadow development. Detail is top class with no signs of oversharpening. White balance and color saturation are also leaving no grounds for complaint.
Telephoto Camera – Daylight Performance at 3.5x Zoom
The telephoto cam has continuous zoom. It can go all the way from 3.5 times to 7.1 time zoom and is optical all the way. At 3.5x zoom, the camera does well overall. Detail and sharpness are okay, and there’s a bit of noise, particularly indoors, but it’s not too bad. Dynamic range is great with the same contrasty look as on the main camera, and colors are easy to like as well. When shooting people at 3.5x zoom, the results are okay, dynamic range is nicely wide, and the exposures are tailored to your subject, and the result is perhaps a little too bright overall. Colors are nice, but the detail of the subject is a bit disappointing.
Telephoto Camera – Daylight Performance at 5x Zoom
Things get a little softer around the middle of the zoom range at five times. The results are still good, just not exactly stellar in terms of sharpness. There is also a macro mode at five time zoom which can focus from as close as 4 cm. There’s no autofocus available in this mode, but if you’re patient, it has the potential to capture some nice-looking close-ups.
Telephoto Camera – Daylight Performance at 7.1x Zoom
When shooting at 7.1 times and maxing out the camera’s native zoom, there’s even more of a decline in sharpness, though we’d still consider the results quite good.
Telephoto Camera – Nighttime Performance
The nighttime zoom shots from the Xperia 1 Mark VII are all right at 3.5x zoom. The phone captures a good amount of detail, but the results aren’t that sharp. Dynamic range and colors are pretty great, though. When you zoom in further, there’s a progressive decline in quality at a pixel level, though global properties remain good even at 7.1 times. You’ll still be getting okay shots, just not ones that are too impressive.
Ultrawide Camera – Daylight Performance
The Mark 7’s new ultrawide cam is quite nice. Its shots are super sharp and detailed, and noise is well controlled. Dynamic range is excellent, and color rendition is superb, too.
Ultrawide Camera – Nighttime Performance
At night, the ultra wide shots are well worthy of praise, with some outstanding detail and low noise. We’re loving the colors and dynamic range too.
Selfie Camera
Selfies come from a 12 megapixel fixed focus front-facing cam. They have very good detail, and the colors and skin tones are quite likable. Dynamic range is excellent too.
Video Recording Capabilities
The Xperia 1 Mark VII can record video in 4K and up to 120 fps with the rear cameras, while the selfie cam maxes out at 4K at 60 fps.
Video Quality – Main Camera
4k videos from the main cam are good, but not great. The color presentation and dynamic range are excellent, but there’s a general softness which is noticeable across the whole frame.
Video Quality – Telephoto Camera
From the telephoto cam, again, colors and dynamic range are very good, but the sharpness leaves more to be desired. We expected a bit more from the telephoto camera.
Video Quality – Ultrawide Camera
While colors and dynamic range remain excellent, it’s not really delivering the great detail that we saw in the still photos.
Video Stabilization
Video stabilization works quite well to smooth out movements while filming.
Low-Light Video
When shooting video at night, the main camera does a reasonably good job. The telephoto cam’s footage, on the other hand, is quite soft. It isn’t competitive against other flagship telephotos with their big sensors. The Xperia Ultra Wide, on the other hand, captures a bit better detail than average at night thanks to its large sensor.
Conclusion: A Solid Choice for Sony Fans
The Sony Xperia 1 VII review shows just how many nice features are packed into this phone! Just like last year, there are many rare features, including a headphone jack and expandable storage.
The upgrades here are few, though there is a new chipset and a great new ultrawide camera, but the battery life is actually shorter this time around, and the speakers are quieter, too. At the same time, other manufacturers are bringing plenty of innovation when it comes to AI based features, something that’s totally missing here on the Xperia.
If you’re a fan of Sony’s approach to things and don’t care about AI, then the Xperia 1 Mark 7 could be worth looking into. Just keep in mind that last year’s model might be an even better deal.
If you’re looking for alternatives, check out our reviews of the Xperia 1 Mark 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
What do you think of the Xperia 1 VII? Let us know in the comments below!
