The Sony Xperia 1 Review: A 21:9 Take of the World
by Andrei Frumusanu on July 26, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Sony
- Smartphones
- Xperia 1
Battery Life - Meagre Results
Battery life results of the Xperia 1 is among one of the biggest questions for the device. With a 3330mAh battery capacity, the battery is a tad lower than what we’d find in other devices of the same device footprint this year. Sony managed to keep the size and weight of the phone in check, but it’s still quite on the lower end of capacities we’re finding on the market.
There’s also the big question of as to how then 4K resolution screen will behave. As mentioned on the previous page, the display implementation for the 4K might not be done in the most power efficient way, and the phone did showcase idle full screen black base power consumption of 538mW which is quite high compared to the ~400ish mW we saw from Samsung and OnePlus. As such, I’m heading into the battery results with a bit of pessimism as to how the Xperia 1 will end up.
Unfortunately my fears were validated and in our web browsing test the new Xperia 1 performed well short of its competition. The double-whammy of a smaller battery and more efficient screen isn’t a great combination and the device longevity visible suffers from this.
If one would simply scale up the result and normalise it for a 4000mAh battery, the phone would still largely lag behind at around 10.3h, but at least it’d be in line with other phones such as the OnePlus 7 Pro.
In PCMark the phone is also lagging behind by a tad, although the display’s inefficiencies here are less amplified as on the web browsing test.
Overall, the Xperia 1’s battery life isn’t too fantastic. It falls in line with the LG V40 which also suffered from an inefficient display, and I made the remark on that device that it was a deal-breaker, so I have to be fair and also say that it’s also a massive negative for the Xperia 1.
The display’s 4K resolution and less efficient DDIC is just a big trade-off to make, but to also have a competitively smaller battery really represents a double-negative for the phone which is very unfortunately given its price-range.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
75 Comments
View All Comments
Samus - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
So this is going to need a custom ROM to get proper 4K rendering across applications? How the hell is a 4K screen useful if the only thing it shows at 4K are photos?Lord of the Bored - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"the included headphones are 3.5mm"No standard headphone port, includes standard headphones.
I ... I can't make fun of this. It is too easy, I'd feel bad.
Cliff34 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
Given that Sony also makes the camera, it will make sense or a stronger marketing strategy if the phone's strong suit is the camera.Hopefully, the next model the smart phone team can work w the camera team to integrate in a way that blows away the competition.
Having a big screen and a small battery is a hard sale. Plus the steep price Tag.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"Given that Sony also makes the camera"this appears to be a case of the cobbler's kids going barefoot. aren't most high end phone cameras sourced from Sony?
5j3rul3 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
So where's the test results of Xperia 1's Loudspeakers in the article?nandnandnand - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"While the panel is indeed 4K"3840 x 1644 = 76% of 4K UHD
s.yu - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
The detail retention surprised me. There's clear evidence of heavy sharpening and strange artifacts in the clouds and/or shadows, but yes, some of the increase in detail retention can't be explained by mere sharpening.The results here are better than at GSMA, maybe it's sample variation, but the artifacts are quite often disturbing, like leaves that look munched up by bugs. Apart from crushed blacks, the Pixel's output still seems the best, since it avoids the artifacts, and Apple's SmartHDR also balances between noise retention, artifact generation and detail retention. For example the shadow cast by the tree onto the street(scene 3), there are still tiles in that shadow, yet only the Pixel and XS could recover the tiles with texture in a way that's more or less consistent with the tiles around it under sunlight, while Sony left a smear there and Huawei's texture still seems aggregated and fake. Also in the indoor shot Sony failed in several places regarding texture, it smeared fibers and wood. Sony seems to have gone too far leaving artifacts everywhere.
The sharpness of the UWA is clearly because of the uncorrected barrel distortion, it's half a fisheye which is much easier to correct CA for while the others are largely rectilinear, but the P30P has a narrower FoV, which also makes it easier to correct. The fact that the S10+ is as wide as the Xperia yet as corrected and as sharp as the P30P makes it the better UWA.
s.yu - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
At night I believe metering is still a significant issue, devices/instances that expose to the right get much better results overall...and I believe the P30P fakes UWA shots in certain instances, only the peripherals (over 50% in area) are managed by the UWA while the center is actually data from the main, the transition is quite obvious in the tunnel shot...I believe there is some sort of merging going on in the Xperia shots. The artifacts in the clouds in certain daylight shots resemble those in LR during an HDR DNG capture, if there's merging in the day there's no sense it doesn't merge at night. That result also seems too stable (if above 1/2s) even considering the OIS.
Zumaso - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
niceUtilityMax - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I really wonder if the architecture with separate CPUs for three types of different workloads is basically a gimmick to score well on single-core benchmarks. Considering that many OEMs still haven't figured out how to optimize well for the big.LITTLE architectures with separate CPUs for only two types of workloads.