The Sony Xperia 1 Review: A 21:9 Take of the World

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.