Sony Xperia 1 VIII targets loyal fans again

The Xperia 1 VIII is Sony’s latest attempt to reinvent its flagship phone line, and it brings real change. The design has been overhauled, the camera system has been rethought, and the signature continuous optical zoom telephoto lens , a defining feature for four generations , has been dropped entirely. Yet for all that evolution, the phone remains firmly aimed at the same audience: Sony loyalists.

Familiar Sony staples survive, including a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot, along with design quirks like a thick front bezel housing stereo speakers. The ambitious pricing remains unchanged too. The Xperia 1 VIII skips the US market entirely, but in the UK and Europe it starts at £1,399 / €1,499 (roughly $1,850), rising to £1,849 / €1,999 ($2,450) for the 1TB storage variant.

For dedicated Sony fans, the phone delivers flagship essentials , a capable camera, a striking look, and those niche features they love. For everyone else, there are simply better Android phones at this price point, like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra or the Vivo X300 Ultra.

Sony’s Xperia 1 line has looked nearly identical since 2020. That design was handsome, but a refresh was overdue. The 1 VIII delivers with a blocky new camera island and an unusual textured finish that sets it apart from every previous Xperia. The design has a stark, brutalist quality that I genuinely appreciate. The slightly grippy texture , like an incredibly fine nail file , varies subtly between the back and frame, preventing the phone from feeling like a monotone slab. That texture actually helps sell the high price better than ultrasmooth glass might, though both front and rear use Gorilla Glass (Victus on the back, Victus 2 on the front).

The straight edges are sharp and clean. Sony hasn’t yet explained the odd cutout above the volume button , maybe it’s for a headphone jack? I hope you like big bezels. The camera island’s edges drop off steeply on three sides and angle down to meet the frame on the fourth, a nice detail. The knurled two-stage camera shutter button returns, adding texture and better camera controls. Less welcome is the recessed power button and fingerprint sensor, which fails about a third of the time , far less reliable than modern under-display options. And there’s still that rectangular patch above the volume button, with an especially rough texture that looks like it should do something but doesn’t. I’ve asked Sony what it is.

Sony abandoned its unique 21:9, 4K displays long ago. The 1 VIII uses a less impressive 1080p display in a standard aspect ratio. For a phone at this price, the resolution is low, but the panel itself is a 6.5-inch, 120Hz OLED with decent brightness. I do miss the taller screens Sony used to offer. Unlike most rivals, the display is uninterrupted by a camera cutout, notch, or Dynamic Island , the tradeoff being the rather thick bezels above and below, which house the camera and stereo speakers. Those speakers are good for phone speakers, but they’re still phone speakers.

The software is mostly stock Android, but with quirks. The most annoying is an insistence on overriding the homescreen to create folders I never asked for.

Internally, the Xperia 1 VIII is unremarkable. It runs the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset found on most comparable handsets, paired with either 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (in black, red, or silver) or 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage (only in gold). That gold model is a curious option , anyone tempted by the so-called Trump phone’s lustrous finish and headphone jack can enjoy similar luxuries here for quadruple the price.

What is remarkable is how poorly Sony has managed to make the 8 Elite Gen 5 perform. The phone runs smoothly most of the time, but I’ve encountered repeated stuttering and slowdowns, especially in the camera app or when switching between apps. It also gets hot. Recording audio at a press event with real-time AI transcription running, the phone became worryingly warm after just 30 minutes. By the end of an hourlong call, it was hot to the touch.

The battery is another disappointment. Sony claims two days of life from the 5,000mAh cell, but I don’t see how. As a light-to-moderate user, I’ve hit single-digit percentages by bedtime more than once. It will last the day unless you push it hard, but expect to charge every 24 hours. And charging takes time , the 30W max speed is substantially slower than most rivals. Only Google’s Pixel 10 Pro charges this slowly.

Zeiss still contributes to the camera lenses, and this is definitely Sony’s best phone camera yet. After years of going its own way, Sony has adopted the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to its Chinese flagship rivals. It abandoned the clever continuous zoom lens and instead packed the 1 VIII with the biggest telephoto sensor it could fit. That Sony dropped continuous zoom in the same year Xiaomi finally copied it and did it better feels like a cruel twist of fate.

What the 2.9x (70mm-equivalent) telephoto lens loses in versatility by giving up continuous zoom, it more than makes up for in quality. The move to a large 48-megapixel, 1/1.56-inch-type sensor , the same size as the ultrawide’s and nearly as big as the main camera’s 1/1.35-inch-type sensor , is the key. The other cameras, including the 12-megapixel selfie shooter, are unchanged from last year. The telephoto and ultrawide are the standouts, both using relatively large sensors compared to the competition. Sony’s daytime processing leans toward higher contrast and slightly more muted colors than some rivals, and nighttime shots come out sharp and well-exposed, though they still struggle with bright streetlights. This camera holds its own.

That is, except for the egregious new AI Camera Assistant. More often than not, when you’re trying to take a shot with the rear camera (not selfies , don’t ask me why), a pop-up appears with four AI-suggested edits to your photos, before you even take them. The overwhelming majority are simply overaggressive filters, ramping up contrast or dialing back saturation, often to comically bad effect. Occasionally one includes algorithmically generated bokeh, and Sony claims it can suggest lens swaps for better framing, but I haven’t seen that. Every single suggestion has been markedly worse than the default camera settings, and the pop-up alone is a distracting annoyance that seems to make the camera app sluggish. Fortunately, you can turn it off. If I wasn’t reviewing the phone, I would have done so immediately.

The AI camera suggestions feel emblematic of Sony’s Xperia line: impressive on paper, but prone to tripping itself up. The headphone jack, expandable storage, and stereo speakers are great. The new design is striking and unique. The camera is the best it’s ever been. Sony’s relatively simple, streamlined take on Android 16 has appeal too, but a meager promise of four OS updates and six years of security support gives me pause. The software has irritating quirks , creating home screen folders, adding Facebook to my Instagram icon to make a Meta folder, and throwing a whole host of Google apps on top of Google Maps. Throw in the middling battery, performance problems, and high price, and the 1 VIII is hard to recommend to the average flagship buyer.

All of which leaves Sony back where it started. It redesigned the Xperia, rethought its camera, and simplified its software, but this is still what it always was: a phone for the fanboys. The rest of us can do better.