Design
The Sony Xperia 1 III is the new flagship from Sony. Unlike some manufacturers that aim to dazzle customers with the looks of each new model. Sony has been sticking to the same tried and true design language for quite a while now. This time around the finish is frosted rather than glossy.
The back is made from Gorilla Glass 6 with a matte aluminum frame. There’s also a dedicated Google Assistant key and a two stage shutter release button for the camera and you get full IP 68 rated water resistance as you’d expect from a Sony flagship.
Display
The display is the 6.5 inch OLED with Gorilla Glass Victus protection. Sony Xperia 1 III is the first smartphone to pair a 4k resolution with a fast 120 hertz refresh rate. But honestly, this is pretty misleading. The panel only runs in 4k within certain supported apps.
You never know which ones and Sony clarified to us directly that when 4k is enabled. The refresh rate will automatically dial down to 60 hertz, so you never actually get 4k and the high refresh rate both at the same time. Still, we do appreciate the 120 hertz refresh rate when it is enabled, which is basically all the time and there is support for high framerate gaming too, which is nice, even if it’s not in 4k. The screen features a super sharp 643 ppi. You get those deep OLED blacks.
There’s HDR support and colors are punchy by default. Some apps like Google Photos or chrome do go as high as 620 minutes, but only if you have creator mode on and this is still much less than you can achieve on rival flagships with OLED screens.
Audio
For audio the Xperia 1 III has a pair of front facing stereo speakers, with the top one doubling as the earpiece. These are nice but not the best around they earned a good mark on our loudness charts. And while vocals and travel sound great, the low end is a bit lacking.
You also get a headphone jack here which these days many other flagship brands have done away with.
Feature
You have options for a whopping 256 or 512 gigs of storage on board and is even expandable on top of that. And waking up and unlocking the phone can be done with a side mounted fingerprint reader which doubles as the power button. The user interface is pretty much stock android 11.
You get a pretty standard looking homescreen as well as support for Android 11 features like notification history. There’s also something called side sets. Tapping on a bar on the edge of the screen will bring up a menu of shortcuts to apps and features. Swiping the bar will open another panel for split screen shortcuts handy for multitasking. Multi window switch is pretty neat too. It basically opens up a separate task switcher for each half of the split screen, giving you even more control if you’re into this sort of thing.
There’s a game enhancer, which not only has its own menu, but is also accessible in game. On top of providing settings for refresh rate. It also gives you performance and notification options and shortcuts for video recording and screenshots.
Chipset
Behind all these features as a proper flagship chipset, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5g. As you’d expect performance is flagship great, the interface is hiccup free, and you can run heavy games. But compared to other flagships with the same chipset for some reason the Sony Xperia 1 III falls behind a bit CPU wise. The phone heats up quite noticeably in the hand even when you’re not doing anything that intensive.
Battery
The Sony Xperia 1 III has a 4500 milliamp hour battery. Larger than last year’s model. Despite that battery life is quite similar in our tests and pretty unremarkable overall with a final endurance rating of 82 hours. Sony Xperia 1 III comes with a 30 watt charger. It was able to take the phone from zero to 42% in half an hour.
Camera
On the back there’s a 12 megapixel main cam with OAS. A special 12 megapixel Periscope telephoto cam, which offers two different optical zoom levels. A 12 megapixel ultra wide cam which has autofocus, and a 3d to a sensor. Photos from the main cam are really good overall. There’s low noise colors are lively, but not over the top and dynamic range is generally excellent.
The ultra wide camera also delivers a strong performance images are sharp and detailed with colors that match those from the main. There are 2 zoom levels at 2.9 times or 70 millimeter equivalent images are well detailed and have a wide dynamic range and colors consistent with the other cameras.
