I believe Sony has finally ascended the mountain. they've been climbing for years, and they've built the world's most enthusiast-targeted phone. which is more than any gaming phone and more than any other niche phone. Why don't people buy as many Sony phones as they should? They've doubled down on all of that since then, and it's become something of a work of art. I've been using this phone on and off for about a month now, and it has everything you could want in an enthusiast phone. Sony has nailed it with this phone, from the stats to the features to the finer points, it's all there. Start with the name, it's the Xperia one three, and it was unveiled months ago in April, so you'd only know about it now that it's quietly gone on sale. You follow enough tech blogs or youtube channels because you won't see any ads for it or find it in any carrier stores here, but then look at the design, you can probably already see some of the emojis.
So first and foremost it has a super nice frosted matte black finish with a little bit of a soft touch that I like even the sides are matte black and the whole thing is built around this 21x9 aspect ratio which an enthusiast would love because now you can watch your 21x9 videos on a proper cinema display with no black bars but let's just go down the feature list okay dual sim card tray at the top removable without a tool and the second sim card tray at the bottom removable without a tool. Dual front-facing speakers are flanking the phone's sides, which are good and louder than the previous version and far enough away to create a nice true stereo image, and then there's a speaker up in the corner. Yeah, that's an LED notification light, which is a feature that you don't see in many features these days but that enthusiasts will appreciate, and as I said, you're probably already thinking about a headphone jack, so yes, the headphone jack is up top as well, and it feels like the phone is barely thick enough for it.
There's a volume rocker on top, then the super reliable fingerprint reader power button combo underneath that, then a custom button that's mapped to trigger Google Assistant, then a dedicated shutter button for the camera system underneath that, with the half-press for focusing and the full press for actually taking the shot, and everything is wrapped in an ip68 water-resistant body and pretty squared off. It's the final stretch. It's the overall beautiful square look that I've liked in the past, but it's just it's good the fingerprint reader on the power button is incredibly fast and very reliable, so I'm a fan of that, and the whole phone is of course very easy and pleasant to grip since it's so small because 21x9.
Let's talk about the screen for a moment. This phone has a six and a half-inch 4k 120-hertz display right out of the box Jesus in the settings you can switch between the super smooth 120 hertz or just normal 60 hertz but you can't adjust the screen resolution at all it's always locked at 4k which is a little bit crazy I mean I get that it's an enthusiast phone and only an enthusiast would want to toggle their phone to 4k occasionally to watch a 4k youtube video or a movie. This is just 4k all the time, full-on maximum enthusiast if you can't turn it off, no 1080, no 1440, it's locked. I'm genuinely amazed they do that.
Allow you to turn off 120 hertz, however, I'm not sure whether they'll remove that option in the Mark IV. The display itself, though, looks wonderful as you'd expect. Sony has a 10-bit creator mode that it has had before, as well as a highly adjustable white balance to tune this OLED display to look exactly how you want it to look. I wouldn't expect anything less here, but the downside to having a 21x9 display is that some apps are still not perfectly optimized for it. Because most phones don't have this crazy tall aspect ratio, the normie apps most everyday people use to have black bars at the top and bottom, but that's fine because this is an enthusiast phone and so people who are willing to make that sacrifice to have a nice narrow taller better-looking display with cinema videos will be fine with a couple of apps not working no big deal this is going to be great with 21 by nine stuff the one thing you can't get around is having a dizzying dizzying dizzying dizzy.
It eats into battery life pretty hard, so this phone has a 4500 milliamp-hour battery, which is solid but not huge, but the rate at which you can chew through battery at high brightness 4k 120 hertz is pretty high, so if you want to get a whole day past about four hours of heavy screen on time away from your charger, I'd recommend having one of those enthusiast battery banks nearby. You have a ton of display customization, you have always-on display controls, reverse wireless charging toggle, lots of battery care features to help you reduce the amount of time your battery spends at full charge to extend the life of your phone, and then one of my favorite sony editions is called side sense, so sony fans taught me if you've heard this before, but it puts this little bar over here to the side of your screen, and you can double-tap that bar anytime you want.
If you're a true enthusiast, you're probably doing this all the time and have your favorite app pairs queued up so you can launch them both at the same time with a single touch. You can also launch one-handed mode from here, which makes sense if you can't quite reach the top of this phone honestly it's so tall that the top corners can be a little annoying to reach even when you're holding it in one hand. This one has really good strong haptics which is always good to see and there's also DualShock 4 support so you can connect a sony ps4 controller to this phone to play certain games if you're into that I imagine they're building in a dual sense 5 support it doesn't work with the ps5 controller yet but that would be cool but you want to know the worst part of the soft you want to know the worst part of the soft you want to know the worst part every time I don't know why, I have the feeling that this is either a glitch that they can correct with software, but yeah, that was incredibly irritating. Now, an enthusiast phone wouldn't be complete without some enthusiast cameras, and boy does Sony have that on lock here literally.
There isn't a basic camera app on Android. As soon as you press the shutter button, double-tap the power button, or simply press the camera icon, you're thrown into Sony's advanced camera app. They do give you a basic mode in that camera app, which is amusing, and it lets you switch to video mode and toggle between the ultra-wide, standard, and two other modes. different telephoto focal lengths but you can also go straight from basic mode into basically a full-on sony alpha camera with programmable auto modes and manual modes and 20 fps burst shutter and slider sphere shutter speed and iso and focus and all that it's great but did you catch one little thing I just said there are two telephoto focal lengths but there's only one telephoto camera on the back of the phone so how are there two telephoto focal lengths well.
You can snap these between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters in the software, and these focal lengths are both shot by the same sensor it's pretty intense now sony won't tell me exactly how they're doing this, I guess it's a secret, but I imagine there's probably some sort of magnets involved moving the glass around the best I can show you is this animation on sony's youtube channel one of their videos, but this animation shows several different internal lenses. As a result, the end outcome is quite remarkable. You now have two separate telephoto focal lengths in one sensor, 70 and 105, and you can digitally zoom between them while also snapping between them for optical zoom to match sharpness, which is quite cool. The brutal part is that even with all that technical wizardry, the photo quality isn't that great. I'd like to think I know what I'm doing because I've shot with plenty of cameras, including Sony Alpha cameras and other Sony phones, but it's just never looked that great despite all the incredible innovative manual control, the shutter is very fast, and I never miss a shot.
The best thing I get out of this phone's camera system is just it's a technical marvel and it's cool to appreciate and I have hope for the future of smartphones with optical zoom but I don't want to get my hopes up because well if you remember what Samsung did with the duo, it's pretty meh so I was hoping for better there so the best thing I get out of this phone's camera system is just it's a technical marvel and it's cool too. It would have been really useful in some of their later year's galaxy s20 having such a thin plane of focus having dual aperture could make a bigger range of focus if you shut down the aperture a little bit but they didn't do it anymore so I see that and then I think of sony's where now you're snapping between focal lengths and it's cool and I hope it advances so I see that and then I think of sony's where now you're snapping. It has a screen that I've never seen before, it has a tonne of features, and there's just a lot going on, so if you're into smartphones in any way, this is a really exciting phone, and aside from the terrible auto-rotate, I thoroughly enjoyed using it. Would I recommend it? Honestly, almost no one should buy this phone.
Specification
Sony Xperia 1 III Android smartphone.
. Features 6.5″ display,
Snapdragon 888 5G chipset,
4500 mAh battery, 512 GB storage,
12 GB RAM
