Is the Sony Xperia 1 III Worth $1300? By Waveform Clips

The Xperia one mark iii has nothing to do with eleven. Well, it has a one, and it has a one in there three ones it doesn't have a two one. So the name is two elevens, but then one of it gets it left anyway. It walked away. Okay, the review of the Sony Xperia mark iii is now live on. The channel hey and I wanted to shout that out, because this I'm going to hold it up right now.

This has got to be the most oddly put together set of flagship parts. I've ever seen, yeah if it is. It becomes Uber enthusiast. It's like a perfect phone yeah. I really enjoyed using this phone, except for the one weird auto rotate bug um, but I just want to just go over from the top to the bottom.

Every weird decision they've made about this phone yeah sure and why it just seems like it's: it's geared to be the lowest selling best phone they've ever made okay number one, the name! It's the Sony, Xperia one, three: okay, yep! That's just good luck! Explaining that it's you can say, mark three yeah! You can say it's the third one, whatever you want to say: it's not a great name, yeah um, but there it is Sony opera, one mark three, two, this phone was announced in April, and it's been under embargo for a while. Since then, I've had this phone for about a month yeah I got the phone and typically this is what happens. We get a phone for review, and it's like all right. Well, when does it actually get like unveiled? When is the embargo up it'll be in a week or so and we'll have that amount of time to play with the phone? Sometimes it's two weeks nice, this one. It was like five weeks we're like okay, this is what happens.

Is it gets announced? It has some cool features and then slowly the hype drains and the attention span forgets yeah, and then it quietly launches a month later. No one buys it so yeah. It is out now um yeah. The screen is the next one. So this is a high-end phone.

It's got a snapdragon 812 gigs of ram android 11. , but the screen is a 21x9 4k. OLED at 120hz, so it's a battery burner. It definitely burns through battery, but it's 4k all the time, and you cannot change the resolution and that to me is kind of crazy. You can change the refresh rate between 60 and 120.

Um. Would you even want a 4k phone, or it's one of those things that, like they have this compatibility, not compatibility checkers, but they have these grids online that you can look up? That's like what resolution do you need for how far away you are from your device, and it's usually for TVs, and it's like you only need 4k if you're sitting up this close because then you'll start to see the pixels. Your phone is like six inches from your face yeah. So I think that's why Apple did the whole retina display thing was because, like look you're here um, you know it's like at least you can toggle the 4k mode on YouTube and know that it's giving you all the pixels okay, yeah um, but it is just feels like something they felt like they needed to do because they have the bra via line of TVs. I would be fine with it.

It's just. You can't turn it down. Yeah, like Sony, put a 1440p screen in a lot of their phones and at any point you can just switch it to 1080p mode, and you'll save battery life. You'll save power, you're, pushing fewer pixels' performance will be better, and you just know you have the ability to do that at any time. If you want 1440 turns it back up yeah now you can watch the video at full res.

This phone is 4k yeah, which would be a great option, but you cannot turn it off yeah, and I wonder if they'll add that with a software update or whatever, but I mean it's a great looking screen but, like you said, if you're looking thinking about retina display um, that's like 250 or 350 PPI is like pretty good yeah. This is a 640 plus PPI. That's insane like yeah yeah, I mean I have to say like I do appreciate. High density displays. I remember when the lg g3 came out, and it was like it was the first 1440p phone, and it just blew my mind, and they had all of these demos built into the phone.

That would just be like 1440p video, and you could show your friends, and it was amazing um and I, like 1440p phones. I just find it hilarious because, like Samsung, for example, who like when the ultra came out, everyone was like, oh, but I want to run. You know 1440p at 120, hertz, and they're like aha. You can't do that. Furthermore, you can run 1080p at 120 hertz, or you can run 1440p at 60, hertz and yet Sony's, just like you will run 4k all the time at 120, hertz, no choice, oh my god, and you're gonna, like it too yeah uh yeah.

No! This is a fascinating choice, and we'll see if that ever changes, but then also okay. This phone also has a, but it's a nice design. It's matte black, it's kind of like soft touch, it's pretty squared off, but it's got a ton of like these niche features that you just don't see, combined to phones nowadays, yeah one headphone jack, yeah wow. They added that in the two by the way in the Xperia one they didn't have it eleven windows, eleven um uh in the experiment, one, but they didn't have it which was like yeah. You know Sony.

This is your chance yeah exactly, so they added it back. Yes, it's still here: yeah uh, there's this really nice haptic motor, and this like sync, where it'll like sync to the beat of your music and vibrate, the music, which is yeah Xperia xz2. They added that, and it's kind of ridiculous, but whatever it works. It's a powerful motor. I dislike when there's like a weak vibration, motor, and you're, like yes, calls because of it.

Yeah tool-less, sim card tray Sony's always had this and it's so underrated for tech reviewers. So happy like. I know people generally don't care, but it's so nice, and especially because they also have dual sim and a micro SD card slot. Micros card expansion. Yes, so you can add up to a terabyte of storage via micros.

That's a dying breed. How many dying breed things we have in here? There's a LED notification light on this phone yeah. You really don't see that very well. I remember when I had to like run cyan engine mod on my galaxy nexus, 6 to be able to enable the LED notifications- oh yeah, because it had one, but it didn't talk to any apps yeah yeah yeah. That was a weird time that was weird like they were going to use it, and then they scrapped it.

But you could like to get it back if you ran your own custom, wrong yeah, and then it would glow like green for text and yellow for twitter and like yeah, for whatever it looks like that's, that was cool um. This phone's got custom buttons, okay, so all the way on the right hand, side, power, button and fingerprint reader volume rocker up here, which is nice custom single button down here just for Google Assistant. Yes, very nice give me that very nice. I kind of wish there was a software toggle to continually make that whatever I want but yeah, I would have made it assistant anyway, so cool yeah and then a separate camera, toggle yeah with a half press for focus and a full press to launch or take photos and videos. That is all like very unusual to find in any other phone out there right now yeah, but I think the camera is where it gets the weirdest yeah.

So we've got triple cameras on the back uh, a regular, an ultra-wide and a telephoto yep, but the telephoto has two different focal lengths, and this is a were trying to figure out how they did this, or you know what exactly is happening inside the phone. There are some Sony videos on their YouTube channel where you can see it's an it's a periscope type lens, so it's sideways inside the phone, but there are glass elements moving inside the phone, so it'll snap between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters yeah. In practice, it's not actually that big of a difference in zoom, that's like a 1.3 x or whatever you want to call it, but it was just fascinating that it would actually do that, and they actually spent the time to engineer such a unique solution inside the phone yeah um. Do you think this has a future? Do you think this could be built by other companies? You think they'll keep doing this yeah I could. I could see it as being a thing for sure.

I think optical telephoto lenses are very important because, like software is fine, when you have really high resolution sensors- and we do have really high resolution sensors. But again you have all of these problems with high resolution sensors in smartphones because, like sure, but they're not big enough and then when you do make them big, you have a very small plane of focus. What Sony was trying to do with this, and they started this in the opera? One two, I believe was like they want to have the holy trinity of lenses, which is a 16 to 24, a 24 to 70 and a 70 to 200, okay, and so the idea is that there's a 16 there's a 24 and then in the mark ii there was a 70, and you could zoom. You could do software crop between them yeah this one. I think, they're just trying to give you as much optical capability as possible.

I love it yeah. Furthermore, I think it's a great idea, but I get a little nervous about this for two reasons: one um, I don't, so I was I talked about this in the review video, but what Samsung did with dual aperture yeah, where they had a perfect idea. They were like okay, we would like to be able to close down aperture, because you can get more in focus. You can take sharper photos, there are all sorts of useful applications of it and in the Galaxy S9 they had either a wide open or stop down. I forget what the f-stop was yeah, but like 4.4 or something yeah versus like 1.8 or whatever wide open, and you could see it like snap closed snap open and they built that under the phone- and I was like that is super cool, literally a variable aperture in our main smartphone camera yeah and the next year was gone yep, and they never did it again and really usually we really could have used it, because there are phones like the s21 that have the ultra shallow depth of field where, if you could just stop down to f4 like every photo in daylight, would look better so the fact that they never brought it back. Despite being super useful, it makes me nervous that this might never show up in another phone again yeah.

It's just a gimmick nobody's going to buy the phone Sony's going to realize all the r d money was for nothing, and then it's gone yeah. So I'm nervous about that. It might happen it might not um. But the other thing is like it's: it's not that great of a camera set yeah. It's a know.

Sony's made like great improvements with their software and obviously Sony makes alpha cameras, and they've made perfect cameras in the past, and so this is perfect, fast, autofocus and really cool having a dedicated shutter button and all the advanced modes and everything 20 fps burst mode. It's great. I never miss a shot. There's like no shutter lag, but then the shot I get is like yeah a little too shallow a little muted. So it is what it is.

The phone itself, though uh very nice, I'll, show this on the podcast, even though I did it already on the video uh world's slowest, auto rotate. I have never seen anything like this in any other phone ready wow. It takes a good four seconds. Yeah, it's a actually timed it yesterday, on average it was almost three and then one time it took seven yeah and as a person I know not everybody, some people just lock, auto rotate and never use and don't care, but as a person who does rotate stuff all the time. I watch a lot of videos.

It got very annoying yeah something to keep an eye on. Maybe they'll fix that with software, but Sony opera, 1, mark iii, 1200 bucks- if you can get over that, then you'll have the world's maybe not the world's first variable aperture or variable zoom, but yeah. A couple really impressive things: 4k screen and a nice smooth, android experience, yeah yeah, they're good their UI is perfect. I think we were talking about this yesterday. It's like, I think, the s like the s21 ultra 1200 dollars is the best, a better overall package for people who care about the things that most people care about yeah.

But if you're like a hardcore just like, I want the best everything yeah then like these are perfect phones, yeah, I would say I would argue, the s21 ultra for the same price will give you all better cameras yeah. They will give you a better screen, despite not being 4k, because it's bigger much brighter yeah. They would give you better software. Furthermore, they would give you better battery life. Furthermore, they would give you faster charging, and they'd probably give you more software updates.

But if you care about the things that Sony does yeah you care about the dual stereo front-facing speakers yeah, which is the expandable storage, that Samsung doesn't have the headphone jack the LED notification light like all these crazy enthusiast things. It's your boy, I always used to say the Xperia ones. Are the r slash android phone yeah? That's what's going to happen. We haven't uploaded the video yet as of the recording of this now, but this is where I expect people to care about this phone cool.

Source : Waveform Clips