Sony Xperia 1 III Hands-On: 4K, 120Hz Sony Zeiss Camera By ben's gadget reviews

Hey everybody, I hope you guys are all doing safe, so I have another exciting new flagship to show you guys today. This is the Sony Xperia 1 mark iii. So this is the newest flagship from Sony, and it has a couple of things several things. Actually that makes this phone special. So first, this phone has a 6.5 inch panel, that's 4k with 120 hertz refresh rate. This is the first screen on the market in the world right now on the phone anyway to offer you 4k resolution and 120 hertz refresh rate.

The second interesting thing is: this phone has a 12 megapixel telephoto zoom lens, that is the world's first telephone lens, with a variable zoom distance. So it is both a 2.9 times: optical zoom and a 4.4 times optical zoom and in the camera app Sony will actually show you that it is 2.9 and 4.4. It doesn't try to cheat and round up to three times or claim it's five times like some other phone brands out there. Now, I'm not quite sure about the technology behind the zoom lens, but for the most part it works 2.9 times and 4.4 times. Zoom shots look really sharp as if they lost this quality, but ultimately this is no match for a periscope zoom lens, as seen in the galaxy s 21 ultra, as you can see from these zoom samples here you know if I go 10 times zoom that 21 ultra is still going to produce a sharper image, but I'm getting ahead of myself I'll talk about the cameras a more little bit later.

The third thing that makes this phone unique is that it is a Sony phone that is released only in China. So far so right now, it's a china exclusive. You know Sony, as all you probably know, is a Japanese company for a Japanese company to release a phone that is only on sale on the china market. It's a little interesting. I think it says to a lot about how important the Chinese market is and how Sony is maybe trying to win over some market share in that segment.

Now all the aspects of the Xperia one mark iii are tip-top, so you have a snapdragon chip AAA inside UFS, 3.1 storage, 12 gigs of lpddr5 ram and has ip68 water and dust resistance. This last part is interesting because the sim tray of this phone, just like the sim trays in most other Sony phones, can be removed with just your fingernail. Now you can just stick your finger in there and just pull out the sim tray now, despite the fact that this is a 6.5 inch display, the phone is quite narrow and easy to hold one hand, because this is a 21 by 9 aspect ratio and the phone is really thin and light too. It measures 8.2 millimeter as thickness and 187 grams in heft. So that's a pretty lightweight phone.

You also have dual front facing speakers that get really loud. Any special features in Sony's flagship phones. The last couple of years is that there's a vibration engine in there that will rumble along the sound. To be honest, I find a little distracting, but some people may like it and to that end, the haptic engine in this phone is excellent too. This is tip-top haptics on par with the Samsung Galaxy s21 ultra and the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra.

I really like typing on this phone now, unlike most other phones on the market, there is now in display fingerprint sensor. Instead, the fingerprint sensor is on the side um embedded into the power button. It is a click power button right in the middle of the phone that makes it quite easy to reach speaking of the phone sides, let's take a closer look at all the buttons on the side, because the right side is actually kind of full up top. You have a volume rocker down here is that power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor as mentioned and right here, it's a dedicated button to trigger assistance. Unfortunately, because this phone is a china phone, when you press the button right now, it actually does not launch Google Assistant.

It asks you to launch these uh Chinese apps and down. Here is a dedicated camera. Shutter button, so when you're in the camera app, you can actually just press the shutter button to take photos and actually, if you press this button halfway, the camera app UI will start like showing this little green box to focus. Now, if you used a Sony camera before those little green focus, boxes will look quite familiar to you, because these are the exact same boxes that show up in Sony's, mirrorless and DSLR cameras. In fact, the camera I'm shooting right now.

The Sony a7c has those exact same green focus boxes to show you where the frame is focused on and that's actually a main selling point of Sony's Xperia flagship phones is that the camera app UI really resembles a camera UI of a Sony, mirrorless camera or a compact camera. So you have like focus peaking. You have those little green boxes. As mentioned, you have eye autofocus too. So you know if you are into photography, this phone will offer you more granular controls than definitely an iPhone and pixel, but even a lot of other android phones on the market, too.

I've reviewed a couple of Sony phones in the past, and I actually was not that impressed by the cameras, because as much as Sony gives you all the controls, the phone itself just isn't that smart at analyzing a scene because one of the best things about an iPhone is you don't really have to think you can't just point and shoot, and the camera will fix exposure and focus for you all that with a Sony phone, they want to give you all the control. So you focus yourself. You can fix exposure yourselves and the auto mode in Sony. Cameras are generally not on par with what the pixel or iPhones can do. At least before, with this new model, I'm happy to report that the main camera actually holds up very well, at least so far.

My limited testing and some of these shots, particularly this really difficult, shot. Shooting against harsh backlight you'll notice that Sony's dynamite range looks just as good as the galaxy s21 ultras and the iPhone 12. That's impressive, because this is just a 12 megapixel main camera, with an f 1.7 aperture. Now, when you move to the ultra-wide angle camera, I would say overall the ultra-wide angle- camera falls short of what the iPhone and galaxy s 21 ultra-wide angle. Camera can do, but it's still a really respectable ultra-wide.

Now I have to be clear. This is not a review because I've only had this phone for about an hour, and I have to return this about an hour later, so in total I'm only going to have about two hours with the phone, because I didn't get this from Sony. I got this phone from Simon or trinity in a Chinese which is a one of the best phone importers in Hong Kong. Okay, now, let's look at the phone's software, so this phone runs android 11. , like I said, because this is a china only phone out of the box.

There actually is no google services, but it's really easy to install. I just basically downloaded APK, pure and from there I was able to install Google Play Store, and after that I just jumped in the play, store and installed everything and everything works. Fine. Now, annoyingly you see this little search bar down below this is not a Google search bar. This is a buy.

Do search bar Baidu is basically china's version of google and just like on a Google Pixel. You cannot get rid of the search bar. You see, we long press, it nothing happens. So that means, if you're importing this phone you're going to have to stupid by the bar at the bottom, even though you will almost never use Baidu but other than that. For the most part, this is a clean, android UI.

You have an app tray. You can swipe down to bring down notification shade one of the cool software editions of a Sony. Xperia phone is that you have this little bar on the side of the screen that when you double tap on it immediately opens a know like a list of apps that you can jump into easily, so you can jump into the camera app right away. You can jump into like anything, chrome, and you know you can jump just as default and from here you can jump into google photos. All that you can also, I believe, jump into split screen mode right here yeah, so you can activate split screen mode like that now.

One big area of concern is battery life, because the battery inside is just a 4 500 William cell, which is not that big, considering you have a 6.5 inch 4k display that refreshes at 120 hertz, even other android phones that give you we HD resolution at 120 hertz. Those phones would kind of give me maybe like 9 10 hours of use outside before it would die on me. So considering that this one has passed even more pixels, I'm not sure this one will last eight hours now. I've tested several Sony, Xperia phones in the past, but I'm usually not too impressed because even just a couple of years ago the bezels on Sony, Xperia phones were chunky as hell and the main camera just wasn't that good, but with the Xperia one mark iii, the camera has improved significantly, and the bezels have slimmed down noticeably too to look pretty damn nice. So now I actually think this is a phone that I could use as my daily driver.

But this is a really expensive phone in China. It is on sale at around 8 400 RMB that converts to about 300 us dollars, and this is the price in China. So if this phone ever gets an international release, you know it's going to bump up even more, because phones always sell cheaper in China than in say the UK or the US, so there's never launches in the U. S. or Europe.

You expect the price to be like 1, 600 us dollars and then at that price. Would I get this over the galaxy s 21 ultra or even the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra? No, I would not, but then there are people out there who are big fans of Sony cameras and perhaps uh Sony's design language. So for you guys, the Sony Xperia one mark iii may be a worthy consideration to import. For now. Just you know have to be annoyed that you can't get rid of that damn binding bar.

So anyway, that's about it for this video. Now you might have noticed that I'm probably the only English reviewers to get my hand on this phone so far. You know it's not because I'm better than other English reviewers on YouTube, it's just because I live in Hong Kong, which is probably the best city to get smartphones like I'm so close to China so close to Japan and Korea that I get everything before people in say, London or the US. So if you're interesting keep up to date with all the latest smartphones, please consider subscribing to my channel. Follow me on Instagram at Ben's gadget reviews.

That's it for now, thanks for watching.

Source : ben's gadget reviews