- Sony has launched the Xperia 1 VIII
- It has a redesigned camera block, a new telephoto sensor, an AI camera assistant, and a top-end chipset
- It also costs more than most high-end phones, and isn’t available in much of the world
Like clockwork, the Sony Xperia 1 VIII has now been announced, a year to the day after the Sony Xperia 1 VII. But while the day is the same, the details are different, as Sony has given its new phone a much-needed redesign.
That’s mostly meant changing the camera block, so instead of the vertical line of lenses in the top left corner that we’ve seen since the Sony Xperia 1 II, there’s now a square camera block, with the metal housing wrapping around to the left edge of the phone.
Other than some new gemstone-inspired shades (Graphite Black, Iolite Silver, Garnet Red, and Native Gold), that’s the only major visual change, but it makes the new phone look dramatically different.
The other big change this year also relates to the cameras, as they include a new AI Camera Assistant that will suggest things like lenses, bokeh effects, and color tones, based on the scene and subject, to help ensure your photos look their best. It sounds a bit like the Camera Coach feature on the Google Pixel 10 Pro series, so it’s not a totally new idea, but it’s a potentially useful implementation of AI anyway.
The cameras, by the way, include a 48MP f/1.9 wide, a 48MP f/2.0 ultra-wide, a 48MP f/2.8 telephoto with a 70mm focal length, for roughly 2.9x optical zoom, and a 12MP f/2.0 front-facing camera.
Those are largely the same lenses as last year, except for the telephoto, which was previously only 12MP and with a roughly four times smaller sensor, but which had a continuous optical zoom, so you could optically zoom to more distances. Instead, on the new phone, you can use sensor cropping to get near optical-quality zoom at other distances.
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Other specs of the Sony Xperia 1 VIII include a top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, a 5,000mAh battery with the promise of two days of life, a 6.5-inch 1080 x 2340 OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, an IP68 rating, and full-stage stereo speakers, which likely means you’ll get better audio from them than most phone speakers.
It also continues to have features that the rest of the smartphone industry is largely abandoning, like a 3.5mm headphone port and a microSD card slot — plus sizable bezels above and below the screen, rather than a punch-hole camera.
A high price and relatively limited support
Unfortunately, those bezels aren’t the only bad element of the Sony Xperia 1 VIII, as it is also only promised four major Android operating system upgrades, along with six years of security updates. That’s not terrible, but it’s dwarfed by the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S26 series and the Google Pixel 10 line, both of which are promised seven years of Android updates.
And it’s not as if the Sony Xperia 1 VIII is a cheaper phone — in fact, it costs more, with a starting price of £1,399 for a version with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, rising to £1,849 for a model with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
There’s no availability in the US or Australia, but for comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,299 / £1,279 / AU$2,199, the Pixel 10 Pro XL starts at $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$1,999, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$2,149. So, Sony’s phone costs more than any of these, likely making it hard to justify for most would-be buyers.
If you do want the Sony Xperia 1 VIII, though, and you live somewhere that it’s available, you’ll be able to pre-order it now, with UK shipping estimates currently showing as June 19. And if you do pre-order, you will at least get a pair of Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones thrown in free, which are worth $449 / £399 / AU$699 in their own right.
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