1st week with the Xperia 1 VI

Hello,

I've had a few xperias before (E3, 5 II) but I've been away from the brand for about 2 years but I've always missed it, I came over from a oneplus 13 to a used 1 VI in perfect condition for 600€ and here are my 1st week impressions

The good:

The design is pure perfection, beautiful sleek black, minimal and pretty camera bump, headphone jack, top and bottom bezels to hide the camera notch and give us front facing stereo speakers. I prefer this design to all others and wish more brands would adopt it. The two step shutter button is also absolutely brilliant, perfect position to put it in and perfect functionality, I like this 3 button combo of power, volume and shutter all on the right side, I like my left side to stay clean.

The display despite being 1080p looks better than my 1440p oneplus 13, I was surprised at that, viewing the same content side by side the xperia looked sharper and better. I can only guess that I am either hallucinating or the xperia actually has all 3 RGB lights for each individual pixel which makes it seem sharper, it's also possibly because of the smaller screen of 6,5" as opposed to the 6,8" on the oneplus. Also as already mentioned, it's uninterrupted and basicly a full rectangle. an absolute pleasure to watch and use.

The 24mm lens and it's camera processing are the best out of any phone I have ever used and I have used chinese flagships with a 1" sensor but their processing ruins the photo and while the xperia may not output "better" photos it does output them as real as possible. I like to see the pixels in the picture, I like the noise. It's real and thats what matters.

The macro capabilities of the telephoto are top tier, the 4cm focus distance comes in handy giving even the tiniest of details.

The battery life has been an equivalent to the oneplus despite having a 1000mah less battery capacity, I get 5-10 hours of SOT from 100-20% depending on what I am doing on the phone, pleasant surprise to be sure (the current capacity as shown by the phones test menu is 4800 mah)

The speakers are also the best I have heard on a phone, an s23 I used in the past probably comes closest but the xperia has the best sound and detail, I find myself using the phone as a speaker for music far more than I do on other phones.

SD card slot, it's present and it's useful but more in the bad section.

Software is minimalistic and swift mostly functional but more in the bad section.

The bad:

Charging speed, 30 watts is very slow to me and while it does work no problem I do have to potentionally plan ahead when I'll charge, on the oneplus this was a non issue. I could plug the phone in for 10 minutes and have it charge up by 50% and be ready for the day

Software has a bunch of weird niche bugs, for example I've found that it sometimes for some reason can't properly detect my usb-c controller and needs to be restarted to pick it up, another thing is that the system screen recorder cannot pick up audio from apps that google deems "unsafe" and a 3rd party solution is needed. The phone also has some minor hiccup and freezes for a second or two but very rarely, it's by no means unusable but it is a weakness. Also some features I would expect to be in every phone are missing such as being able to hide the gesture bar, I read that it's a thing google doesn't do on stock android to make their AI accesible but it seems like such a simple and easy setting to implement and it helps a lot by giving more screen and avoiding burn in.

The SD card slot limits the speed to 45MBs read and 15MBs write, it's a real shame as you can't record high resolution and refresh rate video and you can't put any games that require a high read speed on it but it's still better to have than to not have it, I put in my 512GB SD card and have movies, music and games on it and it works fine.

The telephoto quality is very bad when the light isn't perfect, when it is then it's quite fine and usable but if the light quality gets even a bit worse the photos quickly turn bad to the point where I don't even want to shoot with the telephoto, that is naturally because of the small aperture and sensor, the ultrawide is better in that aspect but still isn't that good in low light.

While it has improved from the 1 V and is further prolonged on the 1 VII and 1 VIII 3 years of OS updates and 4 years of security is a tad too little for a flagship, as it stand I can look forward to android 17 and then there are just security upgrades.

I do hope sony continues making xperias because I can settle for a lot of flaws if it means I get to keep using this design. Overall I am more happy than sad with what it can and can't do and can see myself using the phone for a few years!