Sony Xperia 10 and 1 Preview – Compact, but only in width

The very first Xperia smartphone ever released was the Xperia X1 from 2008. When I reviewed it, this sentence was still quite normal to write: “The screen is anything but small at 3.0.” in 2019. The most compact phone Sony announced at this Mobile World Congress has a 6.0″ screen.

That screen has more than three times the surface of the Xperia X1 screen. Not to mention the new Xperia 1, which has a 6.5″ screen with almost four times the surface area of ​​the Xperia X1. It’s amazing, but the Xperia name outlasts established names like Samsung Galaxy or LG G; it is now exactly eleven years ago that the then Sony Ericsson presented the first Xperia smartphone. The Xperia X1 did not follow the Xperia X2; Sony Ericsson canceled it after providers rejected it. What followed was the Xperia X10 , the first Xperia with Android and a colossal 4″ screen for its time.

Now Sony refers back to that time a bit, with the names of the Xperia 1 and Xperia 10. But apart from the numbers and names, the new devices have little to do with the old ones. We were disappointed when we arrived at Sony’s booth at Mobile World Congress, as we couldn’t play around with the Xperia 1’s software ourselves. It’s not finished yet. Fortunately, the Xperia 10 is ready. We worked as extensively as possible with the new phones from Sony, which all have one striking element in common: a 21:9 screen.

Xperia 10

Will there ever be another Sony Compact smartphone? It is highly questionable: renders of an ‘XZ4 Compact’ had surfaced at the end of last year, but no trace of that phone can be found here at the fair. Sony does not want to confirm or deny that the era of the Compact, a smartphone line that started six years ago, has come to an end.

A Compact phone does not fit into the current strategy of 21:9 screens. After all, a 21:9 screen with the exact width of the XZ2 Compact comes out at around 5.7″. In that case, the screen is 133mm long, while the body of the XZ2 Compact is only 135mm long. With a bezel of around 15mm, a 21:9-Compact comes out around 148mm and that’s not a compact phone.

The step to 21:9 is very logical for Sony. After all, under the wings of the group is also Sony Pictures, which produces films. And in what aspect ratio do movies usually appear? Indeed, 21:9. The compatibility with film material at 21:9 is one of the advantages that Sony mentions with its new Xperias.

Phones have gotten longer and longer in recent years. The screens have grown from 16:9 to 18:9 and now usually 19:9 or even 19.5:9. Now you would think that it is only a small step to 21:9, but that is disappointing. Even the smaller Xperia 10 has a hugely long screen and you’ll presumably need a ‘ thumb extender ‘ to reach the top of the screen.

The screen diagonal is a bit misleading: you can watch 16:9 movies on this phone with a diagonal of 4.8″. The screen is therefore hardly wider than that of last year’s XZ2 Compact, but only a lot longer. makes the whole phone much bigger.

Now you might think that Sony has done a lot in the software to keep the long screen easy to operate with one hand. That’s kinda true; there is a mode to reduce the screen, but where Samsung with One UI, for example, displays all elements in the lower half of the screen, Sony’s Android edition is not designed for that.

The screen is an LCD with 2520×1080 pixels and because of the placement against the bottom of the housing, almost without a chin, I was afraid that Sony had flipped the panel. As a result, the display drivers , which of course require space, would be at the top. After all, there is more than enough space there. Sounds logical, right? It is possible that the hardware is indeed at the top, but that has been taken into account during the production of the screens. After all, a screen that’s upside down has jelly scrolling , the effect where content stretches and seems to come together again. Some people barely see it, others can’t stand it. Thankfully, the Sony phone doesn’t have jelly scrolling .

The Xperia 10 is one of the few smartphones with a plastic back. It feels good, although you can see fingerprints on it. Inside, the device has a Snapdragon 630-soc from Qualcomm with 3GB of memory. The software was often fluent, but in our half hour with the phone we nevertheless encountered quite a bit of stuttering in the software. However, Android is artificially limited for stock demos, so it may not be an indication of real-world performance; you can’t turn on bluetooth, you can’t save images and so on.

We had hoped that Sony would show a new Compact phone at this fair. There are relatively many fans of this line of smartphones in the Netherlands. Anyone who thought the Xperia 10 was some kind of mid-range version of a Compact smartphone would be disappointed: this really is a large phone that is simply not that wide.

Xperia 1

Naturally, we came to the Sony booth for that one phone. The one phone with that simple name and the many innovations compared to previous Xperias: the Xperia 1. We were allowed to photograph and touch it, but we were not allowed to use the software.

Nevertheless, we got an impression of perhaps the most important new component of the phone: the OLED screen with 3840×1644 pixels. Sony calls this 4k because of the high number of pixels in height, of course, but many people will think of 4k as slightly more pixels, namely 2160 in width. Sony’s previous phones with 4k screens have 3840×2160 pixels, but those are LCDs. This is an OLED panel. The screen looked impressive. The 6.5″ screen with 21:9 ratio seemed to be able to be clear, but without extensive experience, comparison and measurements we cannot say anything about it.

Also striking: Sony makes a 48-megapixel camera for other manufacturers, but goes back to a lower resolution for its high-end phone. The 1 has three cameras, all with 12-megapixel resolution; ultra wide angle, regular and tele. Plus, the primary camera has optical image stabilization, a first for Xperia phones, though it’s been on competitor smartphones for years.

The phone is not as big as you might think. Yes, it is very long, but the width is not too bad; It is not much wider than an Xperia Z or XZ of recent years. That is of course due to the long screen. Further impressions of this phone will have to wait until we can use it.