Mario Bautista
Similarly, that 4K resolution is only applicable in certain situations. In most scenarios, the display will max out at a 1080p or Full HD+ resolution, and will only switch to 4K when it detects the appropriate UHD video content being played. Such video content looks noticeably sharper here on the Sony Xperia 1 V than on, say, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra or the iPhone 14 Pro Max.
There’s a 120Hz refresh rate option here, though you’ll need to activate it in the Settings menu, and there doesn’t seem to be any automatic or variable refresh rate option. This seems somewhat out of step with the 2023 flagship crowd, but that’s Sony down to a tee.
Colour accuracy is broadly in line with last year’s Xperia 1 IV, which is to say it’s very good indeed. I recorded a Delta E colour variance of 1.31 in the phone’s Creator display mode, which targets the BT.2020 colour gamut, as well as an sRGB gamut coverage of 96.5% and a gamut volume of 97%. I also recorded a peak measured luminance of 631cd/m² with autobrightness turned off, which is again similar to the Xperia 1 IV. That’s bright enough, though nowhere near the iPhone 14 Pro Max and its eye-scorching ilk.
READ NEXT: The best phone battery life
Sony Xperia 1 V review: Performance and battery life
If Sony has gone with the crowd on anything with its Xperia 1 line, it’s through always picking the fastest off-the-shelf chip available. In this case, that means Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, together with a healthy 12GB of RAM as standard.
General performance is unimpeachable, with silky navigation, speedy app switching and pause-free fingerprint unlocking. Our standard selection of CPU and GPU benchmark tests yielded similar results to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, with a slight advantage for the Samsung phone perhaps reflecting its slightly higher clock speed.
There’s just the one spec here in the UK, with 256GB of storage. That’s fine, though it’s perhaps not up to the bleeding edge Pro spec that you’ll find elsewhere. Still, the provision of a microSD slot (up to 1TB) is rare in a flagship.
Despite Sony’s claims of a 60% bigger diffusion sheet, I did still observe the Xperia 1 V running a little warm under load – and occasionally when not under any particular load at all. It never got uncomfortably hot, but it still got toastier than I would have liked, and on one notable occasion that heat was accompanied by a dramatic drop in battery life that left me on 1% an hour or so before bed time. This has been a warm summer, in patches, so maybe I caught the phone on a particularly muggy day.
Stamina in general isn’t an issue. Sony bumped up the battery capacity to 5,000mAh with last year’s model, which was a welcome improvement, and the Xperia 1 V sticks with the same sized cell. Once again, a day of intensive usage (about five hours of screen-on time) would generally leave me with around 15% left.
That improved heat dissipation, in conjunction with the more efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, did yield some measurable improvement, too. In our standard looping video test, the Xperia 1 V lasted about 50 minutes longer than the Xperia 1 IV, though it’s still about half as long as rivals such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the iPhone 14 Pro Max. This more than likely comes down to the way Sony enhances and upscales video content to look better on its beautiful 4K display.
Charging is the same disappointingly mediocre 30W maximum as before, which gets the Xperia 1 V from empty to just shy of 50% in 30 minutes. A full zero to 100% charge took me 1hr 41mins, which is hardly rapid.
Sony Xperia 1 V review: Software
Something we don’t always focus on a great deal, but which is deserving of a mention from time to time, is how Sony approaches software. The heavy custom UI of Samsung, Xiaomi, Honor and the rest isn’t applied here, with a philosophy more in line with Motorola, Asus and, of course, Google.
This means that you’re getting a relatively faithful take on Android 13, with the same basic menus, icons, fonts and layout as you’ll find on a Pixel phone. Sony gives you its own clock widget and wallpapers, but they’re tastefully minimalistic, and of course can be changed at will.
That’s not to say that Sony hasn’t crammed in lots of its own apps. There are two video capture apps, a Music app, a Game enhancer app and more. Most justify their inclusion with a very clear function. The Window Manager app, for example, lets you utilise that 21:9 screen to run two apps simultaneously in split screen, as well as offering a Side Sense menu for easy one-handed access to your favoured apps.
The inclusion of third-party apps such as Facebook and Linkedin is slightly irritating, but the provision of a three-month Tidal subscription makes perfect sense within the context of the Xperia 1 V being a serious multimedia device.
