The last time I saw a Sony Xperia phone in the wild was when I visited Japan in 2018. A sea of Xperias, iPhones, and the occasional Nintendo Switch stood out in Tokyo's bustling (and punctual!) Metro subway. I don't think I'll ever see such a sight anywhere else in the world, and that's a shame. I say that because Sony now owns less than 1 percent of the global smartphone market share, yet the new Xperia 1 II is (so far) one of my favorite phones of the year.
If you told me in January that I'd write the last part of that sentence, I'd have laughed. But hey, 2020 has been filled with shock and surprise. After years of testing Sony phones that didn't quite click, what makes this one so special? Well, it's a complete package—from a wonderfully cinematic screen, solid battery life, and a strong camera system, to reliable build quality and simple software. This is the best smartphone Sony has ever made.
But—and there's always a but—it's not without flaws. I mean, can we talk about the name? For clarity, it's pronounced Xperia "One Mark Two," following the naming structure of things like Sony's own A9 II camera or Iron Man's suits. That doesn't stop me (and inevitably, most people) from calling it the Xperia One Two. Also, it's $1,200—a very steep asking price even if we weren't in a climate where more than 40 million Americans are out of a job.
If you prize the camera experience on a phone above everything else, it's worth looking at the Xperia 1 II. Its best traits lie in its camera system, which was codeveloped with Sony engineers that make its popular Alpha 9 mirrorless cameras. Most people just want to point their phone at a subject and tap a button to get a photo. And you can do that with the Xperia 1 II, but Sony is explicitly targeting photo enthusiasts and professionals, people who like to manually tinker with their camera settings to control every aspect of a shot.
There are three 12-megapixel cameras: a zoom, an ultrawide, and the main camera, which has a large, 1/1.7-inch image sensor (that's bigger than the one in the iPhone 11 Pro). A larger sensor gives it the ability to take in more light for better night photos.
This is one of my favorite camera systems since the Google Pixel 4; in fact, the Xperia sometimes surpasses the Pixel in image quality. Photos snapped during the day are wonderfully rich in detail and color, and despite no dedicated night mode, the Xperia 1 II manages to generate surprisingly well-lit images with little noise at night. That even extends to the zoom and ultrawide-angle cameras, though to a slightly lesser degree.
The faults start to show when you shoot high-contrast scenes. You can see a comparison with the Pixel 4 in the photo gallery (the photo of the girl and the dog), where Google's phone is much more capable of keeping the whole scene exposed correctly, whereas the Xperia captures a frame that's blindingly white on one side. The Xperia 1 II's dedicated portrait mode can sometimes snap something magical like the example in the gallery of my dog, where you can see all the pores in my dog's very boopable nose. More often however, portrait mode can miss by making bokeh errors around a subject.
More importantly, the camera is less forgiving than phones like the Pixel when it comes to camera shake. This is particularly true in low-light scenes—keeping the phone steady as much as possible goes a long way to ensuring a blur-free result. It means the Pixel 4 is the more consistent performer of the two, as I usually had to retake a photo, tap on the screen, or fiddle around with something on the Xperia.
A few of the inconsistencies I found in the default camera app, like frequently over-exposed photos, can be avoided by switching to Sony's Photography Pro app, which comes preinstalled on the phone. It offers far more granular controls than what you get on most other smartphones—even those with dedicated manual modes in the camera app. You'll find an interface that's very similar to the one on Sony's professional cameras, allowing you the option to set things like shutter speed, ISO, focus area, auto or manual focus, auto-exposure lock, and continuous shooting mode.
This app mimics the feel of using a professional camera, but it can't quite match the ergonomic experience of twiddling with a camera's physical knobs and buttons (though there is a physical shutter button on the edge of the phone). Still, I can't deny that the Xperia 1 II comes close to the real thing. I've taken far more photos with this phone than many others I've tested this year, because it makes me feel more creative, which is precisely what I want from my gear.