Sony Xperia 1 VIII announced
With the new Sony Xperia 1 VIII, Samsung aims to compete with today's high-end smartphones. Think of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Central again are the display, multimedia and camera. And the cameras of the new Sony are enveloped in a new camera island. Where Sony stuck to the familiar recipe for years, in terms of design, this has now been taken in hand. The familiar shape has remained, but what immediately stands out is the new design of the camera island.
According to Sony, the revamped design is inspired by natural materials. Sony calls the new style "ORE design", with finishes and colours inspired by rough gemstones. The smartphone will appear in Graphite Black, Iolite Silver, Garnet Red and Native Gold. The body gets more texture for extra grip and a slightly sleeker look.
The biggest innovation is in the cameras. Sony is introducing a new AI Camera Assistant that gives suggestions for colour tones, lens choice and background blur while shooting. The system automatically analyses what you bring into the picture and adjusts recommendations accordingly. According to Sony, this should make it easier to quickly add a certain style or mood to your photos.
The telephoto camera also gets a major upgrade. Sony now uses a larger 1/1.56-inch sensor, which the company says is about four times larger than in the previous generation. This should mainly ensure better low-light photos and more detail in zoomed-in images. The three cameras, 16 mm, 24 mm and 70 mm, also benefit from improved HDR processing and noise reduction.
Very little changes to familiar Xperia elements. For instance, the dedicated camera button remains present and Sony retains the 3.5 mm headphone jack. As such, the Xperia series remains one of the few premium smartphones where wired audio is still standard. Sony is also making improvements on the audio front. The stereo speakers have been revamped and should provide fuller sound with clearer voices and deeper bass. This should be especially noticeable during music listening, movie watching and gaming.
Under the bonnet, the Xperia 1 VIII runs on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. In doing so, Sony promises a battery life of up to two days and a battery life of around four years. In addition, the device tries to reduce power consumption smarter for heavy apps such as navigation.
Sony will ship the new flagship with Android 16. You will get Android updates for a period of four years, while the period for security updates comes out to six years. The phone is available from today at 1499 euros. This is lower than the €1,900 figure that was circulating in the rumour circuit. For this amount, you get the variant with 256GB of storage. The version with 1TB in the colour Native Gold costs 1999 euros, but will not come to the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. On pre-order, you get the Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones as a gift.
