Sony Xperia 10 review

Vanilla Android Pie

The Xperia 10 boots Android Pie, and as we observed on the 10 Plus, this is a variation that stays closer to Google's own implementation than what we saw on the Xperia XZ3 last year. That's most obvious in the option to use the pill navigation (which Sony calls 'Swipe up on Home button') in addition to the classic nav bar. You can find the setting in the display menu, and enabling it makes the Xperia behave almost precisely like a Pixel phone.

Swipe up setting • Homescreen • App drawer • Folder view • Notification shade

There are unique Xperia bits on top, however - ones that are meant to help out with the tall aspect of the display. This smaller model is naturally easier to operate single-handedly than the Plus, but even so, the notification shade is pretty far up - one-handed mode to the rescue!

It's not a new thing, but we've grown to appreciate it on these 21:9 Xperias more than we used to on previous occasions. A quick double tap on the Home button shrinks the entire UI to one of the bottom corners and makes the notification shade conveniently reachable with one hand - good luck with that on the full-screen UI.

One-handed mode

Then there's Side Sense - a custom drawer-like interface that can be triggered by tapping twice on a handle located on the side of the screen. You can move the handle up and down, adjust its size, and have it on either side or both sides. The menu itself is sort of a take on the Android Pie recent apps interface, which is notably missing from its intended location as a row in the app drawer. You can disable the handle from showing up over apps on a per-app basis, or you can turn off side sense entirely.

Side sense

An inherent benefit of an extra long display is the ability to show more items in long lists - that includes boring stuff like the settings menu, and marginally more fun stuff like, say, Instagram. The benefits aren't at as great on the 10 as on the 10 Plus, because of the slightly different scaling and text fit, but there still are gains.

Another good use for a 21:9 screen is showing two apps in two larger-than-average halves of the said screen. The thing is that with Pie Google introduced much clumsier mechanics for going into multi-window and it affects all phones who adopt it.

There's a downside to the unusual aspect too, in that some apps may not be able to display properly in it. We ran into this with one of the benchmarks we do, but not the more common apps you're likely to use. Even so, the possibility for incompatibility is there.

Settings • Instagram (0.5 extra row) • Multi- window • and in landscape • Incompatible app

Sony also notably handles its own multimedia display and playback. Album features both photo and video support, can connect to the cloud and local network services and is pretty good at organizing galleries and doing the occasional light edit on a shot.

The Music app is simple and well organized, without lacking any important features. All the while, it looks very appealing with large format album art (and automatic art download) and a flat design. It also features Google cloud integration. There are also various options to tweak sound including the DSEE HX up-scaler and the Automatic optimization which work with wired headphones. Others, like aptX HD, are compatible with Bluetooth devices.

Album app • Photo Editor • Music app • Audio settings

Synthetic benchmarks

The Xperia 10 has the Snapdragon 630 inside doing the number crunching, a familiar midrange chipset. Perhaps a little too familiar - it's been around since the fall of 2017 and, as was the case with the 10 Plus, we'd have liked to see a newer/faster chip powering the 10.

Anyway, the Snapdragon 630 has an octa-core 2.2 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and the Adreno 508 GPU inside. The Xperia 10 can be had with 4GB of RAM in China and 3GB in the rest of the world, and we got the ROW package. Storage is 64GB regardless.

The Xperia 10 is off to a pretty bad start already in GeekBench, posting a slightly lower score than other phones with the same chipset in the multi-core test. And then higher-grade chips are even speedier, of course. Under single-core loads, the Xperia's numbers are closer to other S630-equipped rivals, but still that several points behind.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  5894
• Nokia 7 plus
  5893
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  5763
• Honor 8X
  5651
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  5574
• Nokia 7.1
  4975
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  4927
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  4780
• Motorola Moto G7
  4755
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  4446
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  4225
• Sony Xperia XA2
  4215
• Motorola Moto X4
  4136
• Sony Xperia 10
  3985

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Nokia 7 plus
  1634
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  1628
• Honor 8X
  1618
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  1611
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  1595
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  1524
• Nokia 7.1
  1344
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  1340
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1334
• Motorola Moto G7
  1255
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  882
• Motorola Moto X4
  866
• Sony Xperia XA2
  865
• Sony Xperia 10
  848

The less than stellar run continues into Antutu, where the Xperia 10 is trailing behind key rivals with even the S632-packing Moto G7 posting some 20% higher scores. Predictably, the phones with more powerful chipsets than that are way out of reach of the Xperia.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  143257
• Nokia 7 plus
  140820
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  140500
• Honor 8X
  137276
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  136583
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  123883
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  120573
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  117829
• Nokia 7.1
  117175
• Motorola Moto G7
  106292
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  90918
• Sony Xperia 10
  89697

It's not exactly like the Xperia is any better in the graphics department, where its Adreno 508 is struggling with the FullHD resolution of the display. In the offscreen tests, it posts similar fps numbers as the other S636 devices, which are predictably behind the Snapdragon 660s of this world.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  15
• Nokia 7 plus
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  15
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  14
• Honor 8X
  14
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  10
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  10
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  10
• Nokia 7.1
  10
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  9.9
• Motorola Moto X4
  9.8
• Sony Xperia 10
  9.6
• Sony Xperia XA2
  9.6
• Motorola Moto G7
  6.9

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Nokia 7 plus
  14
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  14
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  13
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  13
• Honor 8X
  13
• Motorola Moto X4
  11
• Sony Xperia XA2
  10
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  10
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  9.7
• Nokia 7.1
  9.7
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  9.4
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  8.4
• Sony Xperia 10
  7.8
• Motorola Moto G7
  6.4

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Nokia 7 plus
  9.1
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  9.1
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  9
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  7.6
• Honor 8X
  7.6
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  6.3
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  6.3
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  6.3
• Nokia 7.1
  6.3
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  5.6
• Sony Xperia XA2
  5.5
• Sony Xperia 10
  5.4
• Motorola Moto X4
  5.3
• Motorola Moto G7
  3.8

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Nokia 7 plus
  8.6
• Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018)
  8.3
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  8
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  6.7
• Honor 8X
  6.7
• Sony Xperia XA2
  6
• Nokia 6 (2018)
  6
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  5.9
• Nokia 7.1
  5.9
• Motorola Moto X4
  5.8
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  5.7
• Sony Xperia 10 Plus
  5
• Sony Xperia 10
  4.3
• Motorola Moto G7
  3.5

As we said when looking at the Xperia 10 Plus, the Xperia 10 comes off as underpowered for its price range. Both new and old devices can be had for the same money while offering superior performance.