Sony Xperia 1 VII review

The 6.5-inch OLED display is a familiar sight

Sony chose to keep things simple with the display of the Xperia 1 VII, and it appears to be the same panel as on the Mark VI. It's a 6.5-inch OLED unit with a 1080x2340px resolution in a 19.5:9 aspect ratio - the 1 VI put an end to the 4K displays that used to be a staple of the lineup (and rightfully so, as it had little practical benefit).

Like before, it's a 120Hz-capable panel with 10-bit color and HDR support. Only now, brightness has been increased by 20%, Sony says. Well, in our testing, we got about a 10% increase when the ambient light sensors are in charge (there are two of them now, with an extra one on the back). When you go max out the slider yourself, the max brightness is essentially the same 800-ish nits as last year. Not a record-breaking showing in either case, but solid results nonetheless.

Still, in direct comparison to the Xperia 1 VI in bright sunlight, the new model offers improved legibility and image quality. It could be down to the screen glass being less reflective, but Sony is also dynamically tuning the color rendering, making it more expressive in bright sunlight to compensate for the natural loss of contrast in these conditions.

Refresh rate

The Xperia 1 VII's display supports up to 120Hz refresh rate and has a single setting to enable that 120Hz mode - otherwise it's capped at 60Hz. Either way, the phone will be doing some adaptive refresh rate switching and will typically idle at 30Hz - we didn't see it go any lower than that regardless of brightness or what was being displayed.

When playing back 24fps or 48fps videos in 120Hz mode, the phone would briefly switch to 48Hz, but it will ultimately settle on 120Hz. It would do the same for 30fps and 60fps clips - 60Hz for a short while, then shoot up to 120Hz. This doesn't feel right and could be worth looking into for a future update. We treated it as a bug and tested the battery life in video playback with the 120Hz toggle disabled.

One positive observation was that in browsers, the phone would maintain 120Hz for as long as there's moving content being displayed - a lot of phones switch down to 60Hz in those instances and sometimes there could be benefits from the extra refresh rate.

When it comes to gaming, the in-house Game enhancer utility allows you to tweak refresh rate, touch sampling rate, and a bunch of other things. From here, you can select 120Hz in Performance mode on a per-game basis (otherwise all games are limited to 60Hz/60fps in Balanced mode). Whether all games will actually run above 60fps isn't guaranteed, but we did see most of our usual titles break the 60fps barrier.

Streaming and HDR

The Xperia 1 VII supports HDR10 but doesn't offer Dolby Vision compliance. It does play back HDR streams in YouTube, but for one reason or another Netflix doesn't recognize it as HDR-capable - perhaps it's a matter of the platform whitelisting the Xperia somewhere down the line. It does allow FullHD playback thanks to the Widevine L1 compliance.

The Xperia 1 VII now also supports the Android Ultra HDR standard for displaying compatible photos with metadata-based highlight brightness boost - it works with its own photos in the Google Photos app (which is the default gallery app) as well as other compatible images on the Internet (in Chrome, for example).

Sony Xperia 1 VII battery life

The Xperia 1 VII is powered by a 5,000mAh battery of what is likely the regular graphite Li-Ion type - Sony isn't advertising anything new in this respect, so we gather it's not silicon carbon based. There's also no increase in capacity, and 5,000mAh is feeling a little low in 2025.

Anyway, the 1 VII earned a reasonably high Active Use Score in our testing, at 14:44h. We got more or less average results in all the screen-on tests, with sort of a lower than expected call time. In a way, it's doing great with the smallish battery that it has; it's just that it could have had a bigger battery in the first place.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

When it comes to charging speed, Sony will do what Sony does, and won't be giving you a lot to get excited about. The phone is rated for 30W charging and that's what it says on the box of the company's nicest adapter - XQZ-UC1 (sold separately). That's the one we tested with.

We got peak rates of a little over 24W, and 30 minutes took us from flat to 51%, which is essentially the same as the previous generation.

Similarly, there wasn't much of a change compared to the 1 VI when clocking the time to 100% - it took around an hour and a half, plus about 10 minutes until the phone actually stopped charging.

We also tried a good third-party 100W adapter and got the same results, so if you're getting an Xperia 1 VII, pretty much any modern PD charger will max out the phone's charging capability.

You can spin it any way you want - Sony's take is that the Xperia's battery will retain capacity better over the years compared to others, which may or may not be true to some extent. In our book, here and now, the 1 VII is just too slow to charge. Even the Galaxies and Pixels with their traditionally unhurried ways do significantly better, particularly in the early stages of the charging process.

When it comes to long-term battery health, the 1 VII has a bunch of battery protection options in settings, grouped under the Battery Care menu item. These include the usual adaptation of the charging cycle to your sleeping habits that makes sure the phone only gets charged to full right before you typically need it, as well as a hard limit on charging up to 80 or 90%.

The Xperia 1 VII supports wireless charging too, up to 15W of it, like before.

Speaker test

The Xperia 1 VII features a stereo speaker system. As is the norm with Sonys, both speakers are front-firing, directing sound where it's most naturally needed.

Again, as is the norm with Sonys, the top speaker is always assigned the left channel - the Xperia has a correct side up when in landscape orientation, since it's assumed that the buttons (shutter release in particular) must be on top. If you hold it the other way around, you won't be getting the audio channels in the correct orientation.

Top speaker/Earpiece • Bottom speaker

In our testing, the 1 VII earned a 'Good' rating for loudness, a somewhat surprising step down from the 'Very Good' Xperia 1 VI. It's not really lacking in oomph or quality in practice, though it can't quite match the iPhone 16 Pro Max's soundstage, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra is also a bit boomier. The Xperia does sound nicer than the Pixel 9 Pro XL - to our ears, at least.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

Sony still fits a headphone jack for wired headphones. It's one of few remaining makers to offer wired headphone connectivity on its high-end smartphones.

It's 'Powered by Walkman', of course, the 1 VII's audio experience. The promo materials mention high-quality solder with added gold, copper-plated resistors, and whatnot for the best-sounding Xperia to date. It's nice that there's still someone to cater to that demographic, when other manufacturers have mostly abandoned the headphone jack, leaving analog-loving users to rely on USB-C adapters.