I want to love the Xperia 1 VIII — but Sony keeps ignoring its biggest issues

I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with Sony’s Xperia range, which has all too often left me in two minds about the series. On the one hand, it is arguably the best high-end multimedia phone money can buy, packing Hi-Res audio over wired and wireless connections, unmatched video playback options, and still supporting microSD storage for massive on-device media libraries. In a market obsessed with removing features, Sony continues to build phones for enthusiasts who actually care about media.

But the Xperia lineup has also spent years struggling with the fundamentals. Charging has been slow, thermals inconsistent, and battery life merely decent rather than class-leading. The cameras, despite Sony’s Alpha branding, have often felt undercooked compared to rival flagships. Sony wants Xperia to be the ultimate creator flagship, but it still feels like one built primarily for Sony diehards.

That tension remains with the new Sony Xperia 1 VIII. While Sony has made some smart upgrades, I’m not convinced the company is addressing the series’ biggest problem: workflow.

Sony isn’t improving where it needs to the most

The Xperia 1 VIII suffers from the same issue affecting many modern flagships — much of the hardware feels iterative. Sony is once again sticking with a 5,000mAh battery, which should still comfortably deliver a full day and possibly two with lighter use. But once you start using the phone for its intended purpose — prolonged video recording, editing, and media capture — battery life will undoubtedly drain quickly. Competitors are now pushing the envelope with 7,000mAh-plus silicon-carbon capacities, making Sony’s approach increasingly conservative.

The charging situation doesn’t help either. Sony was keen to emphasize long-term battery health, claiming up to four years of healthy battery lifespan, but that also serves as justification for retaining 30W wired charging. Last year’s model took roughly 83 minutes to fully charge, which feels painfully slow in 2026. That’s difficult to overlook on a phone aimed at creators who may need to top up quickly between shoots or while traveling.

The cameras tell a similar story. The ultrawide, main, and selfie cameras are largely unchanged from last generation, and while they’re perfectly competent, they didn’t exactly impress me before. HDR performance could be inconsistent, zoom shots often looked overly soft, and the front camera particularly struggled in low light. Meanwhile, competitors are rapidly closing the gap between smartphone and mirrorless camera quality with increasingly massive sensors and smarter computational photography.

To Sony’s credit, the revamped telephoto camera appears to be a genuinely meaningful improvement. Moving away from the old variable zoom lens might sound controversial on paper, but replacing the tiny 12MP 1/3.5-inch sensor with a much larger 50MP 1/1.56-inch sensor should dramatically improve image quality. Better dynamic range, lower noise, and stronger low-light performance are worthwhile trade-offs, even if the optical zoom range changes slightly.

Sony also says the new setup supports RAW multi-frame processing for improved HDR and noise reduction, while software bokeh edge detection has apparently been refined as well — another sore point for previous Xperia cameras. These are all promising changes, but they still feel like refinements to an existing formula rather than a major leap forward.

And that’s ultimately the problem. Xperia continues to focus heavily on enthusiast hardware, while much of the modern creator space has shifted toward frictionless workflows.

There’s an entire generation of creators happily shooting on iPhones with objectively less ambitious hardware because Apple nails the broader experience: reliable video quality, consistent app optimization, effortless file sharing through AirDrop, and a tightly integrated ecosystem that makes content production easy. Sony still approaches mobile creation like a camera company, while Apple has made content capture modern and accessible.

Sony has made progress here. Streaming support over YouTube and RTMP is useful, and its camera and video applications continue to improve. But Xperia still lacks the seamless ecosystem integration and creator-first software experience that many modern users actually prioritize. The hardware may appeal to enthusiasts who enjoy manual controls and the craft of videography, but it doesn’t help you get your content out there better than any other phone can.

Pricing only makes the Xperia’s position more difficult. Starting at £1,399 / €1,499, the Xperia 1 VIII enters direct competition with ultra-premium rivals like the OPPO Find X9 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, both of which pair larger batteries with even more aggressive camera hardware.

I like the Xperia brand, but Sony isn’t doing enough

None of this makes the Xperia 1 VIII a bad phone. Far from it. Sony still offers features many competitors abandoned years ago, including expandable storage and a 3.5mm headphone jack, alongside Gorilla Glass Victus 2, IP65/68 protection, and a relatively clean software experience free from excessive AI gimmicks. In many ways, Xperia remains refreshingly focused, and I still love the series for that. But it’s also increasingly difficult to work out who these phones are truly for beyond the existing Sony faithful.

The Xperia 1 VIII feels caught between eras. It’s still clinging to enthusiast ideas that long-time fans adore, yet it isn’t pushing hard enough in other areas to convincingly position itself as the pinnacle of modern smartphone hardware or creator tooling. You’ll find bigger batteries, faster charging, and more advanced camera systems elsewhere, while Apple and others continue to dominate the creator ecosystem experience itself.

So I’m still left in two minds about Xperia. It’s not a relic, and there’s still something genuinely appealing about Sony refusing to fully follow the crowd. I’m glad Xperia still exists, and it’s great to see Sony at least trying something with a new look.  But I’m also not sure the Xperia 1 VIII does enough to attract new fans beyond the existing diehards. I hope I’m wrong.