Sony has unveiled its latest version of the Xperia 1, the Xperia 1 VIII, and it's come with a more significant redesign than between recent generations. The phone now features a square camera enclosure for its three lenses, and a brushed-metal finish in four colours that looks frankly luxurious.
Sony's not leaning that hard on the design in its announcement, though, preferring to spotlight the addition of an AI Camera Assistant that's been added to the phone's camera app. This will let you see suggestions for camera effects like colour tones, lens selection, and bokeh effects in real-time as you shoot.
You'll see these suggestions in the shooting process and be able to toggle to them, with the effects shown in your viewfinder so you can get a sense for how things will look before you ever take a photo. A demo we saw was indeed fairly slick, although it's a curious question as to whether the sort of camera enthusiast likely to pick an Xperia 1 actually wants those shortcuts.
The Xperia 1 VIII has a new 1/1.56-inch image sensor, which is significantly larger than the 1 VII's, which should make for better performance in a range of scenarios. It can also now use RAW multi-frame processing on all three of its lenses (16mm / 24mm / 70mm), which should help de-noise photos regardless of how you shoot them.
Curiously, Sony has also redesigned the phone's telephoto offering specifically. It'll now actually offer a fixed optical zoom of 2.9x, rather than a more flexible digital situation, which might technically make it less adaptable, but should enhance the actual quality coming from zoom shots.
This also results in a tweak to the telemacro setting, which now has a longer 15cm minimum distance (up from 4cm). This should arguably make it easier to get steady macro shots, but will undeniably mean that those shots aren't quite as close-up.
Elsewhere, Sony's packed in a new stereo speaker system, which is a bonus for the 'YouTube on your phone' watchers among us, while the whole thing is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which means it's got authentically flagship-level power (not always a given for the Xperia 1 historically). That should also mean comfortably all-day battery life after efficiency gains.
Sony says that pre-orders for the Xperia 1 VIII should go live today, direct from its store, and it'll come in at a chunky £1399 or €1499 for the default 256GB version, or a far loftier £1849 or €1999 for the 1TB version.
