The Sony Xperia 1 V is a phone designed for multimedia buffs, and audiophiles who love the Sony expertise in audio-visual space. That's the thanks of its 6.5-inch 4K HDR OLED display, with its 120Hz refresh rate, so, it's easy on the eyes in terms of both clarity and with a smoothness of motion, although in truth it only operates at 4K when playing 4K content, running at 2560 x 1096 much of the time. It's all powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and it offers 12GB of RAM and up to 256GB or 512GB of storage (expandable with a microSD card), with notably impressive performance for gaming and multiple apps running side by side.

Image Photography is a big draw, with a triple-cam system co-engineered by Sony's Alpha Division: 48MP main, 12MP ultra-wide and 12MP telephoto shooter offering 5x optical zoom. Add 4K 120fps video capture and real-time eye tracking to the package for pros and casual users. For those who love audio, it comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack, front-facing stereo speakers, and even Hi-Res audio, so both music and gaming performance should be excellent. But Sony continues to avoid the race for computational gimmickry. There's no moon mode, no fake tilt-shift, but instead manual controls more like you get on the Alpha and uncropped 4K 120fps recording on all three lenses. The learning curve is steep, but the finished product feels authored, not machine-written. The phone has a relatively clean skin of Android, it's practically stock, and there's not much special software aside from some extra tweaks that focus on gaming or productivity, primarily.

The Xperia 1 V is very much a mixed bag in those respects, it is the king of display and multimedia, but sucks from a charging speed or gaming performance angle, so is more suitable for creatives and Sony subscribers rather than power users.