Sony at MWC: Three new Xperia phones, including world’s first mobile 4K OLED display

Sony has today launched 3 new Xperia phones; the Xperia 10, Xperia 10 Plus, and a flagship Xperia 1.

The latter comes with the world’s first 4K OLED display, with HDR and a 21:9 ratio display. Well, in fact all three phones have gone with the same 21:9 ‘CinemaWide’ display this time.

For avid movie watchers, this should allow for the best possible experience – although it’s not yet clear how much 21:9 content there is available through the regular channels as yet.

With my brief look at the Xperia 1 on the Sony stand at Mobile World Congress, there’s one word to use for the display; wow!

It really is gorgeous, and what we’ve come to expect from Sony phones for some time. The XZ3 was a phone with a great screen too, but the phone has improved on this still further.

The wide display, in landscape mode, does mean that in portrait mode, these phones are tall. The Xperia 1 is 167mm tall, yet just 72mm wide.

As it happens, LG many moons ago released the BL40 with a similar screen – albeit just 4-inches, and with a resolution of 345×800 pixels instead of the Xperia 1’s 1644×3840. People laughed at LG back then, but today it may seem a little odd, but certainly not ridiculous. And you would likely get used to it soon enough too.

On the camera side, the Xperia 1 has a triple-lens camera system (Each sensor being 12-megapixels), with 2x optical zoom and fast Eye AF that keeps a constant focus on the nearest eye to ensure perfect accuracy when taking photos of people that aren’t standing still.

The Xperia 1 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 chipset, with a 3,330mAh battery, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and USB Power Delivery fast charging.

It is also IP68 water resistant.

Although not 5G (a 5G version is likely in the future), the phone supports Cat 19 4G, for download speeds of up to 1.6Gbps.