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00:00Hey what's up, MKBHD here. And I think Sony's finally done it. This mountain they've been
00:09climbing for all these years, they've finally reached the top and they've created the most
00:14enthusiast targeted phone in the world. More than any gaming phone, more than any other
00:19niche phone. I recently made a video on why people don't really buy that many Sony phones.
00:24They've doubled down on all of that stuff since then. It's kind of a work of art. So
00:28I've been using this phone on and off for about a month now. And everything that you
00:33can think of that would make the ultimate enthusiast phone, they've done it. Sony's
00:38done it in this phone. Everything from the specs to the features to the details, it's
00:42all here. I mean you can start all the way from the top with the name. It's the Xperia
00:47One 3. Good luck explaining that to your normal friends. And it was unveiled literally months
00:52ago in April, so you'd only know about it now that it's quietly actually gone on sale
00:57because you follow enough tech blogs or YouTube channels because you certainly won't see any
01:01ads for it or find it in any carrier stores here. But then just look at this design. I
01:06mean you can probably already see some of the enthusiast features starting to stick
01:10out. It's kind of hard to know where to start actually. So first of all it has a super nice
01:16frosted matte black finish. And it's actually even kind of like a little bit of a soft touch
01:20that I really like. Even the sides are matte black. And the whole thing is built around
01:25this 21 by 9 aspect ratio, which an enthusiast would love because now you can watch your
01:3021 by 9 videos on a proper cinema display with no black bars. But then let's just go
01:36down the feature list, okay? Dual SIM card tray at the top, removable without a tool.
01:41And the second SIM card tray actually doubles as expandable storage for those micro SD cards
01:46up to a terabyte. You're welcome enthusiasts. There's stereo front facing speakers flanking
01:51the edge of the phone. And they're nice and loud. Louder than the previous generation.
01:55And far enough apart to create a nice real stereo image. And then up in the corner, yeah,
02:02that's an LED notification light. A feature you really don't see in many features nowadays
02:06but that enthusiasts will appreciate. And as I say that, you're probably already thinking
02:11about a headphone jack. So yeah, the headphone jack is up here too, up top. Feels like the
02:15phone is barely thick enough for it. And this phone actually also has some extra buttons.
02:19So there's a volume rocker up top. Then the super reliable fingerprint reader power
02:23button combo underneath that. Then a custom button that's mapped to trigger Google Assistant.
02:30Then underneath that, a dedicated shutter button for the camera system. And it's got
02:35the half press for focusing and the full press for actually taking a shot and everything.
02:40All of that wrapped in a body that's IP68 water resistant and pretty squared off overall.
02:46Maybe a little bit of a boring design to some, but I like it. I really like it. It's
02:50the finish. It's the overall like pretty square aesthetic that I've liked in the past, but
02:54it's just, it's nice. The fingerprint reader on the power button is very fast and very
02:59reliable. So I'm a fan of that. And just the whole phone is of course very easy and comfortable
03:03to hold because it's so narrow. Because 21 by 9. But speaking of 21 by 9, let's talk
03:10about the screen. This phone has a six and a half inch 4K, 120 Hertz display right off
03:17the bat. Jesus. In the settings, you can switch between the super smooth 120 Hertz or just
03:24normal 60 Hertz, but you actually cannot adjust the screen resolution at all. It is always
03:30locked at 4K, which is a little bit crazy. I mean, I get that it's an enthusiast phone
03:35and only an enthusiast would want to toggle their phone to 4K sometimes to, you know,
03:40watch a 4K YouTube video or a movie or something. But this is just 4K all the time. This is
03:47full on maximum enthusiast. If you literally can't turn it off, no 1080, no 1440, it's
03:53locked. I'm actually kind of surprised they do let you turn off 120 Hertz. I don't know.
03:58Maybe they'll remove that option in the Mark 4. The display itself though, it looks pretty
04:02great as you might expect. Sony has this 10 bit creator mode. It's had it before.
04:07And it's also a highly adjustable white balance to tune this OLED display to look exactly
04:11how you'd want. I'd expect nothing less here. But of course the downside to having a 21
04:16by 9 display is there are still some apps that aren't perfectly optimized for it. And
04:22honestly, probably never will be. That includes Instagram stories and TikTok, you know, the
04:28normie apps most everyday people use. They have black bars at the top and the bottom
04:32because most phones aren't this crazy tall aspect ratio. But that's fine. This is an
04:36enthusiast phone. And so people who are willing to make that sacrifice to have a nice, narrow,
04:42taller, better looking display with cinema videos, they'll be fine with that. Couple
04:47apps not working, no big deal. This is going to be great with 21 by 9 stuff. The one thing
04:52you can't get around though, is having a display at 4K 120 Hertz all the time. Yeah, it eats
04:58into battery life pretty hard. So this phone has a 4,500 milliamp hour battery, which is
05:03solid, but that's not gigantic. But the rate that you can chew through battery at high
05:08brightness 4K 120 Hertz is pretty high. So I'd recommend you have one of those enthusiast
05:14battery banks somewhere near you if you plan on getting a whole day past about four hours
05:18of heavy screen on time away from your charger. The brick included does get you 30 watt fast
05:23charging and it does have Qi wireless charging as well. But yeah, if there is a weak point
05:28of this hyper enthusiast phone, it's definitely that. So you've got your crazy enthusiast
05:32hardware with the headphone jack and the notification LED. You've got your crazy enthusiast screen
05:374K. You've got your enthusiast specs of course. You've got Snapdragon 888, 12 gigs of RAM
05:43and the works are all here. But what's it like to actually use this phone with such
05:48crazy hardware? You guessed it. It's riddled with quirks and features. I'd feel like Doug
05:54DeMiro trying to point all of these out. There's a lot going on. Now Sony software actually
05:58think overall is pretty nice. Mostly because let's be real, they don't try to do too much
06:03aesthetically. It's like if you took near stock Android 11 and then just plugged a bunch
06:08of features into it that work with Sony's hardware. I mean, that's what an enthusiast
06:12like me wants. So you've got your near stock looking quick settings and the Google discover
06:16feed next to your home screens, even the default Google search box at the very bottom
06:21of your home screen for reachability. But then in the settings, like I've said, you
06:25have a ton of display customization. You have always on display controls, reverse wireless
06:30charging toggle, lots of battery care features to help you reduce the amount of time your
06:35battery spends at full 100% charge to prolong the life of your phone. And then one of my
06:39favorite Sony additions is called side sense. So Sony fans stop me if you've heard this
06:44before, but it puts this little bar over here to the side of your screen. You can
06:48double tap that bar anytime you want to bring up a quick app launcher, which you can customize
06:53with whatever eight apps you want, or just bring up the whole list hilariously. And then
06:57you can slide up on that bar anytime you want to open multitasking, which is pretty sweet
07:03on that extra tall 21 by nine display. I assume if you're a true enthusiast, you're doing
07:09this all the time and you've got your favorite app pairs queued up so you can launch them
07:12both at the same time with a single touch. And you can also launch one handed mode from
07:17here, which makes sense if you can't quite reach the top of this phone. Honestly, it's
07:21so tall that the top corners can be a little annoying to reach even with big hands. So
07:25you can customize the position of this bar, the size, the transparency level, the sensitivity,
07:31every little thing, dial it to your heart's content. And it's all over here in this little
07:36sidebar that's super reachable wherever you want to put it. Well done, Sony. This phone
07:40has really good, strong haptics, which is good to see always. And there's also DualShock
07:464 support. So you can connect a Sony PS4 controller to this phone to play certain games if you're
07:52into that. I imagine they're building in a DualSense 5 support. It doesn't work with
07:57the PS5 controller yet, but that would be cool. But you want to know the worst part
08:00of the software though, for some reason, and this annoyed me a lot. This phone has the
08:06slowest auto-rotate I've ever witnessed in a modern smartphone. Yeah, that's not a bug.
08:15It's that slow every single time. I don't know why. I feel like this is either a... I
08:21guess it is a bug and they can fix it with software. But yeah, that was extremely annoying.
08:27Now, an enthusiast phone wouldn't be complete without some enthusiast cameras. And boy,
08:31does Sony have that on lock here. Literally, there is no basic Android camera app. As soon
08:38as you squeeze that shutter or double tap the power button, or just hit the camera icon,
08:43whatever you like, you're thrown immediately into Sony's advanced camera app. Now they do
08:47give you a basic mode in that camera app, which is funny. And that lets you switch to video mode
08:52and toggle between the ultra wide, the standard, and two different telephoto focal lengths.
08:59But then of course you can just go straight from basic mode into basically a full-on Sony
09:03alpha camera with programmable auto modes and manual modes and 20 FPS burst shutter and sliders
09:10for your shutter speed and ISO and focus and all that. It's great. But did you catch one
09:14little thing I just said there? Two telephoto focal lengths, but there's only one telephoto
09:20camera on the back of the phone. So how are there two telephoto focal lengths? Well, it turns out
09:25quietly for their hyper-enthusiast phone, Sony's dropped variable optical zoom on a single
09:34telephoto camera. So this horizontally oriented telephoto camera has glass inside that moves
09:40to change the focal length optically instead of digitally. So in the software, you can snap these
09:46between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters. These focal lengths are both shot by that same sensor.
09:53It's pretty intense. Now Sony won't tell me exactly how they're doing this. I guess it's
09:59a secret, but I imagine there are probably some sort of magnets involved moving the glass around.
10:04The best I can show is this animation on Sony's YouTube channel, one of their videos. But this
10:08animation actually shows several different internal lens positions, which kind of confused
10:13me because there's only two focal lengths. So I don't know what this is about or how accurate
10:17this visualization is, but you get the idea. It's moving glass inside the phone to give you two
10:23different zooms. And so the result is kind of amazing. You now have two different focal lengths
10:29of telephoto in one sensor. You have 70 and you have 105 and you can digital zoom between them,
10:35but you can also just snap between them back and forth for optical zoom to match sharpness.
10:40That's pretty cool. The brutal part though, is even after all of that technical wizardry,
10:45the photo quality really isn't that great. Like I'd like to think I know what I'm doing and I've
10:50shot with plenty of cameras, plenty of Sony Alpha cameras and other Sony phones, but it's just never
10:55actually looked that great despite all the incredible innovative manual control. The
11:01shutter is very fast. Autofocus is incredibly fast. I never miss a shot with the dedicated
11:06shutter button. It's awesome. But the actual shot I get, eh, pretty soft, a little bit muted colors,
11:13a little noisy sometimes, pretty meh. So I was hoping for better there. So the best thing I get
11:19out of this phone's camera system really is just, it's a technical marvel and it's really cool
11:24to appreciate. And I have hope for the future of smartphones with optical zoom, but I also don't
11:29want to get my hopes up because, well, if you remember what Samsung did with dual aperture
11:35in the Galaxy S9, it was kind of just like this. It wasn't smoothly adjusting aperture between a
11:40range, but you could snap between two different apertures on the same camera lens with a moving
11:47lens. That was in the Samsung Galaxy S9. And then the next year it was gone and it never showed
11:52up again. And it would have been really useful in some of their later years, Galaxy S20 having such
11:57a thin plane of focus, having dual aperture could make a bigger range of focus if you shut down the
12:02aperture a little bit, but they didn't do it anymore. So I see that. And then I think of Sony's
12:07where now you're snapping between focal lengths and it's cool. And I hope it advances, but there's
12:12no guarantees. So we'll cross our fingers for that. But overall, sheesh, this phone is a lot.
12:18It's got a camera I've never seen before. It's got a screen I've never seen before. It's got a ton
12:23of features. There's just a lot going on. And so if you care about smartphones at all, this is a
12:27really exciting phone. And aside from the awful auto rotate, I thoroughly enjoyed using it. Now,
12:32would I recommend it? Honestly, probably almost no one should actually buy this phone. I mean,
12:39it is 1200 bucks. That's how much I get it for. It's on B&H right now. You can get a Galaxy S21
12:45Ultra for that price, which would have better battery, faster charging, better cameras,
12:50better software with more updates, and just overall a bit more versatile. So you have to
12:55really want this. But if you are that enthusiast, or if you're into Sony headphones, or Sony PS5,
13:03or Sony, I don't know, Bravia TVs, or the other stuff they make, then you might consider this
13:09one too. So there you have it. That's been it. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next
13:14one. Peace.