SONY has just recently presented its newest flagship, the SONY Xperia 1 II, yeah pretty creative in their naming scheme. Now, we are wondering just how much has this flagship device improved from its previous version. Maybe it has evolved, perhaps not, but let’s find out.

Design

Sony Xperia 1

The SONY Xperia 1 II has just been announced. We saw it during its recent presentation, and what can we say? It’s a large device, but not as large as its predecessor. The Xperia 1 II is 6.5 x 2.80 x 0.30 inches, and it weighs 181.4g or 6.38 oz. It is smaller but heavier than the original Xperia 1 with dimensions of 6.57 x 2.83 x 0.32 inches and 178g in weight. Both devices come with an aluminum frame and Gorilla Glass 6 on their back and front panels.

Now, the most important difference is found in the back, where we see two different camera designs. The original Xperia 1 came with a triple camera design that was placed vertically in the center of the back panel. At the same time, the Xperia 1 II has a quad-camera setup that’s aligned vertically on the left side of the rear panel, but we will go into details concerning their cameras in a bit.

Display

Here we could say that we have a tie, sort off. Both devices arrive with OLED capacitive touchscreens capable of 16M colors with support for HDR BT.2020. They measure 6.5-inches with a 21:9 aspect ratio and a 1644 x 3840 resolution. We already mentioned that they are protected by Gorilla Glass 6 previously. The most significant change is that the Xperia X1 has an 83% screen to body ratio in comparison to the new 84% screen to body ratio found in the Xperia 1 II.

Internals

Inside these devices, we find the best processors available for the years they launched. The Xperia 1 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, 6GB RAM, and storage option s of 64GB or 128GB, a 3,300mAh battery, and an Adreno 640 GPU. The Xperia 1 II has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 8GB RAM 256GB storage, a 4,000mAh battery, and an Adreno 650 GPU. You can increase the storage space in both devices with a MicroSDXC card, and they are both pretty decent offerings.

Cameras

The SONY Xperia 1 has a triple camera that consists of a 12 MP, f/1.6, 26mm wide predictive Dual Pixel PDAF, a 12 MP, f/2.4, 52mm telephoto with 2x optical zoom, and a 12 MP, f/2.4, 16mm ultrawide with an 8 MP, f/2.0, 24mm wide selfie camera.

On the SONY Xperia 1 II, we find a Quad camera setup that includes basically the same cameras like the ones we mentioned before. It includes a 12 MP, f/1.7, 24mm wide, Dual Pixel PDAF, a 12 MP, f/2.4, 70mm telephoto with PDAF, and 3x optical zoom, a 12 MP, f/2.2, 16mm ultrawide Dual Pixel PDAF, and a 0.3 MP, TOF 3D depth sensor. Its selfie camera is the same one as the one found in the original Xperia 1. They are both able to record 1080p at 30fps and have HDR support. Maybe the most significant difference apart from the triple and quad-camera setups is the fact that the Xperia 1 II comes with Zeiss optics.

Features

Other exciting features found in these devices include a 3,5mm audio jack in both of them, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, and Fast charging. However, the SONY Xperia 1 II has wireless charging, and it is also 5G enabled.

Price

The original SONY Xperia 1 can be found for a little under $700, while the new SONY Xperia 1 II rumored to arrive with a price tag of about $1,000. What do you think? Would you get the latest SONY flagship, or could you settle for last year’s variant? You can also check our full review of the Xperia 1 to see if it’s still a good option in 2020.