Sony Xperia XA1

You don’t need to spend a fortune on a phone. We’ve said it a hundred times before, but top-end mobiles like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone X still seem to be most people’s dream phones.

Fair enough, we can understand why.

The Sony Xperia XA1 is an altogether more practical proposition. It’s the kind of phone many can afford to buy outright, or without a contract that costs as much as a good gym membership.

Sony has aced this phone’s design in a few respects. It looks and feels slick, with metal used in the right places. This is also one of the cheapest phones you’ll find with a camera that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a flagship a year or two ago.

Not every element is perfect. Screen resolution is just 720p, not 1080p, and there’s no fingerprint scanner, which is all but standard in mid-range phones. However, if you can stomach these compromises the Sony Xperia XA1 is a great, sensibly priced handset.

Sony Xperia XA1 price and release date

• Out now in the US, UK and Australia
• Launched at $299, £229, AU$399, slightly cheaper now

The Xperia XA1 first went on sale in April 2017. It’s part of the same generation as the Xperia XZ and Xperia XZ Premium, and it has a brother too, called the Xperia XA1 Ultra.

The XA1 launched at $299 / £229 / AU$399 while its big brother, which has a far larger 6-inch screen, costs £329 (around $420, AU$570). The XA1 has dropped in price with us seeing it as low as £200/$280 and 2GB deals starting in the UK at £15 a month.

Design and display

• Smart, pocket-friendly design
• Plastic back, metal sides
• Relatively low resolution, but display is otherwise strong

The Sony Xperia XA1 looks like a smaller, narrower version of the Xperia XZ. How it is built is rather different, though.

Instead of a lot of glass and metal, this is a mostly plastic phone with some curved metal panels on the sides to give your hands the cool, hard feel plastic lacks. It actually took us a while to realize the back isn’t metal, because the Xperia XA1 feels like such a dense little brick of phone. Sony has done a good job of making this affordable design seem classy.

It has a more expensive look than the Moto G5, for example, which reverses the Sony Xperia XA1’s style with a metal panel on the back and plastic elsewhere. This phone is also reasonably slim at 8mm thick, and has some of the thinnest screen surrounds of any Xperia phone, regardless of price.

The Sony Xperia XA1 does have pretty big blank expanses of black above and below the display, but this just makes it seem long and slender, not harder to handle. Long and slim is often better than short and stubby.

It also has most of the Sony design hallmarks seen in other Xperia phones. The power button is the little metal dot Xperias had before it doubled as a finger scanner, and there’s a physical camera button on the right side. You don’t see those too often anymore.

The obvious missing feature here is a fingerprint scanner. This is an issue given the cheaper Moto G5 now has a scanner, but you’ll just have to decide whether it’s a deal-breaker for you or not. The Sony Xperia XA1 also lacks the water resistance common among more expensive Xperias.

The consolation prize is 32GB of storage, which is enough for most people. There’s also a microSD card slot in the pull-out tray in which the nanoSIM lives.

This phone is a good choice is you want minimalist style without paying too much, and some of you may even prefer its feel to that of the much bigger Sony Xperia XZ Premium. That phone is a bit of a handful.

While the slim screen surround helps, the key to the Sony Xperia XA1’s great pocketability is simple: it has a fairly small screen. It’s 5 inches across and of 720p resolution.

This is where the phone starts to lose its grip on any claims of great value. The cheaper Moto G5 has a 1080p display, and to keen eyes the difference will be fairly obvious.

Text looks less clean and sharp close-up, and you’ll see more ‘jaggies’ in 3D games. However, it’s easy to overstate the importance of this for those who aren’t true mobile phone nerds. The Sony Xperia XA1’s screen is still fairly sharp, and its other characteristics are actually pretty good.

Color is respectably rich and vivid. It loses out to the XZ Premium, which can deliver incredible saturation for an LCD phone, but the Xperia XA1 actually strikes a good balance between punch and a natural look.

The display is also super-bright, if you need it to be, and contrast is very good. Max out the backlight and outdoors visibility is excellent.

It’s still one of the most expensive phones still using a 720p screen, though, so don’t buy if you’re going to notice, and be bothered by, the slight pixelation.

Digging a little deeper, the Sony Xperia XA1 also has special image enhancement modes designed to make your photos and videos look either more powerful or super-saturated. We’d advise not using these to view your own photos, as they’ll look totally different when you transfer them to a different device or upload them to Facebook. It’s a bit like applying an Instagram filter only you can see.

Sony’s standard - and rather unfriendly - white balance controls also reappear in the Sony Xperia XA1, although we found the phone’s default look pleasant. Some Sony phones have a blue skew to their screens, but XA1 is actually slightly warm-leaning.

Interface and reliability

• Android 7.0 with custom Sony interface
• Fairly quick general performance
• Rejects a few interface conventions of Android

The Sony Xperia XA1 runs Android 7.0 with the custom Sony interface laid on top. You get recent Android improvements like the new notifications system and the Google Assistant, but Sony’s UI is actually like a continuation of Android’s pre-version-5.0 design.

For example, the apps menu comes in pages rather than as a giant alphabetical scroll, and you can arrange your apps menu into folders, and choose the position of apps. Google “simplified” features like this out of existence some time ago.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Sony’s approach, as long as you haven’t experienced a recent ‘vanilla’ version of Android and will see this as a step backwards. Only one screen smacks of the sort of bloat we like to avoid in custom interfaces, the “app suggestion” display.

You get to this by swiping left-to-right on your apps menu, and it simply houses a few recently used app icons and a bunch of suggested downloads from Google Play. For most, it’s pretty useless, but is also easy to ignore.

The Sony Xperia XA1's interface feels fairly quick for the most part, with no annoying laggy moments as you navigate or type away at the keyboard. 

However, app loads are slightly slower than some. Using DDR3 RAM rather than DDR4 (judging by our tests) probably doesn’t help, although the phone’s 32GB of storage is actually reasonably fast, writing at 124MB/s.

Movies, music and gaming

• Features a suite of Sony media apps
• Good gaming performance
• Mono speaker doesn’t impress

Like other Sony phones, the Sony Xperia XA1 does its best to nudge several Google services into the background, attempting to replace them with its own media apps. There are Sony video and music apps, and the Sony PlayStation app for the PS4 owners out there.

The video app is not what you might expect at all. It’s not a video store but a local media player and a way to search what’s on TV, a sort of advanced channel guide. It’s not much use if you mostly watch Netflix these days, but may appeal if you’re still playing it terrestrial.

Its suggestion that a 1983 re-run of Top of the Pops is one of tonight’s favorite TV shows in the UK seems dubious, though. Take its recommendations with a critical eye.

The Music app is a decent iPod-a-like local music player that also lets you hook-in Spotify.

Sony’s PlayStation app is perhaps the most interesting of the lot, because it doesn’t just rehash ideas found elsewhere countless times on Google Play. Instead, it lets you control a PS4 with your Sony Xperia XA1, to type things in without using the gamepad, for example.

On its own, the Sony Xperia XA1 is a good, if not class-leading gaming phone. Its limiting factors are simple. You can get bigger, higher-resolution screens at the price, and the internal speaker here is not that good.

While it looks like there are Sony’s signature front-loaded stereo speakers here, the Sony Xperia XA1 actually just has one speaker on the bottom edge. That means no stereo sound, and the lone speaker isn’t all that loud or powerful-sounding.

Every game we tried ran very well on the Sony Xperia XA1, though. While the phone doesn’t have a high-end CPU/GPU, it’s easily powerful enough to make games sing at the native 720p resolution.

Performance and benchmarks

• Smooth general performance
• Slightly lower Geekbench score than Moto G5 Plus

The Sony Xperia XA1 has a MediaTek Helio P20 CPU with 3GB of DDR3 RAM. This CPU has eight Cortex-A53 cores, four at 2.3GHz and four at 1.6GHz. A Mali-T880MP2 provides graphics power.

Judging by the performance of some phones with the last-gen Helio P10, this setup might struggle if the Sony Xperia XA1 had a 1080p screen, but it doesn’t. Everything seems to run rather nicely, the only obvious performance trade-off being in app load speeds, which are slightly slower than the XA1’s big brothers.

In Geekbench 4, the Sony Xperia XA1 scores a solid 3,628 (809 per core) points, around 200 less than the 3,824 score the Moto G5 Plus achieved in our tests. Don’t read too much into that, though. This phone is very much in the same league as the Moto G5 Plus and its smaller brother, the Moto G5.

The three all use Cortex-A53 cores, and the G5 Plus has the advantage of a 14nm die process rather than a 16nm one. However, that’s not too grand a difference. These numbers refer to the size of transistors in a CPU, 14/16 nanometers. In summary: the smaller, the better.

Battery life

• Fair but not great battery life
• USB-C charging
• Feature phone-like mode for battery dire straits

The Sony Xperia XA1 has a worryingly small battery unit, just 2,300mAh, although thanks to the 720p resolution screen the phone’s stamina is acceptable. Conventional, rather than a disaster.

Playing back a 720p test video for 90 minutes, the Xperia XA1 loses 27%. That’s significantly worse than the Moto G5, which loses 22% in the same test.

The message is pretty clear: having a 720p screen doesn’t entirely make up for the low-capacity battery. However, the bright backlight does not help either. We perform these tests at maximum brightness, and on the Xperia XA1 that’s pretty bright.

With real life use you’ll be able to get a full day of moderate use between charges. However, we tend to oscillate between moderate and heavy use, and like this the Sony Xperia XA1 struggles a little. Add a few hours of podcast streaming and the battery is likely to conk out at or just before bedtime.

However, it seems better than last year’s Xperia XA, perhaps because the chipset is more efficient.

It has worse stamina than the Moto G5, if not by a truly dramatic margin. There is a mode to help out, too, called Stamina. This restricts background data and switches off features like GPS and (photo/video) Image Enhancement to lower power use.

There’s also an Ultra Power Saver mode, but as this effectively makes the Sony Xperia XA1 a feature phone, you won’t want to use it much.

The phone uses a USB-C socket to charge, giving it another modern design edge to laud over the Moto G5, which uses micro USB.

Camera

• High-res camera provides good results for the price
• …although images look scrappy up close
• Limited video modes, no 4K

Not every part of the Sony Xperia XA1 is a winner, but its camera is among the very best at the price. The rear camera uses a 23MP sensor of 1/2.3-inch size, the same scale as some dedicated compact cameras.

For a phone at this price, detail and general image quality is excellent. We had a chance to shoot alongside the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, and while the results were a little different, with the Premium creating warmer-looking shots, you’d never guess one phone was almost three times the price of the other.

The Sony Xperia XA1 also benefits from Sony’s super-aggressive brightening of night photos. While the camera isn’t properly stabilized, which is essential for truly great night shots in a phone, it’ll make night shots clearer than most phones at the price. Just don’t expect amazing detail at night too.

The value/price of Sony’s 23MP sensors must be dropping rapidly, because this is a pretty low-cost phone for one with so many megapixels.

After all that praise, we have to deal with the problems with the Sony Xperia XA1’s images. There are plenty, most of which were present in Xperia flagships of years gone by.

First, the processing style is not good. The Xperia XA1 uses far too much sharpening, making fine details look stressed and unnatural up close. Image quality also goes down the toilet towards the extreme edges of the frame, turning mushy.

The camera struggles with close-up macro-style shots too. It just can’t focus that close, and the autofocus tends to favor the background at times even when the subject is in focus range. This is common in affordable phones, though.

The closer you look, the more you realize the character of the photos just isn’t that hot, and the Xperia XA1 could make much better use of on-the-fly dynamic range optimization. However, where these problems were worth screaming about in the Sony Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z5, they are so much less problematic in a phone this much cheaper.

Despite the critique, we remain impressed.

You pay for all those megapixels on the video side, as the Sony Xperia XA1 can only shoot at up to 1080p resolution, and at only 30fps at that resolution. It’s likely this is all the Helio P20 CPU’s image signal processor can cope with when having to juggle all that sensor data.

Around the front, the selfie camera is much less impressive. It has an 8MP sensor and produces typically budget-looking images. Unless lighting is good there’s quite a lot of fuzzy noise, and that classic ugly character to Sony’s processing.

We shouldn’t be too harsh, though, as we praised what is likely exactly the same front camera in last year’s Xperia XA. With reasonable lighting, you can take a decent selfie, but standards in selfie cameras have advanced in the last year.

Camera samples

Verdict

The Sony Xperia XA1 is a phone that picks its elements to amp up, namely the brightness of the screen and the quality of the main camera sensor.

And at this price, it gives you something to think about, offering something different from the admittedly more aggressively priced Moto G5 family and the more expensive Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017).

You may be turned off by the small battery, lack of fingerprint scanner or the relatively low screen resolution, but as a whole the Sony Xperia XA1 makes sense. And so, crucially, does its price.

Who's this for?

The Xperia XA1 is for people who want a big-brand phone that looks smart, but don’t want to pay for Samsung’s A-series devices. Great as they are, they’re not cheap. They’re not even that competitively priced.

The Xperia XA1 is, as long as you don’t expect the sheer value of the Moto G series or some of Honor/Huawei’s phones.

Should you buy it?

If you are big into your apps or like to play a lot of games, the Xperia XA1 might not be the best choice. Its battery can only handle so much and the screen doesn’t make the most of Android’s best-looking 3D games.

However, it’s a good choice for those who mostly use, for example, WhatsApp and their phone’s camera, and are after a phone that slips into the pocket easily. 

The Sony Xperia XA1 is a strong option for camera phone fans on a budget, but the following three handsets are great alternatives to consider, with strengths of their own.

Moto G5

The best cheaper option, the Moto G5 has a sharper screen than the XA1 and a fingerprint scanner. However, the phone isn’t as stylish and is a lot wider, even though the two phones have the same size screen.

You get more substance for your cash, but less class. The Moto G5 also has a much less pixel-rich main camera that produces less detailed photos, although it also doesn’t suffer from Sony’s uptight image processing either.

• Read our full Moto G5 review

Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017)

More expensive than the Sony Xperia XA1 but its closest rival, the Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) is a real contender. It has the fingerprint scanner the Xperia XA1 lacks and its camera is comparable even though it uses a smaller, lower-res sensor.

You notice the 720p screen resolution more in the Samsung, though, because of its PenTile OLED screen. Where you need to pay attention to see the difference in the Xperia XA1, the lower pixel density slaps you around the face in the Galaxy A3, as nice as its display otherwise is.

• Read our full Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) review

Honor 6X

Another top bargain hunter’s choice, the Honor 6X outdoes the Xperia XA1 in a few spec areas. The display is much bigger at 5.5 inches, and sharper too thanks to its 1080p resolution.

It’s also one of the cheapest phones to have dual cameras, even if the results are not close to those of the top dual-camera models. The question here is whether you’ll get on with Honor’s more idiosyncratic interface. And, let’s be realistic, whether you want a phone with Honor written on it. Sad, but true.

• Read our full Honor 6X review

First reviewed: May 2017

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