Sony Xperia XA1

Sony Xperia XA1 comes with a difference in the Xperia Models, despite looking uncannily similar. Priced at Rs. 14,990, this phone is quite a mid-range marvel.

The Sony Xperia XA1 is a capable handset with most of the aspects is falling in its favor. The main highlight is the camera which works wonderfully. The performance is also decent enough for anyone looking to run apps.

However, the terrible shortcoming of this phone is the inferior battery that fails to keep up with the phone and drains away fast, without lasting for a day. The Sony Xperia XA1 is not for a person who likes to roam around and wishes to keep their phone alive for a long time.

The Sony Xperia XA1 appears to be narrower and smaller version of Xperia XZ with a different build. It is not made of metal and glass, but mostly plastic with some curved metal panels which gives it a rigid feel. The Xperia XA1 feels a lot like a dense and sturdy build. It looks premium, at least when compared to competitor Moto G5.

There are thick top and bottom bezels which make the screen size smaller. The problem with the phone is that it does not come with a fingerprint scanner which is an essential requirement from a mid-range phone. Plus, it does not have water resistance. The phone is still quite easy to manage and does not feel very heavy in hand, making it a minimalist and admirable design.

The Sony Xperia XA1 comes with quite a small screen. It is 5 inch with a 720p display. The screen is not quite sharp, and the text can look quite blurry. The display, however, is quite rich and vibrant. Due to the lack of LCD screen, it cannot offer the same color saturation as the XZ Premium.

However, there is a natural look and punchiness to the display which makes it quite excellent. The screen is quite bright, giving incredible sunlight legibility, and the contrast is admirable too. There are also image enhancement modes, though they can make the pictures get over-saturated.

The Sony Xperia XA1 is powered by a MediaTek Helio P20 CPU, paired with a 3GB DDR3 RAM. It has eight Cortex-A53 cores; four are clocked at 2.3GHz and four at 1.6GHz. The GPU is a Mali-T880MP2.

The performance is quite good and can efficiently run multiple apps without lagging, but the shortcoming becomes apparent with loading times which can be slow compared to other XA1 phones.

It scores a remarkable 3,628 points in Geekbench, which is just slightly short of the 3,824 scores of Moto G5 Plus. The games run quite smoothly, though you need to lower graphic-intensive games to medium settings. Gameplay experiences little to no frame-rate drops making this quite a great phone.

Sony Xperia XA1 comes with one of the best cameras, featuring a 23MP rear camera. The image quality is quite excellent with fantastic contrast and bright colors. The details captured are quite accurate too. In daylight, the picture shots are great with little visual noise getting, and the pictures appear warmer than others.

On the other hand, low light shots are not weak, benefiting from Sony’s super-aggressive brightening of night photos. This results in great nighttime shots. Macros can be a struggle since autofocus fails to perform without a proper background for reference. The processing style is also not as impressive as it over-sharpens images. The camera, overall, is satisfying.

The phone comes with an 8MP front camera. Due to the smaller sensor, the phone produces social-media decent shots which is a bit noisy and get over-sharpened due to the processing style of Sony. With reasonable lighting, you get a wonderful image though.

The Sony Xperia XA1 has a small 2,300 mAh battery which can still run the phone due to the 720p resolution. However, in real time, it does falter. Playing a 720p test video for 90 minutes saw it lose 27% of its charge, which is quite significant, and much more than Moto G5’s 22% loss.

The phone may get you through the day with moderate use and small charge top-ups along the day. Heavy usage will make it struggle to chug on through the better part of the day. There is an Ultra Power Saver mode, but it makes the XA1 look like a feature phone, so it is not a recommendation.

Despite having USB Type-C, the phone does not come with quick charging and can take about 3 hours to get from 0% to 100%.

The Sony Xperia XA1 has a lot of elements that fall in its favour. It has a beautiful camera which becomes the main highlight of the phone. Plus, the performance is quite good for a mid-tier phone making the internals a power-packer.

However, Sony cuts back on the battery, providing a deficient battery which does not even last for an entire day. The small display with the poor resolution is also a drawback, along with the lack of fingerprint scanners.

It is a good phone, but if you are looking for a better model, Moto G5 could be a reasonable consideration, partly because of better battery as well as performance.