The best Sony phones are unlike any other phones on the market – we’re talking continuous optical zoom lenses, expandable storage, and, yes, 3.5mm headphone jacks. Sony continues to carve out a unique niche in the smartphone industry, with its handsets offering a mixture of premium features, reliable performance, and pro-focused creation and camera tools.
In our current top spot, we have the Xperia 1 VI; the big and beautiful leader of Sony’s smartphone lineup. It’s a no-nonsense flagship that encapsulates Sony’s phone-making ethos; a powerful workhorse that commands a certain way of working but offers rewards in the form of its expanded feature set.
Of course, Sony charges a premium for its feature-laden phones, and as such, even our pick for the best value Sony phone – the Sony Xperia V – isn’t particularly wallet-friendly. Heck, our favorite 'cheap' Sony phone, the Xperia 5 V, costs as much as a new iPhone 16.
That said, if you’re a creative professional with a demanding mobile workflow, a diehard Sony fan, or just someone who misses plugging in your headphones, our list of the best Sony phones will throw up a model for your needs.
Best Sony phones 2024
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Best overall Sony phone
The Sony Xperia 1 VI is our pick for the best Sony phone you can get right now. As our Sony Xperia 1 VI review details, this is an old-school flagship phone that offers features you’ll get nowhere else (except, maybe, from the other entries on this list). The hands-down coolest thing about this phone is its continuous optical zoom capability, promising consistent quality between 3.5x and 7.1x zoom.
Further proof of Sony’s focus on photography with the Xperia 1 VI comes in the form of a dedicated shutter button and a camera app loaded with options. For videographers, the squared-off screen and headphone jack provide plenty of room for monitoring video and audio. A lot of the more eccentric features of the Xperia 1 VI make sense for professional workflows.
Content creation tools aside, the Xperia 1 VI is a very solid flagship phone. You get a 6.5-inch 1080 x 2340 120Hz display, a healthy 5000mAh battery that we found lasts just over a day (though Sony claims two), and a speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset for breezing through productivity tasks.
That said, the Xperia 1 VI is – as all flagship Sony phones are – wallet-bustingly expensive, at a starting price of £1,299 / AU$1,899. That’s even pricier than the ultra-premium iPhone 16 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – and there’s no US availability, either. Still, if you’re dead-set on a Sony phone, this is the best you can get, and the specs sheet is sure to appeal to pros and casual consumers alike.
Read our full Sony Xperia 1 VI review
Best value Sony phone
The previous generation in the Xperia 1 lineup brings almost the same feature set as the current entry at a substantially reduced price. The Xperia 1 V comes equipped with a 6.5-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, and a triple camera setup with 3.5-5.2x continuous optical zoom. It’s an impressive specs sheet that comes close to this year’s Xperia 1 revision, but at an impressive discount.
The typical price reduction for a year-old smartphone is around $100 – Apple famously keeps its previous generation of iPhone up for sale at this exact discount. The Xperia 1 V, however, is a huge $400 / £400 / AU$ cheaper than the Xperia VI, and with such similar specs, it’s hard to be anything but impressed – even if the starting price is still a whopping $899.
Nevertheless, we found the Xperia 1 V to be an excellent Android phone loaded with photography and content creation features. The cameras offer solid performance, with a dedicated shutter button and the aforementioned continuous optical zoom. The camera app, while not the most user-friendly, is replete with options. And the screen is a ridiculously sharp 4K panel that even the newer Xperia 1 VI doesn’t have.
Read our full Sony Xperia 1 V review
Best budget Sony phone
Our pick for the best cheap Sony phone comes with a pretty big caveat: it's not actually cheap. That said, the Xperia 5 V offers most of the quintessential Sony phone features for well below the asking price of the super-premium Xperia 1 VI flagship. By Sony standards, it's a budget handset.
At a starting price of £799 – and with no native availability in the US or Australia – you're looking at a flagship-priced compact phone, but one that packs a lot of power. Sony’s photo-focused design ethos is on full display here, too, with a 52MP main camera sensor that crops into 48MP before binning to 12MP photos, ensuring an almost superlative amount of quality.
Elsewhere, the specs don’t quite match the flagship phones available at this price point – for reference, you're looking at the exact same starting price for the Xperia 5 V as the iPhone 16 and Samsung Galaxy S24. You get the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, 8GB of RAM, and a display with decent resolution but an inconsistent color profile. That said, if you’re after Sony’s camera tech and the apps to go with it, the Xperia 5 V is your best bet to save a little cash.
Read our full Sony Xperia 5 V review
FAQs
How to choose the best Sony phone for you
Choosing the best Sony phone for you comes down to a few factors. If you're hoping to use your phone for professional creative work or other intensive use cases, it's probably worth going for the most recent Xperia 1 VI, with its extended zoom range and up-to-date Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. However, the previous generation Xperia 1 V offers a very similar spec sheet, and an almost objectively better screen, for a much cheaper price. It's also the only Sony phone currently available in the US.
The confusingly-named Xperia 5 V is the option for Sony fans who want to save a bit of money or just want a slightly smaller phone, though its high price tag will make some potential buyers hesitate.
Why are Sony phones so expensive?
Years ago, Sony made a wider variety of phones at a greater number of price points, but today the company's smartphone business relies on a reputation for professional and creative-focused features like continuous optical zoom and headphone jacks. Producing phones with unique features incurs some extra cost, though, and being the only reputable phone maker to offer some of these creative tools means that Sony can essentially charge what it wants.
Price considered, Sony flagships are still true flagships with high-powered chipsets and great camera systems. Adding up a flagship spec sheet, unique creative features, and professional target demographic makes the high price of the Xperia range make a bit more sense.
Is Sony a good phone brand?
While Sony's current lineup is more compact than in the company's mobile heyday, it's kept its reputation alive by producing some of the most feature-rich and professional-focused phones on the market. Our pick for the best Sony phone, the Xperia 1 VI, boasts a specs sheet unlike any other, with a headphone jack, continuous optical zoom, and a display free of notches or hole-punch cameras. These are creator-focused phones that had camera shutter buttons long before Apple's Camera Control.
Sony has been making mobile handsets since the early days of smartphones, and is a highly reputable brand within the wider electronics world. Elements of the company's expertise in camera and TV design can be found in the camera systems and impressive displays on its phones.
Sony does charge a premium for such a unique combination of creative tools, though, with its phones often around 15% more expensive than the nearest competition.
Do Sony phones have Google apps?
Yes. At the time of writing, the best Sony phones all run Android 14, with access to Google apps and Google Mobile Services. That means you'll be able to use the Google Play Store to download apps, as well as other native Google apps like Maps, Wallet, and Calendar.
How we test
To put together this list of the best Sony phones, we've put each of the phones listed through our rigorous testing process and produced full reviews for each. This testing includes pushing the processors to their limits, testing the cameras in a variety of conditions, and using each phone as our main handset during the test period.
This gives us an excellent idea of how each of these Sony phones handles day-to-day tasks as well as more intensive scenarios, and combined with our tech expertise, gives us the confidence to recommend these phones to the right people.
