Sony has a new Xperia 1 flagship inbound and it's looking like a colourful comeback

Sony has a new flagship phone incoming in the shape of the Xperia 1 VIII, and it looks like the design will change for the first time in years.

You might have forgotten about Sony's mobile phones and you'd be forgiven for that – the Xperia line has a tiny market share. For years, Sony has pushed out new phones with a similar design, but for 2026, it looks like there's a change coming.

The Sony Xperia 1 VIII has dropped the line of cameras, in favour of a raised camera square containing three lenses. It sits on a slab of a phone with quite a brutalist design.

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The phone first appeared in renders from @OnLeaks showing off this new design, before it was leaked on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de – both of which have now been removed.

Today, Sony has confirmed that the launch will take place on 13 May in Japan, using the new camera layout as a teaser for the event. The event will be streamed on YouTube.

While the design renders revealed that Sony's phone would be thicker with that new camera arrangement, the Amazon listing gives us the chance to extract some more information.

What does the Sony Xperia 1 VIII look like?

The specifications are detailed as a 6.5-inch OLED display with a 19:5:9 aspect, Full HD+ resolution (probably 2340 x 1080 pixels like the Xperia 1 VII), and with a 120Hz refresh rate.

Next we see that there's a triple camera, two day battery life, 3.5mm headphone socket and a mention of Xperia AI. All these details were grabbed by Notebookcheck.

However, details from a Reddit post of the leak refer to three different pages of listings for the different colours, including Graphite Black, Garnet Red and Iolite Silver. This is then taken further with a Natural Gold colour, with all these different shades leaked in another set of images from Sumahodigest.

Note that the images shown here were cleaned up using AI to remove patterning from a photo of the phones shown on a display.

If Sony sticks to its typical load-out it's likely to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with 12GB RAM. It's thought to come in 256 and 512GB options, while it's expected that the old variable length telephoto will be dropped in favour of a 48-megapixel periscope fixed at 3x zoom.

The UK listing for this device said it would cost £1,728 which would be a huge jump over the Xperia 1 VII and leave this new device dead on arrival. It's more likely that the accidental early posting bundled it in with the Sony WH1000XM6 headphones which are thought to be offered as a pre-order gift.

All the details will be revealed on 13 May, so stay tuned.