Sony's newest phone keeps a rare feature that fans love – I'm here for it

Whenever a big phone maker launches a new handset, and especially if that handset is billed as a flagship, there can be a bit of feeding frenzy to work out how it compares to the handsets in its price bracket. In the case of Google, Samsung, Apple and the like, this can often mean scouring specs sheets that really don't differ all that much from each other.

That's even more the case if you limit yourself to Android phones, where the latest Snapdragon chip can be a given, and you see a heck of a lot of high refresh rates on displays, fast charging features and more. Still, every so often, a phone does things differently in a genuinely noticeable way.

That's a great way to describe the Sony Xperia 1 VII, which continues quite a long trend from Sony of making a smartphone that both fits into the market and also swims in its own lane. Sony does its best to make the Xperia 1 lineup seem typical, but the fact is that they're pretty odd phones.

Thanks to the large TV and camera businesses that it has to call upon, Sony has increasingly been able to pull in expertise in the display and photography departments that make Xperia 1 phones interesting to use – but it also keeps standing by one little-heralded feature that I always love to see.

The headphone jack is something that most of us finished mourning quite some time ago, largely because that war seemed to have been lost. The moment Apple stopped including one on the iPhone, there was every chance that the whole industry would follow suit, and that's how it's unfolded at the flagship level.

Sony, though, keeps putting one in its top-class phones, and that hasn't changed with the Xperia 1 VII. Like the excellent Xperia 1 VI before it, you get a headphone jack to use as you see fit, giving users the sort of flexibility that can get them out of a tight spot if their earbuds or wireless headphones run out of juice.

This year, more than previous, though, there's an additional layer to the inclusion of a headphone jack that I think makes perfect sense. Sony explained in a briefing that it had folded in some Walkman technology for the new phone, enhancing its musical playback capabilities.

Given that Walkman audio players are now on the very premium end of the market, rather than the mass devices they used to be, this is great news for audiophiles who want more from their phone. That said, any audiophile worth their salt knows that wired audio is essential, eliminating a vast amount of loss compared to even the best wireless standards.

So, if Sony did indeed remove the headphone jack on the Xperia 1 VII, it would be inviting ridicule from the very people it's aiming to satisfy. Instead, it's kept the feature and maintained its position as one of the few phone makers prioritising (or at least not ignoring) wired audio. Here's hoping that makes some executives at its competitors pause for thought.

I can't say that I often need to use wired headphones or earbuds with my phone, but that's partly because I'm long since used to not being able to. Sometimes we're allowed to admit that things were better before, though, and bringing back the headphone jack would seem like a net gain to me in almost any scenario. Best case, you use it a bunch; worst case, you don't touch it, but it doesn't affect you. What could be simpler than that?