Sony Xperia 10 VII review
Android 15 with a clean Sony shell
The Xperia 10 VII ships with Android 15 and Sony's very clean and near-stock Android skin on top. Last year, Sony extended its software support promise for the Xperia 10 VI, and this year, we get yet another improvement on the support promise. The Xperia 10 VII will receive four major OS updates and up to six years of security patches. That's pretty good overall.
Sony has always had some of the cleanest OS builds around, and the Xperia 10 VII is no exception. In fact, the clutter is so minimal that you don't even get a full set of Google and Sony apps out of the box. The initial setup wizard advises you to download these from the Google Play Store, but you can easily opt not to.
Sony's overall UI is very clean and even a bit retro. The notification shade uses compact square buttons. It's definitely a look we haven't seen often. But we can't shake the feeling it has a bit of a "retro" vibe like other parts of the phone.
Besides that, you get a standard non-alphabetized app drawer with a search and a horizontal carousel for recent apps, complete with a quick shortcut to enable a multi-window view.
Side Sense is one of the few additional features Sony has tacked on to the otherwise vanilla OS. A handle on the side of the phone opens up a menu of shortcuts to apps and features, most of them user-configurable. But not even Side Sense is enabled by default.
There's a fairly standard set of gestures for call handling, as well as a one-handed mode and smart backlight control. In this menu, you'll find the navigation options with the two basic types available - gestures or a navbar. In fact, a three-button navbar is still the default navigation scheme, which is yet another retro trait.
Similar to previous generations, the Game Enhancer utility is missing on the Xperia 10 VI. Sony's Music player is on board, and so is Sony's Video Creator app, while Google's Photos and Files are used for gallery and file management purposes.
Google Gemini and Circle to Search
Sony is one of the few manufacturers that hasn't heavily invested in developing AI of its own. Still, the Google Gemini app is pre-installed, so you can use it as a chat-based AI. There is Circle to Search as well. And you can use the AI-powered image editing features inside Google Photos, which is the default gallery app.
Benchmarks and performance
Sony has stuck with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 series of chips. The Xperia 10 VII features a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, a modest upgrade from last year's Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, yet it remains a decent mid-range chip with a modern feature set and an efficient 4 nm (Samsung 4LPX) manufacturing mode.
In the CPU department, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 offers a two-cluster design. There are four Cortex-A78 cores, clocked at up to 2.4GHz and four Cortex-A55 ones, working at up to 1.8GHz. The onboard GPU is an Adreno 710, which is clocked higher than the one inside the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1.
Sony has paired the chip with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage. As we know, this is the only available storage tier.
Looking at some actual benchmark results, it is clear that the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 is nothing more than a modest upgrade compared to the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. Looking at the Xperia 10 VII compared to the Samsung Galaxy A36 (another device running the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset), we can see that Sony is extracting most of the available performance here and not leaving much on the table, which is great to see. That said, AnTuTu is a bit less favorable towards the Xperia for one reason or another. In any case, it is worth noting that you can get a lot more performance for your money within this price segment.
GeekBench 6
- Multi-core
- Single-core
Poco F7
Motorola Edge 60 Fusion
Motorola Edge 60
Sony Xperia 10 VII
Galaxy A36
Sony Xperia 10 VI
Redmi 15 5G
AnTuTu 10
Poco F7
Motorola Edge 60
Motorola Edge 60 Fusion
Galaxy A36
Sony Xperia 10 VII
Sony Xperia 10 VI
Redmi 15 5G
3DMark - Wild Life Extreme (2160p)
Poco F7
Redmi Note 14 Pro+
Galaxy A36
Sony Xperia 10 VII
Motorola Edge 60 Fusion
Sony Xperia 10 VI
Redmi 15 5G
Thermal-throttling
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset is not a particularly power-hungry or hot-running chip. Whatever heat it does generate is handled quite well by the Xperia 10 VII. It maintains very stable performance even after torture testing.
Thermal-throttling
The phone's surface never actually became uncomfortable to touch or hold during our testing, just lukewarm.
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