Sony's Xperia 10 VIII asks 599 euros for last year's phone

Sony wants €599 for a phone whose spec sheet you have already read. The Xperia 10 VIII, announced on 25 August and reaching shops in mid to late September, carries the same Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 as the Xperia 10 VII, the same 5,000 mAh battery, the same 30W charging ceiling, the same 50MP and 13MP camera pair, the same 128GB of storage and the same dimensions and weight. GSMArena counted the genuine year-on-year changes and got to two: a display roughly 50 percent brighter, and speakers Sony rates as 15 percent louder with 30 percent more bass.

The asking price is €599 and £549. Tech Times put the increase over the Xperia 10 VII at 33 percent for what it called nearly identical hardware.

GSMArena's verdict is unusually blunt for a site that reviews everything: "At €600, it's practically impossible to recommend it." The review's pros list is genuine — compact and light, sharp 120Hz OLED with much better outdoor visibility, IP65/IP68, front-facing stereo speakers, headphone jack, microSD — and the cons list is the reason it fails anyway: expensive, almost no meaningful hardware upgrades, average battery life, very slow charging, cameras behind the competition, crude refresh-rate handling, and 128GB with no larger option. The reviewers suggested the phone would make sense at around €350.

In GSMArena's hands-on video, the presenter kept returning to the same puzzle. Sony, he said, apparently decided last year's design was good enough for another year — down to the dimensions, the weight and the plastic back — and the release left the team with a lot of questions. His one charitable theory: mid-range phones are being squeezed hardest by rising memory prices, and this may be Sony's way of absorbing that.

TechEdit's reviewer framed the whole phone as a single question in the title — nostalgic or dated? — and after five days concluded it was obviously both. He liked the hand-feel of the 8.3mm plastic body and the three colours (Frozen White, Frosted Grey, Misty Lilac), and he was more forgiving than most about the pictures, arguing the grain and blown highlights give photos a mid-2010s look that is fashionable again, and that Sony's colour handling beats Samsung's on comparable mid-rangers. He also noted the cases from the Xperia 10 VII do not fit despite identical dimensions, which will annoy anyone upgrading.

Sony promises four years of OS updates and six years of security patches. That is a respectable commitment at this price. It also collides with the single most restrictive decision in the phone: 128GB, one configuration only.

Sony carves 6GB of virtual RAM out of that storage to keep the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 feeling smooth — and TechEdit confirmed it does run better than last year's model — which leaves under 90GB free out of the box. The microSD slot does not rescue you, because Android still installs apps to internal storage. Asking a 128GB phone to stay usable through six years of patches is asking a lot.

Battery and charging

The 5,000 mAh cell is modest by 2026 standards but so are the demands of a 6.1-inch 1080p panel and a low-tier chip. TechEdit's real-world test — a full day at a festival shooting a lot of content and running the phone as a hotspot — ended at roughly 75 percent depleted, and 30 minutes of Netflix at half brightness cost just under four percent. Sony's two-day claim survives only under light use. Refilling takes about an hour and fifteen minutes at 30W, there is no wireless charging, and there is no charger in the box. Sony's stated defence is battery longevity, which is at least a coherent trade rather than an omission.

The Xperia 10 VIII is one of a shrinking number of phones with a 3.5mm jack, expandable storage, front-firing stereo speakers, a dedicated camera key and a screen with no punch-hole. If that combination is what you have been waiting for, nothing else on the shelf offers it. The software is close to stock Android 16 with Sony's Side Sense and a new double-tap shortcut panel called Rewards & Pay, which is a folder of large app icons with a marketing name attached — TechEdit found it more useful than expected and still could not work out why it is called that. Notably, there is no bolted-on AI layer beyond Google's own.

But the arithmetic only works at a discount. Two reviewers independently arrived at the same advice: if you want these features and do not need the brighter screen or the extra year of updates, buy the Xperia 10 VII while it is still around and cheaper. Wait for the VIII to fall, and it becomes a likeable niche phone. At launch price, against €599 rivals with faster chips, better cameras and dramatically quicker charging, it is a phone that assumes brand loyalty will do the arguing for it.