Sony's Xperia 1 III flagship phone can now be pre-ordered for a cool $1,300

We've been waiting to find out the US price and availability details for the Sony Xperia 1 III, the company's flagship phone for 2021, and now that wait is over: preorders are open now, with shipping on August 19, and you'll have to part with $1,299.99 to get hold of the phone.

That makes the handset $100 more expensive than the Sony Xperia 1 II was at launch, following a trend we've seen recently from Sony: premium smartphones at premium prices. The device retails for £1,199 in the UK.

Compare the $1,299.99 asking price with the starting price for the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which starts at $1,099, and the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, yours for $1,199.99 and up. This is a serious investment we're talking about here.

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Sony would argue that you get plenty of smartphone in return for your cash, and in our review we gave the handset four stars out of five – our verdict is that this is Sony's best smartphone in quite some time, with a fantastic display and battery life that goes beyond what a lot of its competitors can offer.

Specs appeal

The phone comes rocking a 6.5-inch, 3840 x 1644 pixel, 120Hz refresh rate OLED display with HDR support and the capacity to display more than a billion colors – not a bad start – while the device is powered by the high-end Snapdragon 888 processor from Qualcomm.

This being a Sony phone, the camera modules are as impressive as you would expect: the rear camera is a quad-lens 12MP+12MP+12MP+0.3MP affair, with ultrawide capabilities and up to 4.4x optical zoom. That's true optical zoom too, with a telephoto lens element that actually moves inside the unit.

We've already mentioned the battery, which has a 4,500mAh capacity that can comfortably cover a whole day, and you also get IP68 water resistance, a generous 12GB of RAM, and either 256GB or 512GB of internal storage (which can be expanded through a microSDXC slot).

High-level specs then for a corresponding high-level price – and now available to pre-order direct from Sony, although only the black version is available (with a purple option to come). If you're after "a highly capable smartphone with a superb screen", we concluded in our review, "the Xperia 1 III may be the perfect phone for you".