Phones with 1-inch main sensor

The image sensor is the camera's film: the chip that turns light from the lens into an electrical signal and from there into a photo, and no single part shapes a phone camera's character more.

One inch is the largest class of main sensor in the phone world, and where it tells is light: a surface that gathers more photons in the same time gives a less noisy, more dimensional frame in the dark. The natural blurring of the background is another dividend of that size. The "1 inch" in the name is not a diagonal measurement but a class name inherited from tube cameras.

What actually separates sensors is not the megapixel count but light-gathering ability: the physical size of the sensor and of its individual pixels, the range of bright and dark it can hold in one frame (dynamic range), and the noise it produces in the dark. Those figures need reading off the model's own spec sheet.