Indeed. AOSP, SailfishX, easy to fetch some officially published repositories on GitHub, compact size devices (i.e. XZ2 Compact), decent tech specification and balanced "bloat" [1] on their smartphones is really compelling to me.
Sadly, competitors like Xiaomi (IMHO, one among the worst manufacturers [1]), Nokia HMD Global, Huawei, Samsung, Apple and many others do not give many opportunities to Sony Mobile be profitable business. I wish they will improve marketing and sales channel.
[1] Annoying telemetry that you cannot opt-out and does not care if your Internet uses mobile data or Wi-Fi. Ridiculous permission requirements for apps, i.e. Weather requires permission to make a phone call (https://en.miui.com/thread-1851703-1-1.html) and Calendar to send SMS messages.
You should absolutely never run a phone with MIUI, or any other similar OS which you have absolutely no idea what it's doing under your nose. First thing you should do is wipe it and install Lineage.
I have A1 (Android One phone), if there is malware, they hide it well. There is no obvious MIUI stuff
The thing about their Android One offering is that they don't bring their A game hardware-wise, they don't really advertise them, and it's confusing to find them in their other phones.
Here's some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19452806 I'm not sure if it's a bad software, but there was some packages that I have no idea about, definitely not from Google.
Perhaps for the OS, but from a photography point of view not at all. The Xperia’s do not fully support the camera2 api, and none support camera raw. I cannot understand why Sony would choose to do this on a camera centric phone. Bulletin boards are full of people who came to this realization after purchasing phones and begging for raw support.
It's because they use completely different camera stacks. Stock has DRM-protected enhancements but minimal Camera2 support and no raw while AOSP has no enhancements but full API and raw support.
Sony is well known for avoiding cannibalization of other divisions to the point of shooting itself in the foot. E.g. the PS4 doesn't have a Blu-Ray drive because Sony also sells Blu-Ray players at roughly the same cost at the PS4 (keep in mind the business model for the PS4 is to sell at a loss and claw back profits on the games)
The XBox pays royalties for it's blu-ray drive - and a significant sum goes to Sony who it part of the Blu-Ray consortium, go figure!
PS4 has a blu ray drive, and will play standard blu ray movies. What they didn't do is support 4k blu ray in the newer PS4 Pro. Unclear why they made the choice, could be cannibalization, could be cost cutting.
I stand corrected. That said, I do remember that while the OG PS4 shipped with the Blu-Ray hardware, the PS4 would not play the Blu-Ray format. I guess at some point they started shipping a software update to support the format.
Maybe it couldn’t for a week or two. It launched early November right? This article is from mid November saying it’s possible with the firmware update. https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=12614
BluRay playback was enabled in the Day One patch, which also basically contained the rest of the OS. The hardware was shipped as a brick, essentially, and the Day One patch was mandatory.
There was really no period of time where it couldn’t play movies. OP is misremembering facts to fit a conclusion they they’re reasoning backwards from.
This is still completely incorrect. It obviously shipped with BluRay from the beginning, as all PS4 games are distributed on BluRay disc. Further, launch reviews mention not only the slot-loading BluRay drive but the day one patch enabling movie playback:
Yeah, their stuff was more open from the Ericsson lineage. My first phone was a SE t68i, my last Sony Ericsson was the Arc. Then I went through a bunch of Sony android phones.
In the US they were fucking garbage. I went through 3 replacements with a Xperia Z5 some years back that kept burning through the screen.
My Z3 had the glass on the back crack, and no repair shop could adequately glue the thing back onto the phone. So I converted it to stationary use. It eventually died after I used it as a AP wedged into a window, and water got inside.
Sony has one incompetent repair center in the US. Turnaround time averaged around 40 days, a time in which we'd need to contact Sony to keep moving the process forward. This was my experience with the Z series right on back to my old featurephone K-series in the mid-2000's
That's awesome that they are so great in the Fatherland where you have strong consumer protection laws. As they are not legally required to do that in the US, the message is more like: "It's your fault for having problems, fuck you"
The screens on front also spontaneously crack, all the time. My first phone, I thought it was a fluke, so I bought another. Then I had to RMA it. Then I stopped buying Sony.
Yeah seriously, my issue isn't that the phones failed. My issue is that the company has a terrible repair center and leaves you over a month without a phone to use. Then when it's an obvious engineering defect, they don't offer a replacement to a model without the issue (or a refund)
I've been lucky (for someone that buys phone direct) that I usually have a backup and a backup for the backup. Many don't have that luxury. I remember I had a Xperia Neo V cook the 3G portion of the radio and get denied for replacement under warranty (corrosion). All this leaves a terrible taste in my mouth.
To contrast, my Phillips 43" monitor had the screen go (backlight mura), it's a comparable $600 device. Know what they do? Advance replacement, I had a new panel in 2 days and could ship back the defective. Sony could do this, but they don't. Since they lack local repair centers you're just left without a working device.
Years back I had a friend with a 40gb ipod photo. It kept failing on him, Apple would replace. Eventually on the 3rd time they upgraded him to a 60gb ipod video, at no cost. He never experienced another failure. To date, he is still an Apple customer, still upgrades to their new devices every couple years. Sony doesn't even try in the US.
Off topic but I just wanna say, oh man the T68 and especially the later T618, one of the most beautiful phones of all time. Apparently sold tons as well.
I still have my T68, I used it for many years after it's phone lifetime as a bluetooth remote for my audio system.
Out of ones I owned with the best aesthetics... the Nokia N9. No other phone matched OS to hardware as well. Mine died, else I'd probably still use it as a desk clock. It inspired the design of the entire later Lumia line.
I have a Sony Z4 tablet, released in 2015. This is the best Android tablet ever made and after 4 years nothing can beat it when it comes to a use-centric approach. Alas, it was the last tablet Sony made.
Sony had a very rare insight when designing it. It's 10.1" with a gorgeous display and no burn-in after 4 years.
It is made of quality plastic, with rounded metal edges so it won't break when falling and a textured back. The thing is light, 395g. Nobody, even today can best this. Because it is light, thin (6mm) and with a textured back, you are never afraid you are gonna drop it. There is grip —remember, usually we don't use cases for tablets. Also due to the weight and how evenly distributed it is, you never get tired holding it. When I hand it to people, they are always surprised by the weight and how comfortable and nice it feels.
When most companies and reviewers optimized for aluminum, Sony had the mettle to go with what they thought better and they were right. Unfortunately, you can only value this, after you use the tablet.
They also made it waterproof. Submersible into water waterproof in 2015 which is very handy for a tablet, using it in a kitchen, etc.
It's a pity seeing them cutting more and more every year their efforts in the mobile division. Of course, they made mistakes, mistakes that I guess come from the company culture, but also the market is increasingly dominated by marketing practices. Let's not forget Samsung mocking openly apple users in their adverts.
True, the Z4 is a great tablet, and it's sad there isn't a newer iteration of it. But the premium Android tabled market is probably quite small, and doesn't replace devices very often.
Seconded. I still have an original xperia tablet Z that i love and use daily. And being waterproof i can just rinse it when it gets dirty from using it in my workshop.
I feel like this thread is as good a place as any to gush about Sony's hardware design. I opened up my Z5 Compact recently to replace the camera flash and audio jack, and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to disassemble. Remove the glass back and there are just 10 standard Phillips screws holding everything in place. Remove those and the main board just pops out. Most of the components attach via ribbon cable, and are super modular. Easy to find inexpensive replacement parts on AliExpress. Of course, all this reparability isn't doing great things for Sony's bottom line.
In this era repairability doesn't do well because hardware performance obsolete fast, while os and software need higher spec each year. It's easier to buy newer, higher spec phone than repair it.
Sony were going to own everything from the camera to the screen with all the bits in between during the days when broadcast television was watched on CRT televisions.
They bought up Hollywood studios so they would not get the Betamax problem again.
But the LCD screen usurped the mighty Trinitron. Twenty years ago the LCD was low resolution, had poor contrast ratio, was small and cost a fortune. Nobody in their right mind would want one - or so the executives at Sony thought.
Sony were a late entrant into the flat screen business with their screens coming from joint ventures rather than it being a core competency. Meanwhile their Korean rivals ate their lunch and made LCD screens their core competency. When mobile phones became the hot seller they were extremely well placed to ride the wave.
Luckily Sony make more than just screens - after all they did have the whole chain from studio camera to TV at home with the professional kit for editing programs and so much else. But there are parallels with Kodak who never thought digital cameras would dominate. Kodak were early movers with digital cameras, Sony were with flat screens. But they got it wrong.
Currency comes into it to, the Yen was not favourable when Sony started to decline.
The mobile phone is going to become a commodity product - a 'hand rectangle'. There is a second wave going on where the Chinese high quality phones for a fraction of the price of the former market leaders are taking over. Sony don't have a 'core competency' in phones despite the best lenses and so much experience in consumer electronics. They also don't have any patents to take the top end of the market.
In the short term this may seem bad for consumer choice, however, phones are becoming a commodity 'hand rectangle' product and Sony don't do commodity things. Their kit is special.
Charitably, they design their own main processors, their phones, their OS's, and many apps. From a hardware perspective, they are definitely less vertically integrated than Samsung, but they have vertical integration in the SOC/firmware/software/apps chain. It's not clear whether that actually drops their costs much, though, which was the original point of the comparison.
> Apple Inc. is one of the best-known companies for perfecting the art of vertical integration. The company manufactures its custom A-series chips for its iPhones and iPads. It also manufactures its custom touch ID fingerprint sensor. Apple opened up a laboratory in Taiwan for developing LCD and OLED screen technologies in 2015. It also paid $18.2 million for a 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in North San Jose in 2015. These investments allow Apple to move along the supply chain in a backward integration, giving it flexibility and freedom in its manufacturing capabilities.
Frustrating that they had a mobile game and a mobile phone group but their only attempt to combine them was thoroughly half-assed. You can't tell me a real all-in attempt at an Xperia PlayStation wouldn't have been successful. And now they're basically giving up on both those fronts.
Look at the razor phone sales....i'm not sure it'd actually of been a best seller.
I think the issue is what makes a good gaming platform doesn't make a great phone. Look at the nintendo switch, it'd make for a poor phone...yet its a great gaming device.
Interesting, though most people want a phone that can be held in portrait mode with a single hand. Hence the xperia play's slider design and popsockets for larger phones.
But most people use the switch as a console, not as a Gameboy-type thing.
All they would have had to do it provide a decent selection of games, and include two low-cost Bluetooth controllers and an HDMI dock with every phone.
I agree, Sony had a great position for selling mobile game content to the demographics that would also be paying for a cellphone. I absolutely would have bought a playstation phone if it had snap on controllers back in the late 2000s early 2010s. Nintendo would probably never step outside gameboy waters. I guess sony simply refused to cannibalize their own products to make it all work.
We've just got 3 Xperia's (love them more than my previous Nexus phones, much smaller, much longer battery) and Sailfish OS/Jolla is also big on Xperia. Bad.
On one side I'm sorry because the Xperia Compact X was the only good compact Android phone left. On the other side the last iterations of the Compact were too heavy and I wouldn't consider buying them. So there was nothing compelling in Sony's products anymore.
The last good one they made was the Z3 Compact. But it had an unfortunate flaw which caused the screen to peel off. That forced me to "upgrade" to the X Compact which is awful in so many ways compared to the Z3. They really screwed up something good.
I couldn't believe that more people didn't use Z3 (Compact), though. I would use other Android phones and they were all shockingly bad in comparison.
I went from Z3C to XZ1C last year when the rubber on the USB cover piece stopped working right. After getting used to the look, I like it a lot. It's a more physically solid design.
It's also one of the only manufacturers that still has an up-to-date (≥ 9.0) Android phone, with decent specs, in the "small"[0] form-factor. Their Xperia Compact line has been one of the few competitors to the iPhone SE in this niche.
[0] Using quotes, as until quite recently this was the medium form-factor.
I know it’s not gonna happen, but it would be great if Sony would develope their own phone OS from scratch again. In a parallel universe Sony is the third big OS developer next to Apple and Microsoft. Of all the smart phone manufacturers i found it always strange how Sony decided to go third party, and imagined them to be the most likely company to develope their own mobile OS.
I dunno, Sony has never really been very good at software. Look at the PS4 OS — it actually repeatedly warns you not to unplug the machine without “powering down” from the software first. Imagine if your phone didn’t have a reliable filesystem layer.
Maybe I don't know because I don't have a PS4, but aren't all operating systems like this? It's an optimization, holding some writes in RAM rather than immediately going to disk. The software needs to know you're powering off so that it can flush those first.
You can probably configure some OS's to disable this (so that if it looks idle you could pull the plug), but it seems like a fine choice for a PS4 that rarely needs to be powered off.
Many people have written off Sony for software as far back as the rootkit fiasco. I love Sony hardware, but I would not trust them with software ever again.
Not surprising. I have numerous Z high end phones but they fumbled the ball a few years ago. They wouldn't do a 64GB phone when Samsung did, and finally had no 128/256GB offerings while Samsung did again.
Such a shame, but for some reason they choked the RAM/Storage.
This is a very important comment. As great as Sony hardware is, many people have written off Sony for software. Loosing customer trust can destroy a business.
Well, if the future moves on to streaming and they can't keep pace with Microsoft or Google's infrastructure advantages… I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the market as strong as they might be with the PS4. In a world where you buy a cheap screen and never upgrade anymore, what would be left for Sony to do? I guess go for Nintendo's market more w/ dedicated portable hardware, but who knows what that'll even be with smartphones being ubiquitous for the streaming services.
Virtually all sexually suggestive content is required to be censored/edited on the PS4, per directives from Sony Interactive Entertainment in San Mateo. If history is any indicator, this means they will be the first loser in the console wars, if not for the eighth generation then most certainly for the ninth. If the PlayStation loses significant ground, there's a chance Sony will bow out rather than challenge prevailing California morality and risk their skins.
This is false. There are tons of M rated games with sexual and suggestive themes on both PS4 and Vita.
Go to http://www.esrb.org/ratings/search.aspx select PS4 or Vita, M rating, content include: sexuality, timeframe: whatever you like and feast your eyes.
Off the top of my head, Witcher 3 on PS4 had sex scenes explicit as an American R rated film. Unless it features penetration, it seems Sony doesn't object to it.
Folks around me sing praises of Samsung and LG display panels, and I can still vouch for my Bravia I got years ago. That thing is rock solid and one of my personal best investments so far in consumer electronics.
Slide 11, "Q1-Q3 FY2018 Results by Segment" shows that all of Sony had an operating income of a bit over 800 billion yen. Of that, about 250 billion came from gaming and network services (so hardware + PSN, basically). By comparison, mobile communications _lost_ about 50 billion.
Still being the second largest record company, the largest music publisher and owning a ton of rights to music, video and tv.
I know physical sales are declining, still yet to die out, and until that and probably even further, Sony will do just fine, even without phones, and maybe even without PlayStation.
Yes, they definitely shook up the market, which is great.
I have an A72, and an EOS R and have tried almost all the modern cameras in the market. I enjoy using the canon one significantly more than the A72. The A73 is slightly better but not overwhelmingly so.
Sony cameras are still meh, they still overheat. They are relatively frustrating to use. Their autofocus tends to hunt in low light (great eye AF notwithstanding).
They win at video, almost overwhelmingly in specs. Unfortunately, I am into photography, not video.
I suppose you are speaking of A7 II? Overheating is a problem for video only, and fixed on the A6400. Their technology is ahead of competition, not "meh". But it is a shame they do not have full touch screen, for some reason.
The camera body gets warm (not uncomfortably warm, but annoyingly so) after shooting stills for a while when the outside temperature is high. And it rebooted on its own quite a few times when I was traveling in my home country.
This also contributes to extra sensor noise in long exposure shots in the dark, which Sony tries to mitigate with software. This leads to the infamous 'star eater' scenario.
They got into smartphones business late, tried to copy Samsung, and now they are failing. What a surprise. What did they offer new on the market? Why would I choose a Sony instead of a Samsung? I personally did, just to test with my own experience, and I will not choose a Sony ever again.
I really like my Sony Z5 compact and while I never spent much time investigating I don't like Samsungs for some reason. For one, I have the impression that their colors look artificial. Also the battery life seems to be better on the Sonys.
I see a parallel to Thinkpads in that I can imagine that Sonys have a little more appeal to some more technical crowds than e.g. Samsungs. And probably Sonys have less appeal than Samsungs for the average Smartphone user.
Xperia Z* Compact is one of the last series of phones that are 4.3-4.6 inches and fit comfortably with one hand. All other vendors went all in into 5+ inches phones that are difficult to operate with one hand.
Sony phones do not have all the newest fancy features, but I found the flagships to be reasonably powerful and just work™.
I never liked Samsungs because they modify the default Android experience too much and ship too much crapware. Since ~Android 6 they are more aligned UI-wise, but the "back" button on the right, and the different middle button are also annoying. Last but not least, being an Android dev, Samsung is one of the most annoying vendors, which makes weird modifications to their fork of Android, which result in Samsung-only crashes.
(Having said that, for majority of consumers, none of this is an issue, given the sales numbers.)
Samsung are infuriating: the S9, after some update, is now running a sequence of two animations before finally showing the content of the app drawer. It would be bad enough if they were running concurrently (which would admittedly look somewhat slick), but no, you wait for one to finish, get your expectations up, but then there is the second animation just starting. I don't know wether it's stupidity or malice (timed to the release of the s10 to make the old model feel sufficiently slow?) and I've long come to refuse invoking Hanlon's Razor when it comes to Samsung.
Boo Boo. Don't like it - root it, hack it. It this hacker news or what?
In any case Android Q disables access to external storage, so it's either one submits to Apple-style walled garden or seeks something else. Where those vendorcrap apps aren't there or are removed without any problem.
And if someone does submit to the Q changes, then there's no point to discuss.
I am surprised how rarely is the phone size issue mentioned. I, personally, would prefer 4.6" Android phone but impossible to get from the major vendors.
AFAICT it's impossible to get from _any_ vendors now. The XZ3 compact doesn't exist, and the only other phone I know of that has a comparable screen size is the Nokia 1, which as a phone isn't comparable at all.
There are also rugged devices like the Zebra TC75, but even though it has a 4.7" screen, the phone itself is large. Similarly, the Blackberry KEY2 has a 4.5" screen, but the keyboard adds quite a bit of bulk. Both phones are also pretty wide, which is a big factor in whether it fits in one hand.
The Galaxy S10e is being touted as a brilliant compact phone, but it's the same size as an S7, and comes with a giant 5.8" screen. Today's "compact" phone is yesterday's "phablet".
Then there are the clamshell smartphones. Surely there's a market for these. The only one sold in the US is the ZTE Cymbal-T, and it's carrier-locked.
And while I'm ranting -- why hasn't anyone made a decent shoephone yet?
Xperia Compact buyers seem to be the most loyal outside the Applesphere, but they are not frequent buyers and rarely willing to pay extra for the very latest increment. A difficult group to build a business on.
In the bigger picture, I think that Sony never really managed to emancipate itself from the network provider sales channel. According to hearsay, the whole "new models twice a year, and a premium variant on top" madness was entirely driven by Japanese network providers. A network driven product portfolio has never worked out well for a phone brand, because the resulting multitude of models makes no sense to off-channel buyers. Which includes every international buyer outside the market reach of the "home" networks of the network-driven models. Motorola used to suffer from this as well.
The XZ2 Compact suggests Sony doesn't have any idea what people liked about previous compact models. It's larger in every dimension than the models leading up to it, and significantly thicker. Despite that, it loses the headphone jack and barely gains any battery capacity.
What does it gain for all that? Screen resolution, mainly, going from 319 PPI to 483. I'd be hard pressed to care less about that change, as I'd need a VR headset or other magnification to notice.
iPhone release was quite late in Japan because SJ told Japanese providers where to stick their dumb demands, which ended up being a huge coup for SoftBank
Most of their devices can run AOSP, and the various blobs are built for a crazy number of android and kernel versions.