Sony to slash smartphone workforce
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
Most of their devices can run AOSP, and the various blobs are built for a crazy number of android and kernel versions.
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!
https://www.engadget.com/2013/11/14/sony-playstation-4-revie...
There are also launch contemporary reviews of the movie playback experience on the PS4:
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.
Actually on AOSP (the version Sony releases), they all support both of those things.
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.
This seems to be most OSes, sadly :(
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.
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
Good riddens, I won't miss them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their build costs are always going to be lower. Outsourcing also hampers the innovation they could do since they're buying components on a market.
Also I think they had issues getting into selling markets.
I remember that they had to disable the fingerprint reader on their phones in America, patent issues perhaps?
> 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.
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.
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.
1. Why would I play games that were designed with a controller in mind of an iPad ? The controller scheme transition is not good.
2. Why would I want to use remote PS4 video or audio options were better quality offerings are available through the iPad directly.
Sony makes amazing hardware, but they never got their head around making great software.
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.
The XZ2 compact is quite a bit heavier. That would be great if the battery were larger, but it isn't (at least not by much).
[0] Using quotes, as until quite recently this was the medium form-factor.
Now, Nintendo... that phone would be cool.
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.
Such a shame, but for some reason they choked the RAM/Storage.
I don't feel bad when they fail again and again.
If Sony withdraws from the game-console market, what will be left for it to do?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully the next time I need a new phone someone will make a compact device with a folding screen.
And I'm still salty over the fact that the Pie update for the XZ1 Compact still doesn't have Night Light (Also no gesture navigation)