No Sony Xperia has truly troubled the best smartphones lists for a while now, so you could understand if Sony was preparing to throw in the towel on its flagging mobile division. Yet according to company chief financial officer Lin Tao, the firm has no such plan.
During a recent presentation of Sony’s latest financial results, she said Xperia remained “a very important business for us” and that “we would like to continue to value the smartphone business” (Cnet Japan, via Google Translate).
Let’s be brutally honest, though: as things stand, Xperia’s future isn’t looking all that great. Sony hasn’t sold a flagship phone in the US for two years now, and a 2025 mid-ranger is seemingly MIA. Google’s Pixel phones are now bigger sellers in Japan, which just a few years ago would’ve been unthinkable given Japanese shoppers’ loyalty to domestic brands. Production of the Xperia 1 VII has even been outsourced to China, rather than home soil – and then Sony had to replace a bunch of the ones it did sell due to glitches.
In my four star Sony Xperia 1 VII review, I called it “an even tougher sell than previous generations” with styling that “shows its age” and battery life that’s “simply great now, rather than class-leading”. While I praised its ultrawide camera, which is arguably the best of the bunch in 2025, it doesn’t give anyone that’s not a Sony die-hard enough reasons to stick around.
Sony’s resolute refusal to abandon fan favourite features like front-facing speakers could be one reason for their dwindling popularity; the resulting thicker top and bottom display bezels look almost antiquated next to the latest iPhone or Galaxy. There are also only so many people left that genuinely care about microSD expansion or 3.5mm headphone ports on their phones – most have moved on to cloud storage and wireless earbuds, begrudgingly or otherwise.
It’s easy to blame Sony’s aggressively high pricing. In the UK, and Xperia 1 VII will set you back £1399 (roughly $1900). That’s considerably more than one of Apple, Samsung or Google’s current flagships. And it’s not like the network carriers are queuing up to offer tempting contract deals to take the sting out even a little.
Then there’s the creator-first approach to photography. Sony makes some of the best smartphone camera sensors out there, but you’ve needed to understand ISO values and reach for the manual mode to get the best out of them on its own phones. Most people just want to point and shoot. More recent Xperias have had more effective automatic modes, and they had physical shutter buttons a full decade before Apple would try to make them cool with Camera Control. But it’s too little, too late at this point.
Perhaps the online chatter sparked by Lin Tao’s words will be the wake-up call Sony needs. Maybe it’s time to go a little more mainstream, let the design team off the leash, and finally put expandable storage out to pasture. Or perhaps it should embrace its wackier side? If you’re listening, Sony, I’d happily buy an Xperia Play 2…
