
Sony to slash smartphone workforce - ingve
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Sony-to-slash-smartphone-workforce-50-by-2020
======
subway
This is disappointing -- Sony has surprisingly been one of the best Android
manufacturers with regard to being open:
[https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-
devices/](https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/)

Most of their devices can run AOSP, and the various blobs are built for a
crazy number of android and kernel versions.

~~~
joecool1029
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

Good riddens, I won't miss them.

~~~
dao-
I had two water damages with my Z5 Compact that were arguably my fault. Got it
replaced both times by a new phone at the Sony Center in Berlin.

~~~
joecool1029
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"

------
andmarios
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.

~~~
detaro
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.

------
endemic
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.

~~~
fendy3002
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.

~~~
dotancohen
What? My five year old Samsung Note 3 works as good today as the day I bought
it. It still does everything that I need from it.

------
Theodores
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.

------
Jonnax
The big players, Samsung and Apple, are vertically integrated.

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?

~~~
Aloha
How is Apple vertically integrated?

~~~
HALtheWise
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.

~~~
scarface74
They also have their own stores where they don’t have to compete for attention
from other manufacturers, they make money from their services, etc.

------
Pxtl
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.

~~~
cobookman
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.

~~~
jimmaswell
But the 3DS form factor would've made a great phone I think. Make the top
screen capacitive and keep the bottom pressure-based.

~~~
mj_olnir
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.

------
rurban
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.

[https://jolla.com/sailfishx/](https://jolla.com/sailfishx/)

------
pmontra
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.

~~~
black-tea
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.

~~~
mng2
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.

------
ChuckMcM
This is to bad, I've got an Xperia phone and its a decent phone. Much better
than the Lenovo/Motorola X that I upgraded from.

~~~
gnomewascool
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.

------
rbrbr
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.

~~~
trevyn
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.

Now, Nintendo... that phone would be cool.

~~~
dotancohen
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.

~~~
igi3ql
Pretty broad brush for what is a company with dozens of departments.

~~~
dotancohen
You are 100% correct. A single bad Apple using the Sony brand could spoil the
whole bunch.

------
scruffyherder
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.

------
taurath
Kaz Hirai is retiring and I guess this is his parting gift for the next guy

------
dang
Url changed from [https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/204021/sony-scales-back-
on-s...](https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/204021/sony-scales-back-on-
smartphones), which points to this.

~~~
cmrx64
thanks, i appreciate that y’all do this.

------
monochromatic
Sony makes smartphones??

------
appleflaxen
Sony put a rootkit on my computer.

I don't feel bad when they fail again and again.

~~~
dotancohen
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.

------
bitwize
Sony, once the king of electronics, is ceding ground to its competitors in all
markets.

If Sony withdraws from the game-console market, what will be left for it to
do?

~~~
jessewmc
Why would Sony withdraw from the console market? They are far and away the
dominant player.

~~~
jeffbax
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.

~~~
curlypaul924
Partner with someone who can keep up, like Amazon?

------
mk89
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.

~~~
jstimpfle
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.

~~~
jakub_g
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.)

~~~
usrusr
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.

~~~
lstodd
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.

