If you’ve read Raine’s Xperia 10 III release blog post, you’ll know that there are a couple of important issues that we’ve experienced with the device adaptation. As it explains there, we had to very carefully balance the impact of these issues against the impact of delaying the release. We ultimately decided it would be better to release with some imperfections. We hope you’ll agree that we made the right call.
First, a glitch in the underlying firmware means that there are some issues related to echo cancellation when making or receiving calls. This affects the person at the other end of the conversation, resulting in substandard audio quality. This is unfortunately an issue in the drivers that we’re unable to fix ourselves since it affects Sony’s AOSP adaptation as well. We’ve managed to devise a workaround when using the speakerphone option, so to avoid this issue we currently recommend using a low volume, wired headset or the loudspeaker.
Second, with the current adaptation only the standard back-facing camera (12 MP, f/1.8, 27mm, 1/2.8", PDAF) is available for use with Sailfish OS, alongside the front selfie camera. This is also as a result of a firmware glitch, however in this case there is a solution, but we didn’t yet get the chance to implement it. Sailfish OS hooks into the Android Camera API to access the camera firmware. The glitch exists in this version of the API, but is fixed in the Camera2 API. Switching Sailfish OS to use the Camera2 API is a large, but not impractical, amount of work. What’s more, because the code that needs changing is open source, and we’ve had a number of excellent contributions to the camera pipeline from the community in the past, we’re hoping we can work together with you i the community to get this resolved in a future release.
If you’re interested and in a position to help with the Camera1 to Camera2 API conversion, we really want to hear so we can align our efforts and get all four of the cameras on the Xperia 10 III working.