Just glanced at an interesting article about LG’s announcement that they are quitting the mobile phone market. The analyst’s view was that although they were technically innovative they’d made a number of missteps seen by the market as gimmicks - citing bendy phones to shape around your bum in your back pocket, physically swivelling screens which revealed another smaller screen underneath, and so on. Apparently LG sold millions of phones but still couldn’t make a profit. The analyst further went on to say that it was very likely that both Sony and Huawei would also quit the mobile phone market within two years - Sony because sales volumes were far too low to be viable in the future and that their phones were pedestrian and uninteresting, and Huawei primarily because of the Android licencing dispute with Google.
This is just speculation.
Of course it is, but presumably market informed speculation by a professional analyst nonetheless.
Ain’t that a common thing in capitalism? As the margins get smaller, there is a consolidation in sellers/vendors. Some get out of business, other’s being bought or join. You’ll end up with an oligopoly. Of course that’s bad for competition and for customers, but what you get without regulation.
At least Sony hasn’t been spending RnD budget on weird expensive niche features.
Their lineup comes across more like an endless line of market research experiments which they never seem to be able to draw any conclusions from.
Also, had they been so sensitive to profit margins they would already have shut down… In fact they seem to be on the verge of becoming profitable, if it hasn’t happened already.
Hopefully the competition in being increasingly premium for no reason will grind to a halt as performance has become enough across the board. And then, Sony will be right there in the reasonable midrange as the big players fight to realign.
Or maybe they will divest like with VAIO, and honestly that could be to the better - maybe fresh eyes can cause something creative with the OS strategy.
There is nothing creative going to happen in the OS strategy. All mfgs chose to have a race to the bottom. If sony plays the camera tech card right it might get consumers. But the form factor (doesn’t help) i think.
But to be fair, all Android adaptations have basically without exception been worse than the base/stock experience. So that is a race to the bottom i can get behind in that regard.
I was thinking more along the lines of mainlined Linux support from day one and support for arbitrary OS:es in their flashing tools. I realize that’s unfounded, but one can always hope - and they have done pretty well so far.
Oh yes. I think they try to have their phones running with mainline kernels. But thats only one part of the equation. There is a lot of work involved in having a working/performing phone. Ie look at how SFOS behaves on sony HW and how much it takes advantage of it.
And that doesn’t just go for their mobile phone department, either…
Actually I like my Sony XA2 and prefer it to my iphone 12 mini. It has better battery life and cost me £190 brand new … as opposed to the £600 I had to pay for the iPhone. Its a good value middle-of-the road model in my opinion - nothing fancy, just a good reliable workhorse. I, for one, will be sad to see yet another manufacturer exit the market.
I’ve heard rumors and analytics say Sony is going to quite the smartphone market for the last three years at least. But it appears that their management made a principle decision to keep the business whatever the cost it takes. In any case, quitting is not on their agenda today and I think there’s no reason for us to be overly concerned about it.
Yes, I think we definitely need more regulation here. We could require random companies to build cell phones and other consumer goods like they did in the GDR (e.g. shipyards were required to build furniture for the consumer market). That really worked exceptionally well for them. The US had only 5 million cell phone subscribers back in 1990, I don’t have the numbers for the Soviet Union but I guess they must have had much, much more cell phone companies and users without those dirty capitalists ruining everything.
Sorry, I do not recall i was asking for a planned economy.
Sorry, just tried to spin it a bit further to explain why regulations are such a great thing 
Capitalism does not work without regulations. It ends up in a race to bottom, killing competition, creating oligopolies or monopolies. The USA was breaking up monopolies a few times (they watered their mechanisms up since by lobbyist pressure), we have anti trust offices to stop mergers that will become to dominant.
Well, that’s your opinion. We may fundamentally disagree here, I’m still hoping we can somehow make SFOS work for more people whatever they leaning may be.
(You’ve stated your opinion, I’ve stated mine. We should probably avoid going too off-topic here.)
Its always good to leave politics out of things 
thats a bla bla bla form a bored analystic man