Saturday, January 12, 2013

Sony looking to back away from entry-level smartphones, focus on premium

Sony looking to back away from entry-level smartphones, focus on premium

Sony is a company with a legacy of quality. From Trinitron to Walkman, from PlayStation to Cyber-shot. Somewhere, during the race to saturate the smartphone market with as many devices as possible, Sony lost its way. Xperia has yet to make the same impact previous Sony electronics have. But it’s not over yet. Sony Xperia product marketing manager Stephen Sneeden recently sat down with CNET Asia to discuss where Sony mobile is headed, and how they plan to get there.

The goal for Sony is simple: They want to be a premium smartphone provider. And they know just how to do it. Sony plans to create a more unified product portfolio in services, quality and industrial design. In order to do this, the first step is going to be backing away from low-end entry level products and focusing on premium devices.

We're ready to be a premium smartphone provider, logically then, at the very entry level is where you lose the 'Sonyness'. And it's where you cannot implement some of these wonderful things from Sony at such a low cost, we might leave the very entry tier to some other manufacturers.Stephen SneedenSony

Sneeden continued on to talk about how Sony “cannot compromise on the experience that the company is trying to show to the customer” and how, if the company does create hardware to be sold at a lower price point, it needs to make an impact.

Currently sitting in third place in global smartphone sales, Sony has a long road ahead of it. The Sony roadmap is a realistic one though, giving the company two years to make the transition to an exclusively premium manufacturer.

To summarize Sony’s new approach to mobile in an elegant way, you only have to bring up Sneeden’s remarks on the unique power button featured on the Xperia Z unveiled at CES. He wants consumers to be able to recognize Sony products based on the power button alone. If that doesn’t sound like a company with renewed focus on making smartphones that we’ll still talk about years from now, I don’t know what does.

No comments:

Post a Comment

//PART 2