By Stephen Schenck | January 11, 2013 3:04 PM
It was just about a year ago when we heard from HTC that it was going to be all about high-end smartphones in the future, leaving less-than-impressive budget models to other manufacturers and cutting back on the shear number of phones it produced, focusing only a few select premium handsets. As 2012 played out, though, that’s not entirely how things played out, and while we’ve seen some top-shelf stuff from HTC, it hasn’t fully followed through on those goals. Maybe Sony will be the company to do what HTC couldn’t and become the Android equivalent of Apple; that’s what we’re wondering, at least, after Sony Mobile Xperia Product Marketing Manager Stephen Sneeden spent some time talking about Sony’s possible departure from the low-end market.
Sneeded makes it clear that Sony has its sights set on becoming a “premium smartphone provider”, and that one of the ways to do that is to stop associating the Sony brand with lower-end handsets. He cites cost concerns that crop-up at that level preventing the company from delivering the quality experience it might otherwise like to.
Assuming Sony actually sticks with this course, we’d still see mid-range devices as well as the higher-end. Phones like the Xperia E we looked at last month (above), on the other hand, with its 3.5-inch HVGA screen and 1GHz SoC, could soon be a thing of the past for the company.
