No Sony Xperia has made the “best smartphones” lists for some time, so you could understand if Sony were preparing to throw in the towel on its flagging mobile division. Yet, according to company chief financial officer Lin Tao, the firm has no such plan.
During a recent presentation of Sony’s latest financial results, she said Xperia remained “a very important business for us” and that “we would like to continue to value the smartphone business” (Cnet Japan, via Google Translate).
Let’s be honest: as things stand, Xperia’s future doesn’t look great. Sony hasn’t sold a flagship phone in the US for two years, and a 2025 mid-range model seems to be missing in action. Google’s Pixel phones are now bigger sellers in Japan, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago given Japanese shoppers’ loyalty to domestic brands. Production of the Xperia 1 VII has even been outsourced to China rather than Japan, and Sony later had to replace many of the units it did sell because of glitches.
In my four-star Sony Xperia 1 VII review, I called it “an even tougher sell than previous generations,” with styling that “shows its age” and battery life that’s “simply great now, rather than class-leading.” While I praised its ultrawide camera—arguably the best of the bunch in 2025—it doesn’t give anyone who’s not a Sony die-hard enough reasons to stick around.
Sony’s insistence on keeping fan-favourite features like front-facing speakers may be one reason its phones are losing appeal; the thicker top and bottom bezels look almost antiquated next to the latest iPhone or Galaxy phones. There are also fewer people left who genuinely care about microSD expansion or 3.5mm headphone ports—most have moved on to cloud storage and wireless earbuds, begrudgingly or otherwise.
It’s easy to blame Sony’s aggressively high pricing. In the UK, an Xperia 1 VII will set you back £1,399 (roughly $1,900). That’s considerably more than current flagships from Apple, Samsung, or Google. And it’s not as if network carriers are queuing up to offer tempting contract deals to take the sting out.
Then there’s the creator-first approach to photography. Sony makes some of the best smartphone camera sensors around, but on its own phones you’ve often needed to understand ISO values and reach for manual mode to get the best results. Most people just want to point and shoot. Recent Xperias have improved automatic modes and offered physical shutter buttons a decade before Apple tried to make them trendy with Camera Control, but that feels like too little, too late.
Perhaps the online chatter sparked by Lin Tao’s comments will be the wake-up call Sony needs. Maybe it’s time to go a little more mainstream, give the design team more freedom, and finally retire expandable storage. Or perhaps Sony should lean into its quirks. If you’re listening, Sony, I’d happily buy an Xperia Play 2…
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