Why Don't People Buy Sony Smartphones? By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here and this is the Sony Xperia one mark ii, snapdragon 865, eight gigs of ram a 21x9 widescreen display triple cameras, a four thousand William hour battery, an all glass and aluminum frame, expandable storage, water resistance, wireless charging, android 10, a high quality haptic motor fingerprint reader and the power button, a revolutionary technology, thin bezels, no hole punch or notch, and just a clean, minimal, modern form, factor, flagship stuff right and that's fine. But you know technically anybody can build that. But the thing is this phone also has a bunch of other stuff, unique, really useful stuff that I haven't seen in any other phone. But all this stuff leads to one question, which is why don't more people buy? These like Sony's, had a roughly zero percent market share in smartphones for the past couple of years in a row, and I think I have an answer. But first let me show you what is actually so good about these, so the biggest one for me is this display. So I've mentioned this is a 21x9 aspect ratio which we've seen a bit more now.

You know it keeps it a bit narrower and more comfortable in the hand, more reachable- and I mentioned the thin bezels they're not concerned with going all the way to the edges and ending up with a notch or a hole, punch or something and actually lets them, keep the front-facing speakers. So that's awesome, but this screen is also 4k, so it is a six and a half inch 4k screen in your pocket, which is crazy. I remember the first 4k phone I ever reviewed, which was back in college, was also a Sony phone, but yeah now, even in 2020, there's something wild about seeing that 2160p option on a YouTube, video and toggling it and legit. Looking about as good as any other smartphone screen. I've seen also pro-tip, definitely go into display settings and switch to creator mode.

If you have this phone, which will give you the most accurate color the best looking videos and photos and yeah everything just looks perfect. Now, here's something else it may seem minor, but this phone has a toolless micro, SD card and sim card tray. Just comes out just like that. Now, expandable storage is already awesome, but to go the extra mile on a phone where people may also take a lot of photos and videos and to engineer this lever where you can pull the tray out quickly and swap cards whenever you want all while maintaining water resistance is actually super impressive. This phone also keeps that headphone jack, so they didn't have to do that, and we all know they didn't have to do that, because Sony clearly already sells some of the best wireless earbuds and wireless headphones on the market, but they kept that headphone jack anyway, good guy Sony, actually speaking of headphones.

If you do order this phone there's a bunch of bundles floating around, while they will bundle in their world-class 350 dollar mark iv headphones for free. This phone has a lot of really nice software features too. Like I said, it's got android 10 with Sony's overlay, which is actually pretty close to stock, which may surprise a lot of people. It's a clean launcher with the Google explorer page next to the side, quick google search box at the bottom, not a lot of pre-installed apps either, but some nice added stuff here, the always on display when it's enabled will show you the icons for your most recent apps, to give you notifications, and they'll actually pulse to let you know which one is your most recent notification, why it's buzzing, there's also easy multitasking on this tall display, and it is smooth and works really well so check this out. When you hit the button in the middle, it brings you to a multitasker for both panels where you can switch to a different app, or you can launch different app groups, so two at a time or quit out of it entirely.

It is really well-thought-out. One of the best multitasking UIs I've used on android, and I'll actually want to use. This phone also has a pretty unique feature with the speakers I talked about where it will vibrate the chassis uh to act as extra bass, so it's kind of cheesy, but it also is kind of cool. You turn it up, and it literally adds bass from the vibration motor for those lower frequencies, so in songs with a bass line, the phone is literally buzzing in your hand, with every bass kick it's kind of wild. You might want to turn it on or off, depending on what you're doing, but that's also not something.

I've really seen done on any other phone before, and this phone also even has a LED notification light up top, which is rare these days and an extra customizable button at the bottom that can be used to launch apps or use as a shutter button for the camera and then speaking of the cameras. This is another area where you'd expect. Maybe people would want to flock to a phone like this because think about it, for as good as the best smartphone cameras are the pixel cameras, the Samsung cameras of the world Sony makes all the sensors for all of those cameras and then, on top of that, Sony also happens to make their alpha line of cameras, their mirrorless stuff, including the a7 iii, which has been pretty much universally praised as a technical masterpiece and potentially just straight up best camera of the year for 2020. , so sony's got camera tech and sure enough. What do you see? Sony is in fact bringing a lot of the tech from their alpha camera line down into these cameras on the phone, mainly the incredible autofocus, and that's what I like the most, but also a lot of manual control.

So, first, if you just take photos and videos in the automatic mode in the standard app like most people will you'll get a lot of good stuff. There's three 12 megapixel cameras, the primary the telephoto and then a truly wide ultra-wide, which is awesome and photos, are pretty good, very neutral. You know very, very good, dynamic range, colors are good, sharpness is okay and focus is fast, but then there's also the included pro level photo and video apps called photo pro and cinema pro photo basically shrinks the viewfinder and gives you full on camera modes and manual levels of control. Just like a Sony alpha camera, it's actually so much control that it requires a bit of a learning curve to get used to shooting it on an entire touch screen interface, but there's a lot of stuff here, it's pretty awesome, and it gives you world-class autofocus object and eye tracking your histograms, your exposure, compensation metering modes. All of that and then the cinema pro app is even crazier to me.

You get wide dynamic range 4k video with profiles with adjustable manual controls, ISO control, Venice, color, science, manual focus and even focus racking. So you can set two different focus points a and b and then have the camera smoothly rack between them without hunting, because yeah you're you're totally making a movie on your phone with this thing. This is next level dedication to enthusiasts, but I think that actually kind of partially answers the question we're considering in the first place, which is why don't more people buy these? Why don't more people buy and flock to these awesome phones with tons of enthusiast level features and part of the answer is because enthusiasts really only make up a very, very small percentage of the overall market of anything, but especially of smartphones? Now don't get me wrong. Enthusiast features do sell things sometimes, but if you want that true high level volume of sales, you need to appeal to everybody and this kind of don't like for all those awesome camera features. I just talked about, and manual controls and Venice color science.

This phone, also just straight up, doesn't have a simple night mode, like people want to just quickly take a great low light photo like pixels night sight. This doesn't have that uh. The front facing camera is only 1080p 30, and we all know a growing mass of people care about the front-facing camera just as much, if not more than the back ones. It's also a 4k 60hz display, and I bet you could hand this phone to a thousand people and not tell them it has a 4k display and ask them what they think, and you'd probably never get a single person asking if it's a 4k screen and also most people who already know how to use and take the most advantage of and really like this super high-end manual control on the cameras most of those people already own and use their own main mirrorless camera, or something like that. So don't get me wrong.

This is good for those people, it's an added feature, but this isn't a feature. That's going to sell new people. Take a look at this chart. This is Sony's volume of smartphone sales for the past few years now. Obviously, this is a concerning trend falling from nearly 40 million smartphones a year for two years in a row all the way down to just six and a half million sold in 2018 for perspective.

That's about as many iPhones as apple sells in a week in a strong fourth quarter. So to get back in the game. Sony needs a strong 2019 right. They need to pull out a few more smartphones, get a little more variety in there start appealing to more people, perfect phones like the Xperia one mark ii, and that should put them back on the map for TW. Oh, oh, that is not good at all, and that's because there's one more reason that people don't buy these, even though they're clearly pretty cool, and they're pretty good, and maybe they should and that's because they don't know about these, and if you think about it, that's kind of crazy that the company that makes all these popular mirrorless cameras and this technical masterpiece, oh and also the PlayStation, and all these TVs and everything that that company can't leverage anything to get over zero percent in smartphone market share and, from my perspective as a reviewer, it's frustrating because it seems like Sony's kind of suffering from some of the same stuff.

Lg has lately anyway, which is their inability to properly launch a phone to the masses like take apple. For example. We talk about them a lot, but they're, notoriously very good at launching a phone they'll have an event then, a week later you can pre-order and then a week later, they're in the streets, it doesn't take very long. The hype doesn't die and you know OnePlus. Does this too Samsung? Does this too? The good launches go that way this phone was unveiled in May may, so that's six months ago, when it first started showing up- and I just got it last week so may June july ? august September October- that's a long time for the hype to die and for a very poorly thought out, launch strategy, and you know whether it is poorly thought out or poorly executed.

It just doesn't look good period, and it doesn't look like a priority for your company when it takes that long matter of fact, it's taken so long for this phone to come out that it's basically successor has already launched. It's already been announced, it's called the Xperia 5 mark ii for some reason, Sony's terrible with names, and we won't even get into that. But you know that's a slightly smaller version of this. With 120 hertz display and a little of a lower price, and when I go to b h to try to get my hands on that. Well, it's not available till December.

So of course people don't want to deal with that, especially when you're dealing with expensive phones. You don't want to have your phone arrive the day the sequel is announced and that that's actually bad for reviewers too reviewers want to know that when they review a phone they have all the most updated information, and if you didn't get one in May or June, when they were first getting seeded like I didn't, and you get one now and the Xperia 5 mark ii just came out. Why would I even want to review this phone anyway? People aren't even going to buy it. So that's the frustrating thing: that it is crazy that Sony can make such a great such an interesting, compelling little phone and there just be absolutely no desire to share it or buy it or anything. But here's the thing: here's the thing, I'm still rooting for Sony, because I don't want to see this kind of stuff die.

Let's not forget the more competition in any field, the better the products get, and so, while that downward curve sort of makes it look like Sony's mobile division is on life support, and we've seen what that looks like in others before I don't want it to die for both of us either way, that's been it. Let me know what you think in the comments below thanks for watching, and I'll catch, you guys in the next one peace you.

Source : Marques Brownlee