Let’s talk about the Sony Xperia Z4. The Japanese electronics giant announced the latest in its line of premium Z-series smartphones recently for its home market. And it’s fair to say the popular reaction to the device has fallen somewhere between bewilderment and outright derision. Consumers and critics alike seem confused as to why this phone exists, questioning the priorities Sony’s taken with what appears to be its early-2015 flagship.
With questionable hardware priorities and no word of any global launch, it’s a bizarre turn for Sony, coming as the company looks to restructure and streamline its smartphone offerings and focus primarily on the high end of the market. The Xperia Z4 can boast only a couple of meaningful improvements over its six-month-old predecessor, and in one or two important areas it may actually be a regression from the Z3.
Now that the Nexus 5 is being phased out without replacement (could you get on that, Google?), and the Nexus 6 is ugly and huge, I consider the Z3 and Z3 Compact to be the phones to get if you want Android. They’re only six months old, modern in every respect, look great, have minimal software customisations, better battery life than the competition, and thanks to Sony’s progressive open source efforts, great third party ROM support (mostly).
Hence, it’s sad to see that, in the pursuit of thinness, the Z4 actually has a smaller battery, and possibly, shorter battery life.
Phones have already reached the practical upper limits of size, performance, screen resolution and battery life. The only changes are be minor incremental improvements in hardware and software.
In future Moore’s Law will be reflected in prices not hardware. Every 2-3 years the cost will halve while hardware remains basically the same. [Point and shoot digital cameras are an obvious example. I don’t think they have changed significantly in the past five years.]
You 2025 ‘flagship’ will probably cost <$50 and be found next to the light bulbs in the supermarket aisle.
Really? Then show me an Android phone released in the past year that:
– Has a camera on par with the iPhone’s
– Has a battery that can last all day
– Has more than 16gb of internal storage (smaller than 5.5″)
– Isn’t the size of a whale
– Is actually in stores in the US, so I can go put my hands on one.
I think the Z3 Compact is the only phone that fits this criteria. Thus, I’m hoping that the Z4 has a wide rollout here.
Edited 2015-04-22 00:03 UTC
Where do I find an iPhone with:
– a removable battery?
– waterproof?
– microSD?
– 4K screen?
– dual SIM?
– doesn’t disintegrate when dropped?
All phones are a compromise. The iPhone does some things very well (camera) and other things (eg removable storage and robustness) very badly.
The top of the range Lumias arguably have better cameras, better screens and longer battery life than an iPhone. They also support up to 128GB of removable storage.
The high end Asian domestic market Android phones are on a completely different level to the iPhone.
Do you really think the Asian manufacturers give a flying fsck about what the average American thinks? Sony, Samsung, Oppo. Huawei, Alcatel etc are primarily focused on the 98% of people who are NOT Americans.
Edited 2015-04-22 01:28 UTC
Eh, I don’t really need a 4k screen, waterproofing, dual SIM card slots, etc. I just want a high-end Android smartphone that gets the BASICS right, and fits comfortably in my hand. Apparently, this is too much to ask for though, at least in the US.
I am trying to understand the benefits of a display with a resolution that is far beyond the limit where the human eye can perceive individual pixels without a watchmaker’s loupe. What are the benefits apart from increased demands on GPUs and reduced battery life?
Having something comon people haven’t? At least for a little while?
There’s more to human visual acuity than whatever Apple’s marketing edict of the season wants people to believe
There are some benefits to ultra high resolution screens in the mobile space:
– Super smooth text, specially now that people use their phones as replacement ebook readers. Plud lots of communication still happening using the written word (e.g. e-mail, texts, etc)
– No need to scale down aggressively those 8+ MP pics people are taking with their devices.
– This is the one I care for: it helps bring down the overall cost and commodity ultra high resolution screens.
Consider this: with 4K on your 5″ smartphone display, why not 4K on your smartwatch too?
So the iPhone isn’t a phone, then?
Moto X
LOL, you’re trolling, right? Sub-par camera and shitty battery life.
Quantitatively it has a better camera and similar battery life. It does not have an official etched out Apple logo on the back of its case, however. Which surely impacts the qualitative assessment of some, I guess.
You can go that way :
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20
Edited 2015-04-23 11:16 UTC
Never going to happen. Sure you will be able to buy a smartphone for $50 at the supermarket (you can basically do this right now) but it won’t be the flagship.
The flagships will cost a lot more and do a lot more. Just like you can buy a netbook for $99 or an ultrabook for $2000 right now despite the fact that the computer industry is a lot more mature than the smartphone industry.
“Never going to happen. Sure you will be able to buy a smartphone for $50 at the supermarket (you can basically do this right now) but it won’t be the flagship.”
It happened with feature phones. Compact ‘flagship’ models cost the equivalent of $2000 in the mid 90s. By the early 2000s there was a feature freeze. The technology remained virtually the same but prices plummeted.
There are so many design compromises in a mobile phone that it is virtually impossible to significantly improve on the current flagships’ I can assure you that nobody will be paying 50x the average 2025 phone price just to buy a ‘flagship’.
If anything, flagships will get more expensive, but I suspect future “flagships” will use exotic/expensive materials as a differentiating feature rather than processing power. The same happened with feature phones, to some extent. Kinda like what Apple are doing with the Apple Watch now.
A bit like the Vertu phones. The guts from a $30 Nokia in a $10,000 case.
Hmm. I’m not seeing high-end point-and-shoot digital cameras for $50 at the supermarket aisles.
you can find plenty of compacts at under 100$ and when there is a sale they may get close to 50$
Yes, but not the flagship models. The top of the line compact “point and shoot” cameras from Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Sony, Panasonic, etc. are all $500+, not in the $50-$100 range.
Just like there’s still a market for more expensive compact cameras, I expect that flagship smartphones will continue to sell as luxury products.
The OP didn’t say flagship compact cameras can be found for 50$, he said they are much cheaper than they used to be, you can’t directly compare prices for cameras and phones.
Still, the OP is wrong on a different way: following the P&S cameras example, when the market will become uninteresting for manufacturers, we will see them reinvent the devices and create new classes of devices only to keep the price. In cameras, when the compacts segment was clearly going on its way out and the SLRs segment became saturated, they first invented the “bridge” (which is actually a compact) and then “mirrorless”. As a parallel, when the tablets market has saturated, they started to push “phablets”. Those new classes of devices slow down the overall decrease in price.
Not at all true. Cameras like the Sony RX100 III, Ricoh GX and Nikon Coopix A completely blow away anything from 5 years ago. If you want to extend the point and shoot definition to include cameras like Fuji X100s and Sony RX1 then you’re looking at cameras that can go toe to toe with most DSLRs.
I just picked up a used Z to replace my old Lumia 710.
I really like the Z, except for the poor battery life. The only real problem is T-Mobile and their utter failure when it comes to updates. 4.4 has been out for a while, 5.0.2 is coming out soon for the Z, but T-Mobile only offers 4.2 on my phone, and has further made it so the bootloader cannot be unlocked.
Maybe it’s possible, but there are enough Zs out there with unlockable bootloaders that I doubt anybody is focused on the ones that don’t provide an official method to unlock.
Grr.
According to GSM Arena at least, the Z3 Compact has one of the best battery life you can get in a phone (the 2-3 higher on the chart are tablets). Not the bit Z’s, I am afraid…