Sony wants to be 3rd biggest smartphone maker, but not advertise much in US or China

[froggyboy604]

Sony wants to become the world’s third-biggest smartphone seller, Kazuo Hirai, the company’s CEO, told reporters on Friday. But according to Reuters, which was at the press event, Sony doesn’t have big plans to tackle the world’s two largest markets – the U.S. and China.

“It’s not realistic to try to do everything at once. In the U.S. we’ll start gradually,” Hirai told reporters. Instead, Sony plans to focus the bulk of its attention on Europe and its home market of Japan, which currently accounts for 60 percent of its smartphone sales."

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I wonder if not pushing their smartphones very hard in the US, and China, and just focusing on Japan, and Europe would work at making Sony the 3rd biggest smartphone maker because there are a lot of buyers for smartphones in China and the US which both have very large populations.

 

[Guardian]

They have the ability to do it, it will just take some work. I am always happy to see more companies enter the market. It only gets better for the consumer when this happens. 

 

[GSquadron]

This is good and bad news, but I hope prices get lower

 

[Guardian]

This is good and bad news, but I hope prices get lower

Its going to be an 'either or' situation I believe. You're going to get more innovation and features, or a lower price. But either way, its going to be better for everyone. 

 

[Black Angel]

They won't get there if they keep locking their bootloaders down like HTC and Motorola. In that case, they'd be just as bad as Apple.

Smartphones are expensive and itvis bad enough that OEM's and carriers are too busy loading the rom updates pushed by Google, with their own bloatware to release an update in a timely manner. So, combining this with the usually 2 year/version upgrade cycle, you are going to have a lot of people who shelled out big bucks for a phone that won't ever get upgraded.

This leaves many handsets vulnerable and lacking important security and feature updates.

The third party developer community is a remedy for this because OEM's can't always keep supporting every handset and carriers won't either since they want you to spend more money on a new device. So this is where the third party devs such as the XDA community, Cyanogenmod, ParanoidAndroid and AOSP and AOKP developers come into play by cooking roms that contain the features and updates pushed by Google, but were dropped by the carriers because they want you to by a new device.

As long as OEM's like Sony, HTC, LG and Motorola lock down their devices and make it impossible to develop these roms for, then Sony will not get there.

Samsung and Nexus devices are open and usually don't have locked bootloaders and so, it is possible to find roms with new features even if official support by both the manufacturer and carriers have ceased. This is an important reason for their popularity.

 

[Ross]

Samsung and Nexus devices are open and usually don't have locked bootloaders and so, it is possible to find roms with new features even if official support by both the manufacturer and carriers have ceased. This is an important reason for their popularity.

This is why I stick with Samsung, as I can pretty much do what I like with it. If Sony and other manufacturers followed suit, I may consider another brand.

 

[Black Angel]

Same here, although I noticed that some Samsung phones have been locked. I mean, my mom has an S3 on T-mobile and hers was locked, although she managed to unlock it her self, she has a binary counter though and flashing via Odin will trigger it, so she has to make sure that any rom she gets, she flashes it through CWM.

Samsung has been pissing me off though with the dwindling internal space and not offering larger capacities outside of certain countries. 

I love my phone but that is probably the biggest issue I have with it, and I said that if the Note 3 was anything like my Note 2, in terms of storage, that I would go with another brand.

Thankfully, that has not been the case.. so the Note 3 will be my next device, although I hope that App2SD will be reinstated with Android 4.3, like many Note 3 owners says it have. If this is the case, then I hope that my Note 2 will be able to do this once the 4.3 update comes to my phone.

 

[froggyboy604]

Apple Smartphones maybe locked down, but owners are generally promised to get new updates after a few generations since the iPhone 4 which is an older phone from 2011 can still gets updated to iOS 7 which is the latest iOS OS.

I think Windows Phone, FireFox OS and Blackberry also send out updates to users without the manufactuer, or cell phone company deciding if they want to send out an update.

Nokia, and Blackberry could still grab the number 3 smartphone spot if they can convince some of their old users to switch back to them because of a better price, nicer quality, more features, free updates, and better experience.

 

[Black Angel]

Google is said to do the same thing as well, and I think that it is about damn time that they did so. This will go along way to making Android more secure on the various handsets out there and this would also help cut down on fragmentation..

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I got a good laugh out of this, Sony can barely match Nintendo in the gaming handheld market and they hope to be the big cheese in the smart phone business? They like to kid themselves.

 

[Black Angel]

I dunno DS, the Experia has sold pretty well..

 

[froggyboy604]

I got a good laugh out of this, Sony can barely match Nintendo in the gaming handheld market and they hope to be the big cheese in the smart phone business? They like to kid themselves.

I also got a laughed out of Sony trying to be number 3 since Sony's TV, Gaming, and computer brands are not really popular these days, and  there are already cheaper Smartphone brands like LG, Motorola, HTC, and Samsung which sells cheaper phones which are nicer to use like the LG Nexus 4 unlocked version which can be bought for $199 without a contract.

I read Hauwei ,a Chinese Smartphone and Electronics company, is the number 3 smartphone maker selling 27.2 million smartphones in 2012, up 73.8 percent from 2011. I think it would be rather difficult for Sony to beat the Hauwei since Hauwei Smartphones are cheaper, and offer better features. Some of Hauwei prepaid, and non-contract/unlocked phones are pretty good for the price.

Not focusing more on China, and the US, maybe a bad decision for Sony since there are many Chinese, and Americans who love to buy expensive items like Smartphones to show off to their friends and family since it's how their society is like, and how they are raised to enjoy material goods as a way to improve their life. Sony maybe missing out on many Smartphone buyers from the US and China.