On the same day that Sony announced the powerful Alpha 1, it also unveiled its latest Xperia phone. Although it is technically a smartphone, it is functionally something entirely different.
It’s easy to look at the Sony Xperia Pro and ask yourself what Sony is thinking. To understand what led them to this point, it is important to look at their history on portable devices.
Sony makes fantastic smartphones, but the strategy behind these phones has been disconcerting and undoubtedly detrimental to the phones’ commercial success. As a result, those who would like to use Sony’s Xperia devices and actively seek them out are a tiny slice of the overall smartphone market.
Such a large slice that the devices command about 0% of the smartphone market share in the United States.
This is admittedly strange considering how the company has been producing devices that look great on paper. Previous devices have expandable storage, wireless charging, high-resolution 4K screens, a headset, water resistance and a state-of-the-art processor. In addition, it offers settings that promise better color accuracy for photographing and viewing content, along with Sony’s high-level camera features such as full manual control and the company’s legendary autofocus features.
And it can’t be overstated: as much as other companies like Samsung and Apple have great cameras for smartphones, these sensors are made by Sony, and Sony makes state-of-the-art full-end cameras. They get the camera market, and these features are reproduced quite faithfully in the Xperia line.
However, despite all this, the company simply does not sell many of its cameras, and this is where the “strategy” part comes into play. Sony treats its smartphones the same as it treats its cameras: it makes an announcement and waits for a while until the camera is available. This gap between hype and availability takes the wind completely behind the launch, to the point that, when the phones are finally available, the general public forgets that they exist.
Add to that that Sony spends basically zero dollars on phone marketing until and during its launches. It is incredibly easy not to know that Sony phones exist because of this.
I think another problem is that Sony’s smartphone division is kind of superimposed on the camera division and for those who send products and how they market the phones is very similar to the way the company handles normal-sized camera launches. It works for the camera niche, but not for the smartphone consumer market.
Sony seems to have embraced this problem with open arms now. The latest phone, the Xperia PRO, has stopped trying to be a phone altogether. Instead of trying to be a consumer device like other smartphones, everything is now included in the professional camera market as a photo and video accessory. As the company is no longer trying to make a device for all smartphone users and is now hyper-focused on making a specific device for a very specialized niche, in fact there seems to be an appropriate strategy at stake.
The Xperia Pro is basically the redesigned Xperia 1 Mark II to take more advantage of niche features than ever before. This is not a device that anyone looking to buy a phone would ever consider, and that seems to be on purpose.
In the video above, Marques Brownlee argues that in a market flooded with products with the name “pro”, this is the only device that really deserves it. While many devices use the term Pro to sound high quality, the Xperia Pro is, in fact, arguably a legitimate professional tool.
The main feature of the device, which you can read more at PetaPixel’s coverage here, is its HDMI input and connectivity with full size cameras. It has the ability to use 5G signals (and monitor signal strength) to transmit photos and videos from field cameras to a central location for distribution.
Basically, it is a 4K HDR monitor with an integrated 5G modem.
If you look at Sony’s marketing images, no image shows that it is being used as a camera or a phone.
So, while before nobody was considering a Sony phone because of messy strategy and poor marketing, now Sony has apparently turned this “bug” into a “feature”. The company never imagined selling many Xperia 1 Mark II phones and I have a hard time thinking that this changes with the Xperia Pro. But, at least this time, it seems on purpose, and not by chance. In fact, it looks like a solid strategy.