Sony may have finally started to see some smartphone growth with Android. That’s mainly because they have finally started making quality devices that don’t happen to be that much behind the competitors, as they used to be in the past, and why they’ve never really made anyone excited about them. They are expecting to sell 50 million smartphones in 2014, which is a significant boost from last year’s 34 million units.
Volumes of the 5-inch Full HD Xperia allocated for sale in Japan, France, Germany, Hong Kong and Taiwan were all fully booked on the first day when distributors began to take pre-sale orders in the markets, the sources revealed.
Sony Mobile aims to ship 50 million smartphones in fiscal 2013 compared to 34 million units shipped in the previous fiscal year, according to a company internal estimate.
The success of the Xperia Z, which is also attributed to launching earlier than the HTC One and Galaxy S4, will help them to launch new mid-end and l0w-end devices, where the profit per unit may not be so big, but it would help them ship many more units, and into new markets, which will help their brand become recognized by people who can’t afford their high-end Xperia Z.
This new sales boost will give them enough money to try their luck with other mobile platforms as well, such as the new Firefox OS. I don’t think Firefox OS will give them a full alternative to Android for the whole price range, though. Firefox OS will be meant more for the low-end devices, at least initially, because it won’t have many “native” apps, and even those native apps will be based on web technologies like HTML5 and Javascript. Most of the rest will simply be web apps, much like the web apps we can find in the Chrome store for Chrome OS. That means it probably won’t appeal much to the mid-end and high-end of the market.
But Ubuntu Touch could be perfect as an alternative to Android in that range. Ubuntu Touch is only going to ship on devices with at least a quad core Cortex A9 or S4 CPU, or a dual/quad core Cortex A15 CPU. It’s not going to compete much against Firefox OS at the lowest end of the market. It should also be trivial for Sony and other OEM’s to support it, because Ubuntu Touch will support most Android drivers out of the box. The only question is if Sony has enough money to take on a third OS, too, and they might not have enough right now, but if they build on the success of the Xperia Z, they might have in the near future.
[Via DigiTimes]