With all the rumors of Sony possibly pulling out of the smartphone game you wouldn’t expect the company to be as active as it has been lately. Sony recently announced the Xperia Z4 Tablet marking the beginning to a very busy looking year for the Japanese electronics giant. We’ve seen plenty of rumors of the Sony Xperia Z4 smartphone come across the wire over the past couple of weeks as well as a bigger sized Z4 Ultra being a very real possibility this time around, something Sony hasn’t done in a few years. Then there’s also the more affordable segment of the market that Sony’s been delving into a little bit with its C series and the upcoming rumored Xperia C4 that would be as focused on taking selfies as its predecessor was.
Now we’re hearing rumors of another mid-range model that Sony’s R&D labs have been experimenting with. Besides the Xperia C series there’s not a whole lot that Sony does in any sort of affordable market regardless of the technology they’re into, generally going for the more premium segment of the market at all times. Sony’s latest Walkman is a testament to that, retailing for well over $1000 and marketed towards the enthusiast audiophile market. Eschewing that ideology would be the rumored Sony Lavender, a code name for a new type of device Sony wants to get in the hands of as many people as possible. How will it do this? In a way it doesn’t traditionally use: price.
While we don’t have a specific price on this rumored E5503 model the tweak by @upleaks on twitter reveals that Sony is packing a MediaTek 6752 64-bit octa-core processor inside this new phone. That’s the same processor inside the iOcean Rock, the Meizu M1 Note and a handful of other upcoming mid-range Chinese phones. All these phones have one big thing in common besides the processor powering them: a price tag around $200. That’s significantly less than Sony’s premium offerings but given MediaTek’s price to performance ratio it won’t be sacrificing user experience for price. The phone will reportedly offer 4G LTE connectivity, a 1080p screen as well as ship with Android 5.x Lollipop and Sony’s custom user interface over top as we’ve seen on the Xperia Lollipop updates as of late.