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The Sony Xperia Pro. Why is it $ 2,500?
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That’s why? Under the valve is a Micro HDMI port and hopefully several $ 100 bills.
Sony
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With the HDMI port, you can use your $ 2,500 smartphone as a camera monitor. You can also do this with a normal phone for about $ 20.
Sony
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The side has a lot of buttons. After the volume button, it’s a relax button and two shortcut buttons for the app.
Sony
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There is a MicroSD slot under the valve.
Sony
We have seen smartphones with stratospheric price tags, but usually there is something special about them. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X are between $ 2,000 and $ 2,600, but they were the first generation foldable smartphones with brand new display technology. Sony’s latest entry into the smartphone market, the Sony Xperia Pro, is a boring old record phone that looks completely forgettable until you look at the price: a staggering $ 2500, or the price of three brand new $ 800 Samsung Galaxy S21s. Sony has really outdone itself.
The Xperia Pro mostly looks a lot like the Xperia 1 II, Sony’s all-too-expensive $ 1,300 flagship smartphone from 2020. Both have 6.5 inches, almost 4K, 3840 × 1644, 60Hz OLED screens, the Snapdragon 865 SoC, three rear cameras, an IP65 rating and a 4000 mAh battery. This year’s Xperia Pro gets 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, but it’s usually only worth $ 100 extra. There’s also mmWave 5G this year, two “app shortcut” buttons on the side and a shutter button. Fancy.
None of this explains why this phone is at least $ 1,000 more than it should be. Sony’s justification for the outrageous price is (drumroll please) an HDMI port. Yes, besides the USB-C port on the bottom, there is also a Micro HDMI port that can be used as a video input. Sony suggests that you connect the phone to a Sony Alpha camera and use it as a live video monitor, or that you move an external video source to the Internet for live streaming. Just this one feature and the adjacent camera are worth an extra $ 1,000 according to Sony’s logic.
There have been other Android phones with HDMI before. The Motorola Atrix comes to mind, a $ 480 phone released in 2011. It was micro-HDMI outputwell, and it can connect to a TV or a special laptop. Sony calls it ‘the world’s first smartphone with HDMI input’, and makes the phone serve as a mini-TV.
If the idea of an Android phone mounted on top of your camera appeals to you, you can make basically the same setup as Sony’s example at home with a $ 20 dongle. Android phones come standard with USB support, and today’s small HDMI dongles mean you can use an Android phone as a video monitor or a livestreamer relatively easily.
An upcycling-type setup with an adapter seems more appropriate for an idea like this, rather than stopping and buying an Android phone worth more than a thousand dollars. If you really want to spend thousands of dollars on a camera monitor, you probably want one with a removable battery, as the permanent battery in a smartphone will be empty in a few years. A specific monitor will also be cheaper, have more input, have a larger screen and have a sunshade. If you really need a phone, you probably do not want to connect to your camera at the right time.
On top of that, as an Android phone, the Xperia Pro does not look very good. Last year, the SoC, the Snapdragon 865, instead of the Snapdragon 888, had an unforgivable problem if you asked for $ 2,500. Last year’s Xperia 1 II has a fingerprint reader on the side, but this is not the case and there is no biometrics of any kind on the site. The phone’s adjoining camera apparently also led Sony to give it an ugly design, with a thicker body and thicker edges over the Xperia 1 II. But the battery is not bigger, and the phone no longer looks robust.
List by Sony