- [Narrator] Sony had a lot to show off at IFA this year,
including a new-ish flagship smartphone
and some impressive acoustic accessories,
but what stuck with me after leaving Berlin
was a pair of very peculiar products
that made me wonder just what Sony is doing.
I'm Michael Fisher and this is the last
Mr. Mobile video from IFA 2016.
Big Walkman, small phone.
(electronic music)
To be clear, I'm not bashing Sony here.
Like every red-blooded and lucky American teenager,
I had a Walkman growing up and when I went off to college,
I went full Sony with a MiniDisc player that I loved.
But you know what they say, never go full Sony, man.
This is the company's latest bit of extravagance,
and it's exactly what it looks like.
It's a gold-plated Walkman.
It weights a full fricking pound.
It stores as much music as the highest capacity iPhone.
It has dual audio outputs to accommodate
the equally elaborate headphones
with their sheepskin air pads and helix woven wires.
Pushing the chunky buttons recalls the Walkman of yore,
while operating its laggy Android-based software
recalls cheap smartphones of yesterday too.
Inside the thing, the analog audio components
are separated from their digital counterparts
for better interference attenuation,
and the copper body itself
is meant to reduce magnetic interference.
It's the most lovingly crafted music player
I've ever laid hands on, and it costs $3,200.
The headphones, $2,300.
Look, I love aspirational technology.
I even love stunts done just
for the sake of proving a point,
and for a tiny sliver of consumers with good enough ears
and a willingness to back up the money truck for a Walkman,
this thing is probably appealing.
But luxury technology isn't my bag,
and my ears, frankly, aren't good enough to discern
the probably amazing sound this thing puts out,
so I wandered over to the smartphone side of the Sony booth,
where I came upon a murder scene.
See, Sony used to hold a special place in my heart
as the last phone maker who did small phones right.
While many manufacturers build miniature versions
of their flagship phones, they almost always
hobble the specs in the process and make them worse.
With the Compact series, time and time again,
Sony shrunk down its full size flagships
to a manageable footprint,
and left almost all of the high end specs intact.
The result, most of the time, was a small phone
that was still a great phone.
Not anymore.
The X Compact continues a slide
that you could argue started with the Z5 Compact.
It's small, yes, and it's camera packs impressive features,
but make no mistake, it's a compromised Compact.
The processor driving it is a Snapdragon 650,
not the high end 820 of its bigger sibling.
And the water resistance that's characterized
high end Sony phones for years is gone too.
Even more damning, the buttons are chintzy
and the metal-backed construction of the XZ
didn't make the jump to the X Compact,
so we're left with a glossy, smear-prone casing
that doesn't make me wanna spend
over 450 bucks on the thing.
Are there reasons you could come up with
to buy the X Compact?
Sure, I like what Sony's doing in software these days,
finding a nice bridge between stock Android
and its own upgrades.
There are nice hardware features like expandable storage.
The size is quite nice if you have phablet fatigue.
And if the camera is anything like the one in the XZ,
you'll probably have a good time with it.
I didn't get to spend time with the XZ,
but my colleague, Alex Dobie, did.
His Android Central review is linked below.
Point is, you can justify anything if you hedge hard enough,
and look, if Sony stuff is your passion,
I'd never tell you to take a pass.
Go for it.
But there's no escaping that the two lasting impressions
I took from the Sony booth were a $3,200 Walkman
and a deluded compromised version
of a smartphone I'd admired for years.
Sony hasn't had a big presence
in the North American mobile markets for a while now,
and with products like this,
I don't really expect that to change anytime soon.
Here's hoping next year's CES trade show proves me wrong.
This is Mr. Mobile's final hands-on
from IFA 2016 in Berlin, folks.
Next week, we'll be back in the Boston studio
for more mobile tech videos.
Subscribe so you don't miss them, and thanks for watching.
Until next time, stay mobile, my friends.