Sony has fired its first salvo in the 2014 smartphone war with the introduction of a pair of new devices aimed at emerging markets: the Xperia E1 and Xperia T2 Ultra.
Both phones, says Sony, were designed with users' penchant for multimedia entertainment in mind.
The smaller sibling - the Xperia E1 - features a four-inch display. It sports a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and has 512MB RAM and 4GB storage. It also features a dedicated Walkman key, as well as shake to shuffle and hardware music keys. Sony positions the E1 as a "mid-tier smartphone with seriously premium credentials".
Fitting in with the phablet generation, the Xperia T2 Ultra features a six-inch display and sports a 13-megapixel camera, as well as a 1.1-megapixel front-facing camera. It runs on a Snapdragon Quad-core 1.4GHz processor and has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of on-board storage. Sony says the T2 was "designed specifically with customers from emerging markets in China, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific rim in mind".
While pricing details have not yet been released, according to comparisons made in Sony's press material, these could be in the vicinity of R2 500 (EUR175) for the Xperia E1 and R5 900 (EUR400) for the Xperia T2.
Local availability of the devices is also not clear at this stage, but tech blogs indicate this information may come to light at Mobile World Congress next month.
Big brother Z1
Sony's renewed focus on mobile surfaced in 2012, when its CEO, Kazuo Hirai, identified mobile products, gaming and digital imaging as the core of a rebound in consumer electronics after more than a decade of decline for the pioneer of personal music players and compact discs. It had a record loss of $5.74 billion in the 2011/12 fiscal year.
Of those three priorities, mobile quickly emerged as the best near-term hope for Sony, although when the company launched the phone it positioned as embodying the best Sony had to offer - the Xperia Z1 - it was clear it had a long way to go.
According to research firm Gartner, Sony did not place among the top five smartphones makers in the second quarter of 2013.
In a push to become the world's third-biggest maker of smartphones after Samsung and Apple, Sony unveiled the Xperia Z1 in September last year. At the time, the company said the device was the "highest spec phone on the market".
Known for being waterproof, the Xperia Z1 features a five-inch display and has a 20.7MP rear-facing camera.
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