[ad_1]
-
The Sony Xperia Pro. Why is it $ 2,500?
-
This is the reason why? Underneath that strand is a Micro HDMI port and hopefully several $ 100 bills.
Sony
-
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 around $ 20.
Sony
-
The side has a lot of buttons. After the volume rocker, it’s a trigger and two app shortcut buttons.
Sony
-
There is a MicroSD slot under this flap.
Sony
We’ve seen smartphones with stratospheric price tags before, but usually there’s something special about them. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X cost between $ 2,000 and $ 2,600, but they were first-generation foldable smartphones with brand new display technology. Sony’s latest smartphone entry, the Sony Xperia Pro, is a boring old slab phone that seems utterly forgettable until you look at the price: an incredible $ 2,500, or the price of three everything. new Samsung Galaxy S21 at $ 800. Sony has really gone above and beyond.
Most of the time, the Xperia Pro looks a lot like the Xperia 1 II, Sony’s already overpriced flagship smartphone at $ 1,300 as of 2020. Both have 6.5-inch, near-4K, 3840 × 1644 OLED screens, 60Hz, Snapdragon 865 SoC, three rear cameras, IP65 rating and 4000mAh battery. This year’s Xperia Pro gets a tier above 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but it’s usually only worth an extra $ 100. There is 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 tag is (drum roll please) an HDMI port. Yes, in addition to the USB-C port at the bottom, there is also a Micro HDMI port which can be used as a video input. Sony suggests connecting the phone to a Sony Alpha camera and using it as a live video monitor or pushing an external video source to the internet for live streaming. That feature alone and the proximity to the camera is worth $ 1,000 more by Sony 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. production, however, and it could connect to a special TV or laptop. Sony calls it “the world’s first smartphone with an HDMI input”, letting the phone act like a mini-TV.
If the idea of an Android phone connected above your camera appeals to you, you can basically make the same setup as Sony’s example at home, using a $ 20 dongle. Android phones come standard with USB support, and today’s tiny HDMI capture dongles mean you use an Android phone as a video monitor or live broadcaster relatively easily.
An upcycling type setup with an adapter seems more appropriate for an idea like this rather than running out and buying a bespoke multithousand-dollar Android phone. If you’re really willing to spend thousands of dollars on a camera monitor, you probably want one with a removable battery, because a smartphone’s permanent battery will be dead in a few years. A specially designed monitor will also be cheaper, have more inputs, have a larger screen, and have a sunshade. If you really need a phone, you probably don’t want your phone connected to your camera all the time.
Also, as an Android phone, the Xperia Pro doesn’t look very good. It has last year’s SoC, the Snapdragon 865, instead of the Snapdragon 888, an unforgivable problem when you load $ 2,500. Last year’s Xperia 1 II has a side-mounted fingerprint reader, but it doesn’t, and no biometrics of any kind are listed on the website. The proximity of the camera to the phone also led Sony to give it an ugly design, with a thicker body and thicker bezels on the Xperia 1 II. But the battery isn’t any bigger and the phone doesn’t feel more rugged.
Sony ad image
[ad_2]
Source link