Try a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!

They've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one.

If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]

This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.

[1] https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/device-brands/sony

I loved the early Sony Ericsson but they lost their way on the phones. And the funky camera phones when their stand alone phones are decent to cutting edge.

Xperia 5 IV owner here, don't give Sony any of your money.

Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones.

The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a point and shoot camera from 2004, and you have to treat it like that or your photos will be a blurry, underexposed mess. The cameras are technically fine, but the software implementation is truly terrible.

Yes, the phone has a headphone jack and micro SD slot, but those aren't worth it when everything else sucks. Sony is far, far behind other major Android manufacturers when it comes to software quality and support.

I gleefully gave Sony money for the 5 IV in late 2022. The phone stops receiving all updates next month (September 2025). Custom ROMs (e.g. LineageOS) are nonexistent because Sony has such an insignificant market share.

I won't be giving Sony any money for a new phone.

I'm writing this from my own Xperia 5 I device, and I can corroborate some of your complaints.

Most of the frustrations can be resolved by liberal use of third-party apps from F-Droid. Lawnchair and the Fossify suite make the basic experience quite reasonable, because the system UI components are thankfully not too heavily modified, only the system apps. With apps such as DAVx⁵ and Fennec it's really very useable.

Unfortunately the locked bootloader (which is completely illegal of course) is a big frustration and the main reason why you can't get custom ROMs running on it. I don't think it's about market share; some less popular brands have better community support because their manufacturers don't build artificial barriers to modifications. For security, this puts Sony's phones right down in my estimation and I too would not recommend them for this reason alone.

I think you can thank Apple for that. They destroyed all the funky phones from competition.

Apple just chose what the iPhone did.

The other phone manufacturers slavishly imitating them is what destroyed "all the funky phones".

There was no particular reason other manufacturers needed to copy absolutely everything Apple did.

There is a near-infinite variety of phones. People claim that they want them but really they don't.

I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.

I was wrong.

"I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge battery "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a dumber phone" here's a dumber phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a privacy-focused phone" here's a privacy-focused phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

People will make up an infinite variety of excuses why a product that meets their chief stated requirement isn't for them.

"Oh the camera is only 24.9999 megapixels instead of 25. Oh that's 9mm thick I really can only do 8.9mm at maximum. Oh that's only IP68 rated I want IP69. Oh that screen is 5.4 inches-- TOO BIG-- I want a 5.25 inch screen."

The best was when someone wanted a rugged phone with long battery life and they rejected an option because its ARM cores ran at like 525MHz less than the latest shiny Samsung joint so they bought the skinny non-rugged non-gigundo-battery Samsung instead. They didn't understand that the only distance between the two would be in benchmarks, and only by small margins, and that to human perception there would be no difference.

What I think they want, instead of a phone that meets their requirements, is a POPULAR phone that they consider to be an aspiration goal or status symbol to be specifically designed to meet their personal requirements and that everyone else should have those same requirements too.

The problem is that the market has a few clear market leaders that have dominated the field. Every other player is fighting for scraps.

It's almost impossible to compete with Apple and Google. Samsung is managing to hang on, but not many others can.

I think the level of software control that Apple and Google wield alone is cause for regulatory scrutiny and possible antitrust action. Maybe something like that can oxygenate the field for better competition.

Smartphones shouldn't be this stagnant. It should be a highly competitive market. But it isn't.

> I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.

> I was wrong.

You were wrong because you misunderstood the comment. When people say "I want a smaller phone" what they mean is "I want this phone, but smaller".

So when you tell them a smaller phone exists but it's also different in 20 other parameters, now there's a new problem, as you encountered. It's not because those people are disingenuous, it's because you misunderstood them.

There used to be phones with a secondary display, full QWERTY keyboard, wireless split remote, whole Windows computer in the back, a completely square display, two displays of which one rotate, a plug-in dual display cover, dual SIM slot, a miniature video projector, fingerprint sensor in the back, TV tuner, FM radio, sleep-swappable battery, IP68 rating, laser barcode scanner, 1" equivalent image sensor, 42MP image sensor, actually mechanically zooming lenses, IrDA, strap holes, 3.5mm headphone jacks,

iPhone killed them all. Yeah I personally kind of want iMessage. Doesn't change the fact that iPhone killed them all.

With the possible exception of IrDA, which in 2025 is like wanting a parallel port on a phone, pretty much all of that still exists.

Here's a phone with "a completely square display": https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rotatable-Phone-i19-Pro-Mini-Fold...

It even rotates but only the one screen.

I even found a phone with integrated barcode scanner, the UNIWA V9S.

funnily enough iPhones had tiny NVMe storage since 6s 10 years ago, but Apple wont ever sell expandable storage option when it can gouge on upsells.