Foreign. This is the brand new Sony Xperia One, Mark V It's the one five, the fifth one. Uh, this is a fourteen hundred dollar pure Enthusiast phone from Sony Uh, I've been using it came out a couple weeks ago. Actually, it was announced a couple weeks ago, but it's not out yet.

but I've been really loving it so far. and just like a lot of their other previous phones, there's some incredible Tech here, but I've had to take a step back and realize that these phones are endangered species for a reason like Sony phones were already a rare breed to start with. I've talked about this before in past videos where I've reviewed the Sony Xperia 5, Mark II and the Xperia 1, Mark III and the one mark IV and the pro I Etc All these phones and this one are loaded with features and manual controls and Technology but they also all have like the smallest Target demographic like the narrowest band of people who will actually appreciate everything that they do. and that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with a product like that existing, but that also has me kind of worried. See, we lost HTC We lost LG This this is just in the past couple of years. Uh, and YouTube commenters would probably have you believing that it was just the negative videos about the smartphones that single-handedly took them down even though there was huge corporations behind them and that's clearly not true. But I would like to try something a little bit different today because I actually think Sony right now looks almost exactly like where Porsche the car company used to be.

So if we're being generous, Sony Smartphones today are like Porsche cars 20 years ago. so Porsche was toiling away making expensive Enthusiast sports cars for years and they were sick. They were really fun cars, but also their sales numbers were anemic and the business itself was actually in danger. So the strategy to oversimplify was just give the people what they want.

crossover SUVs are starting to blow up, they're taking off in sales and they're becoming the most popular, best-selling vehicle. So they took a bit of a risk as a sports car company and built a Porsche crossover SUV that was a Porsche Cayenne That thing went on to become their best-selling vehicle ever by a mile and propped up the whole rest of the business well enough to keep everything else afloat so they could afford to also keep making the expensive and sports cars. It was kind of sacrilegious at the time for Porsche to make an SUV, but if you ask any Porsche fan today, they're all glad that the Cayenne exists because it enables them to keep making the 911s and the Gt3s and everything else that they love so much. So hear me out.

Sony Give the people what they want now. Importantly, what I'm not saying is for them to stop making these super high-end Enthusiast phones. But what I am saying is they need some sort of like Mass Market appealing phone that people like me can actually recommend to everyone so that they can afford to keep making phones like this. So I'm thinking something in the six to eight hundred dollar range which isn't totally foreign to them.

they can do this and it needs to keep. Of course, all the character that makes a Sony phone a Sony phone. Not just another generic 700 phone. but really, think hard about this.

So here's three things I would do or would recommend for Sony to make a Sony character Mass market phone the same way that Porsche made a Porsche character mass-market vehicle. So number one with the phone itself, you got a smartly slightly cut down those specs. So this new Sony Xperia 1, Mark 5 I've been talking about. it has a 6.5 inch 21x9 120 Hertz, 4K HDR OLED display.

It's kind of ridiculous. It's one of the most technically impressive parts of any phone. Just like the last Sony phone and the one before that, it's literally 643 pixels per inch. It's the sharpest thing you'll see on a mobile device.

Sony is the only company I see right now putting 4K displays in their smartphones and there's a reason for it. So for the mass market phone 1080p and I know it sounds sacrilegious because this Tony thing is always a 4K display. but they did have the Xperia 5 Mark III which is also 1080p display and you keep all the Sony character around the display, because it's not just the 4K resolution that makes this a Sony thing. but there are also one of very few to be doing the tall 21x9 aspect ratio that makes it easier to hold and the flat panel with no curves around the edges and no hole punch and it's surrounded by large front-facing speakers because I don't mind a little bit of bezel, they should keep all of that now.

Some of you might also be thinking right now about the Xperia 10 series, which is Sony's line of like more budget oriented 400-ish dollar phones. Those phones have 60hz 1080p displays I think this should be right in this sweet spot in the middle. Just do a premium mid-range 120 Hertz, 1080P and I'd also like to make it a bit smaller. this is a six and a half inch display, which like I said, is on the larger side and while Sony's doing what they can to make it more reachable with 21 by nine, it's still going to be tough for people to reach the top without some hand gymnastics, mostly because the fingerprint reader power button is here and so if you unlock the phone while holding it like this, it's unlikely that you can also reach the top with your thumb.

So I'm thinking getting it down to roughly a six inch phone, maybe a little less 1080p display with Sony character around it all. That's really the biggest spec to cut down really the only other thing you end up missing out on if you make a smaller phone is a slightly smaller battery. But then you're going from a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and a 4K display to a 1080p display with a 4 600 milliamp hour battery. So then number two and this is a big one.

A better automatic camera. Now it's specifically specifically automatic cameras. So what you've probably heard me talk about in the past is do Not get it twisted. These are some of the absolute best cameras in any smartphone, but they are because they are so manually controllable and customizable.

That's why the enthusiasts like me love these things and why so many people in that crowd will buy them. But it's just a different world being in full auto. So these have a lot of parallels to shooting with like the Sony Alpha cameras. and then this Xperia 1 Mark 5 has some interesting new stuff.

They've moved up to a 52 megapixel sensor, which is not a number you see very often, but that's really just binning down to 12 megapixels with some extra room for stabilization. And it is a 1.7 times larger sensor than the last gen with some new optimizations surrounding the sensor Tech itself. It's insane. You see, by decoupling the photo diode and transistor from being housed in the same space, they basically free up room to have a larger photo diode in the same area.

and that also lets them increase the size and overall performance of the transistor in its own layer. All this results in better light sensitivity on each sensitive area and larger pixels on their own substrate layers, which results in massively lower noise and improved low light sensitivity if you know how to use it. So what's frustrating about reviewing these Sony phones is I Can say all that and the enthusiasts will appreciate it, but I Still can't recommend a fourteen hundred dollar phone to the masses that still has a slightly confusing, slightly subpar full auto camera mode. like if you want to dig in and navigate your way around.

you can get incredible footage and photos out of these cameras in the more manual modes, but on a Sony phone. First of all, there are three camera apps: Cinema Pro Video, Pro and Photo Pro and even in the most basic mode of Photo Pro that launches when you just hit that sweet dedicated shutter button, it's a little more complex than most people are used to. There's just a few extra unlabeled buttons. There's just a few weird quirks like the photo modes are hidden under more, but also night mode and portrait mode are down here at the bottom.

It's also weird that the shutter button doesn't blink at all when you take a photo. I Know it's just a tiny thing, but regular people expect the viewfinder to Blink when they take a picture because every other smartphone does and for some reason Sony's doesn't. It seems unnecessary, but this auto mode, it just has to be simplified even more than it already has. Of course, right behind the dumb down Auto modes is a ton of other way more powerful modes.

all the manual modes. all the Sony character is still there. but for the masses I Promise you, they just want to like pull the phone out their pocket, launch the camera real quick, and take a picture of their friend or their kid, their pet doing something silly. There's something happened right in front of them.

They just want to take a quick snap and they want that to be the best picture possible. Just that Quick Auto One Shot boom. and I even get a little bit bummed out by the quality of shots from Sony's straight auto mode because I know all the technology that goes into these cameras. Also, Sony literally makes all these sensors so they should have the best vertical integration pipeline in the world, but yet they still get blown out the Water by a pixel or a Samsung phone.

In these basic point-and-shoot situation, Sony tends to overexpose a little bit. They don't do HDR scenes as well as the others. They were consistently near dead last in the blind smartphone camera test that I ran last year where you all voted on the best looking pictures without knowing which camera took which photo. So Sony's full-blown auto mode despite having all this awesome Tech can still be pretty rough and fixing that would make a massive difference to making it for the masses.

So then number three. Last but not least, treat it like a flagship Sony It would be great if you could copy the other's homework a little bit on this one here. I'm not even going to get into the naming of the phones, but you have to put out the phone a week, maybe two weeks Max after you announce it like that I don't know how else to say it like I Know there's a lot that goes into launching a phone and of course getting it into carrier stores in certain markets and international markets and getting everything to work. but you I think you really need to do as much as possible behind the scenes so that when you reveal the phone as soon as that hype wave starts to Crest people can buy it one to two weeks later tops now Sony believe it or not, is making some progress on this.

It used to be six months of a gap between announcing the phone and it going on sale. Can you imagine that It's like a phone gets announced in April and you can't actually buy it until like October It's absurd. But then they got it down to five. They got it down to four.

This phone was announced May 11th, but B H has it estimated for July 28th. That would be still almost three months after the initial unveiling, which is better than it used to be. but that's still. Trust me.

That's enough time for people to forget about it and find something else to do with their 1400 bucks. So Sony's got to get this window down to be much much shorter. So to summarize, there's clearly nothing wrong with Sony making these incredibly high-end impressive Enthusiast phones just like: there's nothing wrong with Porsche making their awesome high-end Enthusiast sports cars. but Porsha needed that Cayenne to survive and I think Sony is going to need some type of Mass Appeal obvious for the masses type phone that still has the character of all the stuff that makes a Sony phone special.

I think it'll be a bit smaller version of this I don't think it gets a 4K screen I think it's 1080p. It's a much better Auto camera mode because that's what most people just want in a phone. It's got to come out a day to two weeks after it's announced and maybe change the name, but still keep the design the headphone jack, the SIM card tray and micro SD card slot that both pop out without needing any ejector tool, yet somehow keep Ip68 water resistance. definitely keep that keep the taller and more reachable aspect ratio and the square sides and the fast fingerprint reader that's comboed with the power button and the dedicated shutter button definitely keep that the flat screen with no hole punch cut out the stereo front-facing speaker pair all that would be so killer with some fast Android updates Until then, these will continue to be some of the most underrated phones on the planet.

but while the rest of the planet even though they exist, thanks for watching catch you in the next one. Peace, Thank you.