Sony may have ditched plans for an Android-powered tablet.
Sony’s 2018 Xperia tablets have been in the news ever since Sumaho Info found a piece of code in Sony‘s new camera app that references at least two tablets. The wording in the code led us to believe Sony could be working on two Xperia tablets, one with an 8-inch display and the other with a 10-inch display.
However, a reliable source has told Android Marvel that, though Sony had plans to release Xperia-branded tablets in 2018, it had to ditch the idea because “the sales didn’t go as expected for 2018 high-end phones including Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact“. The source also confirmed that Sony was planning to name the tablets Xperia Z5 (10-inch) and Xperia Z5C (8-inch).
The last tablet to come out of Sony was the Xperia Z4, that featured a 10.1-inch 2K display, and that was in 2015. The tablet reportedly didn’t do very well in terms of sales, and the firm had to put an end to their usual annual upgrade cycle.
Sony’s mobile division has been on the downside for some years now partly because of the firm’s fragile efforts on marketing the devices and partly because they stopped innovating in terms of design since 2013. Until last year, all the phones, flagship or otherwise, released after the Xperia Z looked pretty much the same with huge bezels.
Besides ditching tablets, there have been reports suggesting Sony might trim down the Xperia lineup as well. Per the firm’s Q1 financial report, the revenue from Xperia-related products stood at 723.7 billion yen (approx $6.6 billion). Now, for the sake of comparison, the revenue from the said division was around $759.1 billion yen (approx $6.9 billion) from the previous year.
