Sony Announces Three New Bluetooth Headphones
Ahead of the reveal of the iPhone 7, which is largely expected to usher in a new era of user interest in wireless headphones thanks to the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack, Sony recently unveiled three new wireless headphone options for its customers (via SlashGear). Each of the three Bluetooth headphones couple together high-quality sound with Sony’s “Extra Bass” technology, along with high-rated resistance to the elements for sports-related activities on two of the models.
The first, most expensive set is the XB80BS Sports In-ear Headphones ($149.99), which come with a splash-proof IPX5 design that allows users to wear them in heavy rain and even clean them in water. In addition to being the most waterproofed of Sony’s new headphones, the XB80BS also packs in the highest quality sound with “high fidelity wireless streaming” thanks to Bluetooth and LDAC technology for up to seven hours of music listening.
From left to right: the $150, $100, and $80 models of Sony’s new Bluetooth headphones
The mid-range, XB70BT Bluetooth In-ear Headphones ($99.99) are a slight step down in comparison, with an overall lack of waterproofing and high-quality music streaming, that’s compensated for with a focus on smartphone interactivity. Thanks to in-line remote controls with phone call and music playback functionality (lacking on the other headphones), along with 9 hours of battery life, Sony’s XB70BT headphones are aimed more at daily casual users who don’t need an emphasis on sports-related resistance.
Lastly, the company’s cheapest new headphones, the XB50BS Sports Bluetooth In-ear Headphones ($79.99), brings all of the same Extra Bass technology and wireless connectivity with a splash-proof IPX4 rating. Sony says this will let users keep a workout going “even in light rain,” so water submersion capabilities of the XB80BS aren’t the focus of the cheaper model. The battery on the XB50BS lasts 8.5 hours.
The $150 and $80 models come in three colors, including black, red, and blue, while the $100 version is only available in black. All three can be purchased through Sony’s website and Amazon, although each listing on Amazon marks the headphones as temporarily out of stock. The company also announced three new wired headphones along with the trio of Bluetooth options.
Tag: Sony
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The PlayStation VR includes a demo disc loaded with games
PlayStation VR is expensive enough by itself, so you probably don’t relish the idea of spending more just to get a taste of what the PS4 headset is like. Thankfully, you won’t have to. Sony has revealed that PSVR’s accompanying demo disc will include samples of eight games. A handful are definitely lighter releases that serve more as showcases (PlayStation VR Worlds most notably), but there are also tasters of games you might well buy later. You can play demos for Battlezone, Driveclub VR, the ubiquitous VR sampler EVE: Valkyrie and RIGS: Mechanized Combat League, among others.
This lineup surfaced on Sony’s European PlayStation Blog, so don’t be surprised if the lineup changes depending on your region. Should it remain largely intact from country to country, though, it’s good news for many future PSVR owners. Yes, the demos are ultimately there to get you to buy games, but the breadth is important. You won’t run out of things to try minutes after opening the box, and you’ll get a genuinely diverse range of experiences that will give you a feel for what’s possible in VR. That’s particularly important when many players will know very little about VR, let alone have first-hand experience.
Via: The Verge
Source: PlayStation Blog
Apple Partnering With Sony to Bring Apple Pay to Japan
Apple is partnering with Sony to bring its Apple Pay payments service to Japan, reports Japanese news site Nikkei. As has been previously rumored, Apple will make future versions of the iPhone compatible with Sony’s FeliCa technology to allow Japanese citizens to use Apple Pay for contactless payments at FeliCa-compatible terminals.
FeliCa is Sony’s tap-to-pay format, which has been widely adopted in Japan. It’s used to access the country’s railway and bus system, and it’s able to store e-money that can be used at vending machines, cafes, and other locations equipped with FeliCa systems. FeliCa is able to process transactions in a fraction of a second, making it suitable for use in a fast-paced transit environment.
Users will also be able to store train tickets on their iPhones, letting them enter gates with a wave. Other proposed uses for the technology include integrating membership cards and replacing security key cards. Apple’s foray into Japanese smartphone payment services will promote broader adoption of compatible terminals at retailers and event venues. Foreign travelers may be able to use foreign iPhones to make payments as well.
The new iPhone is expected to be equipped with the technology needed to allow it to interface with FeliCa payment terminals, but according to Nikkei, Apple Pay is not likely to launch until Japan until next year. Instead, a gradual rollout is expected.
Apple still needs to negotiate fees with financial institutions in Japan and establish deals with retailers and service providers that use the FeliCa readers, a process that will take some time.
Apple Pay is currently available in nine countries including the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, France, and Singapore. Apple Pay vice president Jennifer Bailey has said Apple is “working rapidly” to expand the service to additional countries in Asia and Europe.
Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tags: Sony, nikkei.com, FeliCa
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The best of the rest at IFA 2016
Now that we’ve said goodbye to IFA 2016, it’s time to bring you highlights of the most interesting devices at the event. In this particular edition, you’ll find some that aren’t smartphones or wearables. We’re talking virtual reality massage chairs, fridges with built-in tablets, as well as adorable robots and drones. Acer’s ridiculous 21-inch gaming laptop is there too, along with its new convertible Chromebook. But that’s just part of it, so check out the slideshow and think about which items you want the most.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
IFA 2016 showed us how far wearables have come
The wearables world has come a long way in a very short time, and plenty of companies have had to learn their lessons out in public. The first devices they launched were often far, far too ugly to find mainstream acceptance, but now the fashion and wearables worlds are perfectly aligned. That’s why we’re taking a look at the devices that arrived at this year’s IFA, and comparing it with their more embarrassing predecessors. Think of it like #throwbackthursday, except nobody’s got one of those face-worn retainers you only see in ’80s movies.
ASUS’ Zenwatch
Like many other early Android Wear pioneers, ASUS thought that it was hip to be square. It made sense, since smartphones have square displays too, not to mention the (then) scarcity of truly-round displays. ASUS trimmed the price to make the Zenwatch cheaper than its rivals, and curved the glass over the face to offer an illusion of greater ergonomics. The end result is a watch that made square faces look reasonably stylish, even if it would only ever cater to a niche.
Two years down the road and ASUS has firmly grasped a copy of the fashion watch design playbook and is holding it firmly with both hands. The Zenwatch 3 is packing a rose-gold inlay, a chunky crown and double pushers, making it look less like an Android Wear device and more like a Longines. It’s the sort of watch that goes down well with business types who want to be seen wearing their money on their wrists.
Samsung Gear
When you look at the first Galaxy Gear you have to ask what Samsung was thinking, even back then. It may have been a refinement of the company’s S9110 telephone watch, but it wasn’t pretty, no sir. Admittedly, it’s a striking piece of gear, with a brutalist design, exposed screws and a humped, 1.9-megapixel camera that juts out of the band rather than the hardware. But when you look at Samsung’s earlier smartwatches, like the SPH-WP10, the Galaxy Gear looks like pure elegance.
Just three years stand between the OG Gear and the Gear S3, but they couldn’t be further apart in the looks department. The Gear S3 looks like a regular watch, the sort of ultra-masculine timepiece that you’d see advertised in an in-flight magazine. Like its immediate predecessor, the bezel acts as a control dial, but now it’s been geared so that it doesn’t even look like a watch from the future. In fact, the Gear S3 could convincingly pass for a Rolex diving watch made half a century ago.
Sony Headphones
Sony’s been there (or thereabouts) for plenty of milestones in personal audio, even if it might not want everyone to remember some of its own missteps. From 1968’s DR-4A, the company’s first noise-isolating stereo headphones, to the Xperia Ear, which will arrive in stores this November. Back in the day, a 5.5mm audio lead with a nice woven coating was what connected your headphones to the sound source of your choice. These days, of course, it’s all about Bluetooth, but the Ear lets you send commands to your phone as well as receive sounds back. Even if you wouldn’t necessarily call it a headphone, per-se.
A side effect of the design of these small earpieces, of course, is that wearing them are significantly less conspicuous. In an era where people wear enormous Beats-branded cans as a matter of course, in-ear earpieces are, by comparison, invisible. While the first-generation Xperia Ear stands out, other devices of its kind — like Bragi’s Dash — aren’t meant to be visible. Although, we’re getting to the point where it’s not necessarily right to call these gadgets wearables, since they’re not really worn so much as inserted. Then again, nobody wants to walk into an electronics store and ask for the insertables section.
Withings
Withings has built its ecosystem of health products piece by piece, but its first device with heart rate monitoring wasn’t one for the record books. The Withings Pulse was a square rubber brick that was intended to be worn on a belt clip like a pedometer. After your workout, you could pull out the device, press it against your finger and be told how well your heart was doing at that particular moment. But aside from its blocky design, it had some great features, including automatic activity detection and a long-life battery. Unfortunately, the act of removing it from the clip wore the rubber out pretty quickly, and it was easy to forget when you changed pants.
Now, the company has seen the error of its ways and baked in the optical heart rate monitor into its Swiss-inspired watch. The Steel HR masks its more technological components between an analog dial and sub-dial — the latter of which tells you how much activity you’ve undertaken that day. The only gadgety component of the watch is the digital sub-dial which offers your heart rate, as well as smartphone notifications for calls, emails and texts. By burying the nuts and bolts behind a well-designed and subtle timepiece, Withings is pushing us towards a world where we’re not even aware of the tech we’re wearing.
E-Ink Watches
Sony’s first E Ink watch, FES, arrived in 2014, and cleverly added the technology to both the face and wristband. That’s led to some interesting options for customization and promised to radically alter the way watches were worn. But it was by no means the first E Ink timepiece on the market, and an early proponent was Phosphor, which launched the Ana-Digi timepiece back in 2012. The display itself was static, and users could use a side-mounted pusher to toggle between time and date views on the face.
But adding E Ink to a watch clearly hasn’t provided the necessary surge in sales that Sony was hoping for. For the second-generation of its groundbreaking timepiece, it’s added more traditionally-watch like design cues. That includes a prominent bezel and sapphire glass across the crystal, making it slightly less exciting. Then again, it perhaps shows that the tried-and-tested formula for watches hasn’t changed much in the last century, and these companies have learned that if you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
After Math: Call me, maybe
It’s been a banner week for mobile devices not made by Apple (you’ll have to wait until the 7th for those). Samsung, quite literally, blew its chance to gain ground on Apple, given the new iPhone’s reputed lackluster feature set. Google likely killed off Project Ara, its modular smartphone. Verizon and T-Mobile both rolled out new service plans aimed at stretching subscribers’ data plans. Hasselblad actually made a photography device that won’t require the life of your first born to obtain. And Nubia unveiled its newest flagship phone — but where’s the bezel. Numbers, because how else would we determine market share?
IFA 2016 day zero: Selfie-phones and barista robots
We’re edging ever closer to the official start of IFA 2016 (that’s today as you read this), but the pre-show events continue. Huawei, ZTE and others brought new phones, and Sony showed its hand — even if some of that was familiar. There was also a surprise visit from the future. If that future is the 1950’s version of robots.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Sony’s gold-plated Walkman needs deep, strong pockets
How much do you love music? Do you love it enough to spend $3,200 on a fancy pants Walkman? That’s the proposition on the table with Sony’s new gold-plated NW-WM1Z music player. Essentially, Sony continues to position its immortal Walkman brand as a true audiophile experience aimed at fans of High Resolution Audio files (don’t worry, it’ll play your plain old MP3s too). The basic concept might seem contradictory: a portable media player that pairs with a (non-portable) amp and custom designed headphones. But this isn’t a product that’s meant to make sense to most people. Audiophiles will know. Or at least, that’s what Sony hopes.
Oh, if you thought that $3,200 was a wedge of cash, know that that’s just for the media player part. All three components — known as the “Signature Series” come with a healthy price tag. The amplifier is $2,100, and the headphones are $2,200. All in, that’s a chunk of change. For those of you still with their wallets out, you probably want to know what it sounds like. I only got to spend a few minutes with the set-up on a show floor in Berlin, so it’s hard to give it the full critical listening experience, but it’s definitely a few cuts above your phone and regular on ears (as you’d hope).
I’ve had the pleasure of listening to several “high end” audio players, including Neil Young’s Pono (if you remember that). There are no real words to explain the difference. The audio you get out of your phone and $200 headphones has so many variables that the sound ends up either flat, or juiced with bass — and most people have made peace with this.
The Signature Series on the other hand (and in my experience higher grade audio systems in general) feels like you’re in another space completely. It’s delicate and airy, almost a little unsettling at first, but ultimately quite a different experience — and that’s the secret sauce that those with golden ears are looking for. I’m loathed to say more without giving it a fair and extended trial.
Despite its hand-held design, the Walkman was surprisingly heavy. There’s reassuring weight, and then there’s paperweight. I guess you’re unlikely to be walking around with this in your pocket (so it’s more of a Man, than Walkman?), but the gold-plated metal casing, touch screen and satisfyingly clickable buttons do give it an all round classy feel that, well, you’d hope for at this price.
The big question, for both Sony and for buyers, is whether this is any better, or more appealing to anything already out there. The world of high end Hi-Fi is an island all of its own, and the users are notoriously as particular about the details on their hardware, as the sound itself. But we love Sony for trying this anyway.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Sony’s run out of ideas for its smartphones
If the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then someone needs to check in on Sony. Every six months, the company announces a handset in the hope of making some tiny level of impact on the mobile industry. And every six months, those same devices are rated as being generally fine, but not as compelling or cheap as alternatives from rival companies. You’d think that, after a couple of years of this crushingly predictable cycle, someone would have suggested a change. Well, you’d have hoped so, because the Xperia XZ just feels like more of the same.
The new Xperia XZ isn’t a bad phone, by any means, but it’s little more than a glorified polish job on the Xperia X Performance. That was Sony’s early-2016 flagship and when we reviewed it, our Chris Velazco called it “$700 worth of disappointment.” But this isn’t just a one-off, it’s the latest in a series of conservative, underwhelming handsets that have failed to click with buyers across the world. Technology purchases like smartphones are meant to excite you — especially if you’re spending the better part of a grand on one — and Sony simply can’t do that.
In order to illustrate Sony’s malaise, it’s worth looking at the list of flagship-level handsets that it’s launched since the start of 2013. This list of devices covers three eras of Sony, immediately before and during Kaz Hirai’s much vaunted “One Sony” turnaround strategy, as well as his subsequent U-turn when it came to mobile. At the start of 2015, Hirai said that the mobile division would now simply produce a handful of devices each year in the hope of keeping skilled employees and facilities around just in case future technologies needed them.
- Xperia Z – (January 13)
- Xperia ZR – (January 13)
- Xperia ZL – (January 13)
- Xperia Z1 – (September 13)
- Xperia Z1s – (September 13)
- Xperia Z1 compact – (January 14)
- Xperia Z2 – (February 14)
- Xperia Z3 – (September 14)
- Xperia Z3 compact – (September 14)
- Xperia Z3+ – (April 15)
- Xperia Z5 – (September 15)
- Xpera Z5 compact – (September 15)
- Xperia Z5 premium – (September 15)
- Xperia X – (February 16)
- Xperia XA – (February 16)
- Xperia X performance – (February 16)
Sony’s defenders would point to Samsung and say that both companies have a similar Spring-to-Fall release cycle. But Samsung caters to two distinct user groups with two very different products in the form of the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note handsets. There’s also the fact that Samsung is happy burning billions on advertising to support its devices, in stark contrast to Sony’s relatively empty pockets.
If Sony can’t compete with Samsung’s financial muscle, then it should probably attempt to innovate its way out of trouble. Except that’s going to be a problem too, since — right now — there are no new technological worlds to conquer in smartphones. Last year, Sony added 4K displays to its flagship Z5 Premium with predictably beautiful, but otherwise pointless, results. The fact that the Xperia XZ ships with a 1080p screen shows that wiser heads prevailed this year.
That doesn’t leave Sony with many places to go, and there’s not much it can do in hardware, despite its legendary expertise. After all, LG couldn’t make a big impact with the “friends” ecosystem that surrounded the G5 and Motorola doesn’t appear to have set the world on fire with its own version. So that just leaves software, an area where Sony notoriously lags behind its Android rivals.
Then there’s the fact that the smartphone world is slowly beginning to crunch and, much like the tablet space, it won’t be long before several manufacturers pull out of the market. We’ve reported on this problem a few times, but everyone who can afford a smartphone already has one, and fewer people feel the need to replace them once every two years. In that vacuum, it’s price, rather than quality, that has become a big driver for people’s purchases — which is why low-or-no-margin companies like Huawei and OnePlus have become so huge. Oh, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Samsung is targeting Japan for its next big growth opportunity: parking its tanks directly on Sony’s lawn.
Given that Sony has very few places that it can turn, I asked my colleagues what they would do in its place. The most repeated answer was “Vita Phone,” a device that would combine the company’s (under-loved) gaming handheld with a smartphone. Of course, Sony’s been there already with the Xperia Play and other companies have tried to blend gaming with smartphones — wave hello, Nokia’s N-Gage, with no success. Then again, Sony is now at the point where it’s got so little to lose that maybe a little bit of left-field alchemy is exactly what it needs.
A closer look at Sony’s Xperia Ear voice assistant
Sony has been teasing its Xperia Ear voice assistant since last year, but now we know the concept will be an actual consumer product later this year. At IFA 2016, the tech giant announced that the tiny Bluetooth- and NFC-powered device is set to arrive in November, though it still hasn’t said how much it’s going to cost. Still, unlike at MWC 2015, Sony’s now letting people try the device here in Berlin, as opposed to only showcasing it behind a glass box.
Once paired with a smartphone, the Xperia Ear supports a variety of voice commands, such as dictated messages, web searches and weather info. You can also get directions, check your schedule and get more notifications from your phone. Behind it all is Sony’s “Agent”, a personal assistant platform designed to rival the likes of Amazon’s Alexa. What’s more, the Xperia Ear is said to have a full-day of battery life and, most importantly, doesn’t feel uncomfortable when it’s placed in your earhole.
It’s worth noting that the Xperia Ear is just one of many concepts Sony has shown off in recent years. Last IFA, for example, the firm gave us a sneak peek at a lamp that doubles as a Bluetooth speaker. And like the Xperia Ear, that’s being turned into a consumer product as well. We’ll be sure to share the Ear’s pricing info as soon as we have it, but do keep in mind it’s only expected to be available in select markets.
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