Sony will be a niche phone no matter what. Dropping 4k and 21:9 won't increase the customer base.

Price drops, better OS support and selling in more markets might help.

I have the Xperia 10iii and love the 21:9 and design. It's also very fast and with Nova Launcher 8 it's very fluid.

The cameras are good but not as great as I'd hoped considering they typically position themselves as photographers phones. That seems to be reserved for the expensive phones.

Given that they make the lenses they have a chance to position themselves as phones with great cameras when at the budget and mid level and that might generate sales.

The big problem with the budget and mid range is poor cameras. The 2a is trying to change that but e what's needed is Samsung s series level photography but at budget and mid market prices.

People really want that but keep being disappointed. Only Samsung A34/A55 kind of gives a decent experience but better is needed.

I feel like Sony could do well there if it manages to get S series/iPhone quality photos on those prices.

Definitely agree with OP. 4K is completely unnecessary on a display this size but moving to one of these weird in-between aspect ratios is a clear downgrade. 16:9 or 21:9 is where it's at as most video content is displayed in either of those, 21:9 has the added benefit of making larger phones easier to hold and use one-handed.

Let's be honest here, 4k never made any sense on a smartphone. It was just a way to sell it to people who had no idea. It actually might be straight up worse than 1440p because it draws more power.

With that, I always wanted one of those 5 phones but they are just a bit too pricy for what you get. Getting an s23 ultra was cheaper than the 5iv at the time (that's for 256 GB on the Samsung and 128 on the Sony btw).

The 5iv also had the snapdragon 8gen1 which was plagued by overheating and bad battery life according to reviews. I like the Sony phones in theory but they have to take a more critical look at their position in the market.

It doesn't help that their hardware releases take so long all the other companies move on to next year's SOCs by the time they release. Not sure when the 1vi will release so at the moment the 1v is still on the 8gen2 for example. You might say it doesn't really matter at this point, these are all great chips, but when you're paying a premium over other flagships it feels bad to get last years outdated hardware.

I dunno, these extreme tall phones are a pain to type on. Keyboard usability seems to be defined by the squareness of the phone.

Are they really going to drop the resolution and the aspect ratio, the features that differentiate them? Will they drop the headphone jack and the card slot next, along with adding a notch? All of this while charging a premium price? Are they still not going to match the software support time of the competitors?