What is wrong with Sony these days?

Gone is the company that bought us such icons as the walkman and the robotic dog. Welcome to the new Sony, a company that makes major design flaws in its products and who cripples its new products with an insane marketing strategy.

Lets take the memory stick debacle , not content with subscribing to one of the main formats in the flash media market they did something really dumb , yup you guessed it they created their own (the memory stick).

We were promised memory stick in everything, and all Sony’s cameras, Televisions, PDA’s, high end phones shipped with one form or another of memory stick. Everything was fine and dandy until ….. Users started to need access to more than 128MB of data and guess what, the technology could not scale.

So while people who opted for CF and SD devices; are still able to take advantage of media exceeding 1GB with devices purchased around the same time as an equivalent Sony product. The Sony product owners have to be content or upgrade.

There are three main products ranges which were deeply affected by this short sighted decision, and I have been burnt by all of them.

1) Clie Range of PDA’s
2) Camera range
3) The Sony Ericsson Phone range

The latest of these products, the p900 phone is unforgivable. Sold as a multimedia phone capable of playing video and music, after owning the device for 6 months I find out that it is not capable of accepting the larger format memory sticks that are on the market.

I will probably never ever buy a Sony Ericsson product again.

Next time we will talk about the Librie and its bizarre DRM, and how Sony can kill a product before it has chance to draw a breath.