14 DAY TRIAL // This story is as funny as it is sad. Sony customers are now blasting the company for not shipping feature updates, improvements, and refinements to its most recent flagship, the Xperia XZ Premium, forcing them to live with bugs and issues that weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.
After reviewing the Xperia XZ Premium a couple of weeks ago, and also publishing an in-depth camera review with Sony’s flagship phone, we emphasized the device has a lot of potential, but only if the phone maker ships feature updates and addresses the bugs we’ve come across.
The camera, for instance, often fails to focus and applies filters that aren’t necessarily needed, substantially impacting the performance and altering photo quality in a dramatic way.
Barbecue for the win
And this is the kind of bugs that Sony customers are complaining about in a letter to the company developers posted on the forums, explaining that all the other devices, including Samsung’s and OnePlus’, receive fixes on a regular basis.
“I have the device since 7 weeks and all we have is two security patch... really?” the original poster explains. “I don't think the R&D at SONY is on vacation mode but it's far from reality. As the last update was a few days ago, I don't see any update coming before the next month and I'm not sure that it will bring any fix whatsoever other than the security patch nobody gives a d... about...”
The next comments deserve at least as much attention as the original post. It turns out that Sony has a team of just 20 engineers working on updates for its flagship devices, and all of them are based in Sweden.
And the funny thing is that Swedish people treat summer as a long vacation, so there’s a good chance many of them are out of the office this time of the year, hence the lack of updates.
The typical long vacation in Sweden is causing major delays in several other industries, and guides posted online indicate that getting things done in the country right now is “incredibly difficult” just because of this Swedish culture.
The same thing for smartphone updates, it seems, so if you do purchase a Sony Xperia XZ Premium, expect more substantial updates at some point during the fall.