Sony adds HDMI to last year’s Android phone, charges $2,500

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  The Sony Xperia Pro. Why is this $2,500? [credit: Sony ]

We’ve seen smartphones with stratospheric price tags before, but usually, something is special about them. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X are anywhere from $2,000-$2,600, but those were first-gen foldable smartphones with brand-new display technology. Sony’s latest entry into the smartphone market, the Sony Xperia Pro, is a boring old slab phone that seems utterly forgettable until you look at the price: an astounding $2,500, or the price of three brand-new, $800 Samsung Galaxy S21s. Sony has really outdone itself.

Mostly the Xperia Pro seems a lot like the Xperia 1 II, Sony’s already-overpriced $1,300 flagship smartphone from 2020. Both have 6.5-inch, almost-4K, 3840×1644, 60Hz OLED displays, the Snapdragon 865 SoC, three rear cameras, an IP65 rating, and a 4000mAh battery. This year’s Xperia Pro gets a tier bump to 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but that’s only usually worth $100 extra. There’s also mmWave 5G this year, two “app shortcut” buttons on the side, and a shutter button. Fancy.

None of that explains why this phone is at least $1,000 more than it should be. Sony’s justification for the outrageous price is (drumroll please) an HDMI port. Yes, in addition to the USB-C port on the bottom, there is also a Micro HDMI port that can be used as a video input. Sony suggests either hooking the phone up to a Sony Alpha camera and using it as a live video monitor or pushing an external video source out to the internet for live streaming. Just this one feature and the camera-adjacentness is worth $1,000 extra by Sony’s logic.