The upcoming Sony Xperia event on October 26 and if you were expecting they were announcing new devices, you might be disappointed. It looks like the major announcement is specifically for the Chinese market as they have inked a partnership with another Chinese brand Meizu for “strategic cooperation”. Basically, they want to make Xperia phones more appealing to the local market and partnering with a brand that boasts more than 100 million users in the country is one way to do it.
According to GSM Arena, the possible announcement on the Xperia event happening next week may very well be about this partnership. Sony will soon be pre-installing some Meizu apps on their Xperia 1 III as well as “subsequent new products”. If you own the current 1 Mark III, you will be able to download the Meizu apps after installing the firmware update. You will be able to download an app store, email, weather, news, and other apps.
Since there’s no Google Play available in China, having an appstore and access to various Meizu apps will be a boon for Xperia owners in the country. Aside from apps, Sony is also looking at bringing some of the features from Flyme, Meizu’s Android customization. They did not specify yet which features they are working on but since Meizu is a growing brand in the local market, it’s probably something that will appear to Chinese users as well.
Non-Chinese brands normally have a hard time clicking with the Chinese market. But everyone wants to become big here of course since it’s one of the biggest tech markets in the world and brands like Samsung and Sony want to get even just a small part of a pie that is dominated by local brands like Huawei, Vivo, Oppo. We’ll eventually see if Sony’s decision to partner with Meizu, not a major player currently, will benefit them in the long run.
While the announcement of the Sony and Meizu partnership is official, we still don’t know if that’s all that the Xperia event will bring. We’ll find out in a week but for now, this is the major news coming out of Sony.
