Sprint to start offering Sony Xperia smartphones
After Sprint’s $22 billion acquisition and a failed T Mobile merger, SoftBank corp is scrambling to come up with ways to turn Sprint profitable.
The first of these ways was unveiled a couple of weeks ago, the $60 a month unlimited data plan, which to this day Sprint won’t give me an answer as to how much the add-on “print surcharges and “administration fees” they list are, along with some conflicting info on what exactly is $60 about it. If anyone has a first month’s bill, drop a line with whether a phone purchase was required or what the deal is.
The next step appears to be adding the less expensive Sony Xperia line of smartphones to their roster. Sony’s been having a bad year with sales coming in about 14% below expectations, so this is probably great news for them.
There’s no reports on whether they plan any changes to their HTC and Apple offerings, but you can bet they’ll be getting less display space and possibly less in carrier subsidies.
The Xperia line from what I can locate appear to ship with locked bootloaders with no carrier unlock mechanism, so rooting appears a tad frowned upon in the Sonyverse. Not being an Xperia rooter, I may be completely off base on these as there are root tools and years worth of exploits.
Reuters reports that SoftBank plans to sell Sony phones on August 29, 2014, which will be the first time the Xperia line of smartphones has been available on a national carrier other than #4 ranked T Mobile.
[Bloomberg]
