There's a new Sony Xperia phone in Japan, the Xperia 8 Lite - but many have noticed it's almost exactly the same as the Xperia 10 from 2019, just with one important change.
You can find the Xperia 8 Lite listed on Sony Japan's website, and if you take a look through the specs list, you can see it all looks very similar to the Xperia 10.
That phone is still on sale in many regions, but it has been superseded in Sony's lineup by the Xperia 10 II that launched earlier in 2020.
- The Sony Xperia 5 II may be coming soon
- Check out our Sony Xperia 10 II review
- These are the best Sony Xperia phones
Both phones have a 6-inch Full HD+ LCD display, with a 2,870mAh battery, 3.5mm headphone jack and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor. These specs were indicative of a cheaper phone in early 2019, and they look pretty outdated now, especially regarding the aging chipset and small battery size.
The key difference in the Sony Xperia 8 Lite compared to the Xperia 10 is the cameras. While the older phone had 13MP main and 5MP depth-sensing snappers, the newer phone has a 12MP and 8MP combo.
It's likely these are using newer sensors that weren't available when the Xperia 10 was out, otherwise the company likely wouldn't have replaced the main snapper for one with a lower resolution.
Understanding the Sony Xperia 8 Lite
There's no word on Sony Xperia 8 Lite release outside of Japan, but we're not holding our breath as the Sony Xperia 8 launched in late 2019 and never left the country. TechRadar has asked Sony for clarification.
Maybe it's for the best - Sony's phone naming conventions can be quite a bit to get your head around, and having the same phone in its naming spectrum twice, under different names, makes that even more convoluted.
In Sony's pantheon, lower numbers are better, so the Sony Xperia 1 was a more premium phone than the Xperia 10, and newer versions of those phones are denoted with 'mark' in the name, so the Xperia 1 Mark II is an upgraded version of the Xperia 1.
Between 1 and 10, the numbers are meant to indicate how high or low a phone's specs are, so the Xperia 5 is in the middle and Xperia 8 is in between that and the Xperia 10. But with this new move, Sony is putting out a low-end version of its high-low-end phone, instead of just an all-out low-end phone, and... can you see the confusion here?
Perhaps the company would have done better to simply re-release the Xperia 10, but then again Sony has never been fond of normal names for its phones, so we shouldn't be so surprised.
Via GSMArena
