If you were one of those nerds (like us) that enjoyed poring over the specifications of a newly released Xperia smartphone, through Sony’s white papers, then unfortunately those days are behind us. Sony Mobile will no longer publish white papers for its new devices.
In fact, it had already stopped. Over on Sony’s Developer World site, there is no white paper for the Xperia XZ1, Xperia XZ1 Compact and Xperia XA1 Plus to be found. Sony will not release one for these phones, nor for any future smartphone.
This is a big shame in our view, as the white papers were the only place to find certain information such as an idea on battery performance, the different variant model numbers related to each new smartphone release, as well as key network frequency support information. As things stands, there is no way to know which LTE bands are supported by each variant.
For example, if we look at the Xperia XZ1, how do we know which bands the G8341 variant supports versus the G8343 model? How would a normal person even know these model numbers in the first place? They aren’t published anywhere, not even in Sony’s product pages, which has a page of ‘full specifications’, but gives far less information than we used to see detailed in Sony’s white papers.
A very disappointing move by Sony. We just hope that Sony continues to share some of this detailed missing information on each smartphone elsewhere, or bulking up its existing spec sheets on their product pages.