For many years, Sony Mobile offered its European customers an online storefront from which it directly sold its Xperia smartphones and accessories. The Sony Mobile eShop/eStore enabled users to pick up the latest Xperia hardware across a number of regions across Europe including UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Czech Republic and Poland.
The Sony Mobile Shop often had some enticing promotions for newly released hardware, particularly for flagships. It was also an alternative to the usual retailers that one might use, like Amazon, and one place where you would always find stock of recent Xperia hardware, something that may have been increasingly difficult in recent years as interest for Xperia products has dwindled.
The transition from Sony Mobile to the Sony parent group over the last 12-18 months has seen a number of changes, and it looks like the Sony Mobile Store is another casualty. All of the links to the eShop for the UK and other regions have been dead for a number of weeks. We were hoping that some of the Store functionality might have been built into the existing Sony.co.uk/Sony.de and other European regional domains, but this has not happened.
Sony instead now provides third-party retailer links on each of its Xperia product pages – none of these includes a direct sale option from Sony. It’s sad to see one less option in terms of distribution for Xperia hardware in Europe, particularly so, when the option to buy directly from Sony online has been removed.
If you are an Xperia fan based in Europe, did you ever use the Sony Mobile Store? If so, what were your experiences? Are you sad to see it go? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks Billbond4!
