Sony halts Xperia 1 VII sales in response to phone-killing bug

For a major electronics company, there’s probably no brand whose smartphones are more of niche product than Sony’s. While we’ve had Xperia phones going back to the early days of Android, Xperia handsets have never really taken off in the US. But even as competitors like LG and HTC dropped out, Sony kept right on at it — we were really impressed with last year’s Xperia 1 VI, and the new Xperia 1 VII sounded even better. Or, at least, it did, up until right about now.

On a Japanese support page, Sony announces that it has suspended shipments of the Xperia 1 VII, and paused sales in its own stores (via Reddit user Hashabasha). According to a machine translation, the company is doing so in response to problems with the phone “occasionally experiences issues such as the device shutting down, rebooting, or not turning on during use.”

The manufacturer identifies a few specific Japanese carrier editions of the phone as being impacted. So far, we haven’t seen any direct reports of this issue affecting the Xperia 1 VII outside of Japan, and a report from Kunkoku suggests that the software bug at the heart of this problem could be specifically tied to a feature only available in the nation.

That said, last month GSM Arena shared that pre-orders of the phone were being canceled across European markets, and right now we observe that Sony UK lists the Xperia 1 VII as out of stock.

Sony advises that, if possible, affected users hard reset their phones and attempt a software update. That sounds to our ears like a fix may already be available, and this shipment pause may represent Sony trying to prevent handsets currently out there from being rendered inoperable before users have a chance to install it.

At least, we’re hoping this is just a temporary software issue. Back at the end of May we heard that Sony might be outsourcing hardware manufacturing to third parties, and this practice could start with the Xperia 1 VII.