Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

In the updated market, you will now be able to rent movies and buy books, and the interface is overhauled to something similar to Windows Phone 7 panels.

New market will be available only to devices in U.S. , that have Android 2.2 and above, of course other countries will be supported soon after.

Lets start with some bad news.It has been reported by unofficial Sony Ericsson news sites that the Xperia Pro has been delayed. The first I heard about this was on Wednesday the 6th of July, when I popped into the Carphone Warehouse, ironically to find out if Xperia Pro was getting a release date of July, rather than June that they had up on their website since towards the end of June.

I have been trying to find out the cause of the delay, but with very little information to go by, I didnt want to post anything about it.

What I managed to find out was that Sony Ericsson are supposedly working on Android 2.3.4 for the likes of Xperia Play, Xperia Arc, Xperia Neo and Xperia Pro. There is no information about this update coming to the X10, and of course we can safely assume this update will not reach X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro and X8. The planned release date is October 2011 (in reality, lets say November 2011).

So, is this the reason why the Xperia Pro is delayed? In a word, no. What makes me say that?

Well, Ive recently contacted somewhere that I do not wish to name regarding their sale of Xperia Pros, but the reply I had also suggested that Sony Ericsson hadnt even talked to them after I had talked to Carphone Warehouse on the 8th July:

Please be advised we are expecting these handsets to arrive at the end of this month however we have not had a specific release date so it could be extended.

There hasnt been an official announcement saying why Xperia Pro has been delayed (or if there has, then noone has quoted it). What I do have though is a comment left on the Sony Ericsson Product Blog, sort of explaining why the Xperia Pro has been delayed:

Daniel Sandblom says:
July 8, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Fully understand the eagerness for Xperia pro. Since I send a lot of emails from my phone it’s one of my favorites too. However, as we have communicated earlier, following the earthquake in Japan, we have shifted the timing of the global introduction of Xperia pro to early Q4 2011 in order to meet continued demand for Xperia arc, Xperia PLAY, Xperia neo, which have already been introduced in multiple markets.
Source

That was posted before I had my reply back from my unnamed source.

All fine and dandy I suppose, until you go back to the MWC announcements, and then go forward a couple of months; Xperia Arc, Play and Neo was all due to come out at roughly the same time: March 2011. Xperia Pro was originally going to come in Q2, according to the Pro announcement.

Arc and Play made it (just). Neo got delayed until about June, but in fact saw its in shops release only on 6 July 2011, but did go on sale online a few days earlier making it a Q2 release. Assuming that without the Japan earthquakes, Pro would now be about to be released by now absolute latest, in fact the last we heard was that the Pro was coming out in July. So why then have we got to wait a full quarter (ie October) for the release of Xperia Pro?

Sony Ericsson claimed that they have “learnt their mistakes” from the X10. By delaying Xperia Pro further than August, I would say that they havent learnt anything very much, especially when I can go and get a HTC Desire Z (thats the one with the QWERTY keyboard) now. The only thing the Xperia Pro that can make waiting for it a little less “painful” is that the Pro comes with a better processor than the Desire (Pro has 1Ghz to Desires Mhz). Clearly though, it looks like that if 2.3.4 does come out in October as well, then most “new” Xperia Pros wont be getting the updated firmware pre-installed.

Sources for delay: XperiaBlog, Carphone Warehouse and GSM Arena
Source for 2.3.4: Somobile