Hasta La Gadget!

Japanese technology giant Sony has gone on record to confirm that they will be launching new soundbars later this year. It will be a premium range that is going to be significantly better than Sony’s current soundbars which are already available in the market. Unfortunately they haven’t said much about these upcoming products, they’ve not gone in to details or specifics. However Sony executives have confirmed that the upcoming premium range of soundbars will have HDMI output and Near Field Communication or NFC compatibility.

It is expected that Sony will announce this new range at the IFA trade show in Berlin. This assumption is based on the company’s previous launch widows, though it has not confirmed whether IFA trade show was what it meant when it said that the soundbars will be available later this year. Soundbars with NFC capability will be high on usability. Users with NFC capable devices such as Xperia Tablet Z or the Xperia Z smartphone would simply have to tap their device to the soundbar and music would start playing. Sony also confirmed that more AV receivers will be released later in the year, but they’ve not gone in to specifics once again.

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Sony has decided to release a sequel to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for Xperia S it began in August of 2012, and took over from Google in November of last year. This time, the Xperia Z is getting its own project, which means that the company’s water resistant flagship phone will get to participate in the kind of Android development work more often reserved for Google-blessed Nexus devices.

Sony’s Xperia S AOSP experiment was well-received, though it was eventually moved away from the AOSP main branch to Sony’s own GitHub, owing to the limitations of what could be done with the hardware. Sony software engineers Johan Redestig and Björn Andersson want to help continue that work with Sony’s latest. The Xperia Z project will help developers and tinkerers interested in making contributions to Android, and to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro platform do so using essentially a vanilla Android OS installation on the device, albeit starting out on Sony’s own GitHub, and not as part of Google’s own main AOSP project.

Before you go thinking that this is a way to turn your every day Xperia Z into a stock Android Nexus device, however, note that use of the AOSP comes with a few big caveats: It can read the SD card, use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, the LED notification light and sensors, but the modem and camera are dependent upon proprietary binaries that Sony can’t release to the public. And still other binaries have been released by Qualcomm and Xperia Z, and are provided by Sony’s developer partners, but can’t technically be part of the AOSP efforts because they aren’t open source code. Sony plans to try to replace at least some of those binaries with source code as the project progresses, however.

While this isn’t quite as exciting as when Google added the Xperia S as a hardware target to its own AOSP main branch, it’s still good news for developers and the development community, and should help broadly with contributions to Android and its evolution as well.

You can more or less observe that different hardware manufacturers have varying levels of “friendliness” when it comes to implementing third party code, and Sony is one such company who seem to be friendlier than normal, as Sony has also backed AOSP (Android Open Source Projects in full) efforts even when they were the ones who had to shoulder majority of the responsibilities.

Hence, it does not come across as a surprise to us to hear that the Sony Xperia Z as well as Xperia ZL are the more recently introduced smartphones from the company to be on the receiving end of nightly CyanogenMod 10.1 builds. Of course, it goes without saying that nightly builds of custom OS code tend to be risky since you can never quite tell whether Murphy is going to strike or not, but for folks who lack the patience for Sony to officially roll out a safe Android 4.2 Jelly Bean release, this is an alternative for you to fall back upon. Check out our Sony Xperia Z review here.

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While wireless charging on smartphones still isn’t as “free” as we’d like it to be, we guess the lack of cables does help a bit in terms of keeping desks clutter-free. In any case if you own the Sony Xperia Z and you were looking for a little wireless charging action, Ipan Ipan has announced a wireless charging case for the Sony Xperia Z that will play nice with Qi wireless charging platforms. The best part is that this case will also double as a protective case for your Xperia Z, so not only do you get wireless charging action, but you get a measure of protection as well. As you can see in the image above, it is a flip cover case and the wireless charging module will be hidden in the back. According to the company, it seems that designing a wireless charging case for the Xperia Z was not easy.

Since the back part of the phone is non-removable and made from glass, they could not employ the same techniques used by other manufacturers, such as simply replacing the battery cover door with one with a wireless charging module installed. Instead the company had to go with the 2-pin connector which is normally used by the Xperia Z’s docking station. If the Ipan Ipan wireless charging case for the Sony Xperia Z sounds like something you might be interested it, it is retailing for 39 EUR for the case alone, or 89 EUR for the case and the charging pad. Head on over to Ipan Ipan’s website for the details.

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