Sony suspends Xperia 1 VII sales in Japan over weird shutdown issues
Sony released the Xperia 1 VII globally last month as its main flagship model for the year. Reviews of the phone have been mostly positive since then, but the company has now—seemingly out of the blue—confirmed that it will be temporarily halting sales of the Xperia 1 VII in Japan.
Taking to the official Sony Japan website today, the company shared:
Thank you for your continued patronage of Xperia products. It has come to our attention that the smartphone "Xperia 1 VII" occasionally experiences issues such as the device shutting down, rebooting, or not turning on during use. As a result, we have temporarily halted shipments of the affected product and sales at Sony stores.
Evidently, there seem to have been multiple reports of the Xperia 1 VII randomly shutting down or restarting in Japan. This issue seems to be peculiar to Japanese models of the phone, and has been speculated to be linked to Japan's Osaifu-Keitai mobile payment system. Global versions of the Xperia 1 VII are currently unaffected, and Sony's press release lists the SO-51F, SOG15, A501SO, and XQ-FS44 variants of the flagship as the only affected devices, with all four being Japanese models.
Sony has released a software update with the build number "71.0.A.2.43" on all four of those Xperia 1 VII variants in an attempt to fix the bug. It's unclear how effective that has been, however.
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