TAIPEI, Taiwan — Sony Mobile Communications on Monday begins global sales of its newest flagship smartphone Xperia Z2 in Taiwan, one of the markets in which the Japanese handset maker has outperformed most of its rivals. Sony initiates a war of next generation smartphones by rolling out the digital noise-canceling technology, while HTC's M8 is going to be unveiled later tonight.
A recent report from market research company IDC shows that Sony Mobile has a 16 percent share of Taiwan's smartphone sales in 2013, ranking it third behind South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. with 28 percent and Taiwan's HTC Corp. with 21 percent.
Taiwan's smartphone shipments totaled 7.55 million units in 2013, up 26 percent from 6 million units shipped in 2012, according to IDC statistics.
Z2, is equipped with a 5.2-inch display, a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a 20.7-megapixel camera, is the world's first smartphone to incorporate digital noise-canceling technology that can be seen as a driving force of Z2.
Z2 comes with built-in active noise cancellation technology, which reduces the ambient noise up to 98 percent when the device is paired with Sony's Digital Noise Cancelling Headset MDR-NC31EM.
Each MDR-NC31EM headset has outward-facing microphone, the two mikes pick up background noise and send it for processing to the Z2. Following, a signal processor inverts the noise's phase by creating an anti-noise wave, which gets mixed with the audio that is being played on the phone.
As a result, a great amount of portion of the background noise reaching the user's ears gets cancelled by the anti-noise wave that is carried along with the audio signal so that users can enjoy a better quality when phoning.
However, details surrounding HTC's upcoming new flagship smartphone M8 have been leaking constantly for weeks. Finally, the phone is going to be announced later tonight.
Rumor has it that M8 features a 5-inch 1080p display, a quad-core Snapdragon processor, dual rear cameras, Android 4.4 KitKat and HTC's new Sense 6 Android software, but no such an impressive technology like digital noise-canceling is introduced.
