Thanks to the design chops of Jonathan Ive in particular, Apple is almost universally seen as the king of the design throne.

Well, Sony would have none of that. And with their new ad for the Sony Xperia Z, Sony is out to convince you that they are the rightful masters of design engineering.

According to Sony, the Xperia Z is purposefully designed to blend into the background so that your attention goes to your media rather than to your phone. That’s a nice way of putting it.

That got me thinking about the difference between the approaches of Apple and Sony to design. And so far here’s what I got.

Apple is all about Zen: the serenity that comes from a simple, elegant yet beautiful design. It is minimalism that simplifies the experience of having to deal with a high technology product. The fewer buttons, the better. The less going on, the better.

Sony, on the other hand, would rather have a conversation that is all about industrial design in general. About how reachable the power button is. Or how well it fits the human hand. Perhaps because Sony is basically beholden to Android for its phones, so there is this subtext that “we can’t do anything much about the software experience anyway, so we’ll stick to the hardware engineering.”

There’s a bit of an irony here, in that the Japanese company couldn’t talk about Zen as much as the American one can. And with this, it looks as if we are looking at two different design philosophies at work.

Now if you’re interested in the Xperia Z’s specs, here they are thus far:

• 5-inch 1080×1920 HD display with 441 pixels per inch, beating Apple’s Retina display density of 326 pixels, and with Sony’s Mobile BRAVIA Engine 2 processing
• Quad-core 1.5GHz processor
• LTE capability
• 13.1 megapixel camera with 1080p 30fps video recording
• Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean operating system
• Shockproof, dustproof, waterproof (!)

Can’t get enough of the Xperia Z? Here’s another video:

Art

Art is a long-time editor for a number of technology publications. He is a Palanca-winning writer whose day job is to try to be as serious as possible while being a management consultant and lecturer. His favorite noodles: chapchae.

email: art@technoodling.netwebsite: http://www.technoodling.net