Sony has scheduled a livestream for August 25 at 11:00 a.m. JST — 10:00 p.m. ET on August 24 for U.S. viewers — to announce a new Xperia device. The company hasn’t named the product, but the timing and prior leaks point strongly toward the Xperia 10 VIII.
Sony’s mid-range Xperia 10 line has kept a fairly predictable annual cadence, and this event lands close to where past 10-series launches have fallen. An FCC filing surfaced last month showing a device matching the expected specs, which is typically one of the more reliable pre-launch signals since it comes from a regulatory filing rather than a leaker’s source.
Based on that filing, the incoming phone is expected to keep a 3.5mm headphone jack — increasingly rare even in mid-range phones — along with support for four LTE bands, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi 6. None of that is flagship-tier hardware, but it fits the Xperia 10 line’s positioning as a budget-conscious phone for a shrinking pool of buyers who still care about a wired headphone jack and Sony’s camera software heritage over raw benchmark numbers.
What’s absent from the leaks so far is any detail on pricing, chipset, or camera hardware specifics — the FCC filing covers regulatory-required radio and connectivity details, not the full spec sheet. That leaves genuine uncertainty about how the device positions against competitors like Google’s A-series Pixels or Samsung’s Galaxy A line, both of which have pushed harder on camera and AI features at similar price points in recent cycles.The stream goes live in roughly a day, at which point the “expected” framing gets replaced by confirmed specs, pricing, and availability. Given Sony’s shrinking share of the global smartphone market, the more interesting question may not be the phone itself but whether Sony still sees enough return in mid-range Xperia devices to keep the line going much longer.
