Sony is on track to ship 35 million smartphones this year; that's 8.75 million per quarter. Last week the company's Q3 2012 financial results showed 8.8 million smartphones were sold, so it looks like everything is going to plan. But what about next year? According to sources who have spoken to DigiTimes, Sony wants to bump up their smartphone shipments to 50 million in 2013; that's 12.5 million per quarter. The report goes on to say that as many as 40% of those phones may be outsourced to companies like Foxconn, Arima, and Compal. Now this isn't anything new. Many of Sony's low end Android devices are made by Foxconn, and Arima is expected to ship their first Sony smartphones by the end of the year.

Should companies be in charge of making their own devices? Put yourself in the shoes of a company. You buy many of your components from Taiwan, right? Are you really going to want to ship those components to a foreign country just to assemble them? No, you're not. That and where exactly is one supposed to find the man power to build that many phones? China already has the infrastructure that enables companies to instantly start producing a product. It's pointless to recreate that somewhere else just so you can say that you own a factory.

Back to Sony, are they going to come out with any interesting phones next year? Rumor has it that they’re working on a 5 inch 1080p superphone, but then again so is everyone else, most notably HTC. Sony's got some awesome designs, and they've proven that they care about software updates, but nothing they do really stands out. We're really sad to say that, but that doesn't diminish our optimism for the company's future. Now that Sony is under Sony proper instead of being a joint venture with Ericsson, things can only get better.