First of all, Carphone Warehouse put a page up for the Xperia Ray and said that it's expecting the phone to be released in August. Then online retailer Play.com put the Xperia Ray up for pre-order, and estimated that it would start shipping it on August 15. And, for a while, that was that. We were expecting the Ray to be out in the UK around the middle of August, if not exactly on August 15.
Yet today things have changed a bit. The Carphone Warehouse page that previously announced an August release for the Xperia Ray has changed and now estimates that the phone will only hit the streets sometime in September. Strangely though, Play.com still lists August 15 as the release date for the Android-powered device.
So what's going on? It's tough to tell. The best case scenario for those eagerly expecting to be able to buy the Xperia Ray is that Carphone Warehouse will simply get its first stock of devices later than other retailers such as Play.com. It may have initially expected that stock to come in August, but for some reason it's since been delayed by about a month (for all we know, ‘August' could have meant August 31, and ‘September' may mean September 1, in which case this isn't much of a delay after all).
The worst case scenario is that Play.com simply wasn't told about the delay yet, or hasn't acted upon the new information so far. That would, of course, mean that the Xperia Ray would be delayed throughout the UK. This wouldn't be the first delay that Sony Ericsson has faced this year in the UK, but it's unclear what the cause may be this time (when the Xperia Neo got delayed, the infamous Japanese earthquake and tsunami were to blame).
The thing is we just can't tell at the moment which of the above possibilities is what's really happening here. Things though are bound to get cleared up in the near future. After all, if Play.com also receives notice of a delay, it will change the expected release date at some point. If it doesn't, than there's still hope for would-be Ray owners that the phone will still be out next month.
Whatever happens, we'll keep you posted.
source: Unwired View
