Sony’s Vice President of Western Europe, Pierre Perron and VP of Global Communications, Tim Harrison, have busted some of the rumors about the company’s smartphone division.

Firstly, Harrison revealed that the company will be announcing the Xperia Z4 soon, but that it has not shifted to a 12 month product cycle that previous reports indicated. Instead the company is only making some adjustment to the way it phases its products.

On the same matter, Pierre Perron said that the company is now focusing on launching products and services that bring more value to Sony’s brand, instead of just releasing smartphones for the sake of launching them.

“The innovation is not so much about launching and announcing a flagship with more and more megapixels and so on, it’s about how can you make consumers’ lives more innovative and more relevant as we go forward. This is what it’s all about. We are focusing on bringing what is unique to the brand, bringing this content element into our proposition, such as Sony (Xperia) Lounge. This is what you need to understand. We will continue to launch beautiful hardware but it’s not the only thing anymore.”

Both executives also said that Sony’s current crop of Xperia Z3 devices are doing extremely well in the market.

“At IFA we announced three Z3 series products, the full sized smartphone, the Compact and the Compact Tablet. These are doing really well in the market and there is still quite a considerable amount of interest in those particular products and since we’ve announced them, we’ve updated a number of features. We’ve introduced Remote Play, there are more camera themes and there are more camera apps,” said Tim Harrison, Sony Mobile’s Vice President for Global Communications & PR.

There have been a lot of reports and rumors about Sony considering selling its smartphone division and switching to an yearly release cycle for its flagship devices to elongate their lifespan and to reduce their expenses. However, it is nice to see the company shooting down these rumors and taking a step in the right direction to only launch high-end flagships when they offer compelling new features.