Sony has halted sales and shipments of the Xperia 1 VII in its native Japan.Affected phones spontaneously reset, and may refuse to turn back on.Right now we have no confirmation that there’s any problem with the Xperia 1 VII outside of Japan.For a major electronics company, there’s probably no brand whose smartphones are more of niche product than Sony’s. While we’ve had Xperia phones going back to the early days of Android, Xperia handsets have never really taken off in the US. But even as competitors like LG and HTC dropped out, Sony kept right on at it — we were really impressed with last year’s Xperia 1 VI, and the new Xperia 1 VII sounded even better. Or, at least, it did, up until right about now.On a Japanese support page, Sony announces that it has suspended shipments of the Xperia 1 VII, and paused sales in its own stores (via Reddit user Hashabasha). According to a machine translation, the company is doing so in response to problems with the phone “occasionally experiences issues such as the device shutting down, rebooting, or not turning on during use.”