Sony DSC-QX10 and DSC-QX100 remind of the innovative Sony of old

I remember during the 70s and 80s Sony seemed to the company that always had the most interesting new gadgets. 

The Walkman in all of its iterations was the flagship especially the version that was barely bigger than a cassette.  The trouble with that product was that it easily got bent during use with the result that all of your music was susceptible to audible wow. 

My cousin had a credit card sized FM radio which was astoundingly portable.  The trouble with that product was that the battery life was never any good and it seemed you had to hold rock still to get a signal lock, which defeated the purpose of the portability.

Maybe the weirdest was a player for LP records that was not a turntable.  Instead the records were placed in a vertical slot that rotated the records.  I never used one of those so I do not know if it was any good.  I assume not since there were only a few about and this was well before turntables were superseded by CD players. 

Those products really established for me the image of Sony as a cutting edge adventurous manufacturer willing to use its technological might to get novel ideas into the market.  I guess Apple must have learnt from Sony's mistakes that it is not just about getting novel ideas into the market, they also have to work.  Apple, in fact, does not tend to do anything really new, it just puts existing ideas together better than anyone else.

The just leaked Sony DSC-QX10 and DSC-QX100 "lenses" remind me of that old Sony.  They are really innovative and like nothing else on the market.  It seems like a good solution to the cameraphone issue.  You want a good camera and a good phone with you but you do not want to carry two full devices that have a lot of duplicated parts.

I am looking forward to seeing whether Sony has come up with really good products or whether there will be some flaw that means they will just be a quirky side note to gadget history.