Linda has been a known codename for quite some time now, but until now we really haven’t had any phones to match with the codename. Now, a bunch of photos of the upcoming W595 - W580 successor - leaked on Journaldugeek.
The Sony Ericsson G700 is Sony Ericsson’s cheapest smart phone to date, and probably also the last Sony Ericsson phone to be making use of the UIQ user interface. It’s not necessarily marketed as being a smart phone, but rather being a smart feature phone.
Sony Ericsson recently selected Swedish mobile games developer and publisher GlobalFun as one of its two official content acquisition partner for the upcoming PlayNow Arena and Fun & Downloads services.
The T610 was one of Sony Ericsson’s first smash hits, and many will argue that this single phone model marked a turning point for the company. Five years after its release, it looks like Sony Ericsson is about ready with a remake of this ever-popular handset.
The G900 and its sibling, G700, represent a new kind of Sony Ericsson smart phone products, that don’t look or feel like a smart phone, yet perform and deliver as one would expect a smart phone to do. These G’s are targeted at the normal everyday consumer, who wants a little extra something from his phone, while still keeping the price low.
As a part of the KKDI au Spring 2008 collection, two new Japanese Sony Ericsson phones have been announced. One is the W61s Cyber-shot phone and the other being the W62s, a phone that supports both GSM and CDMA EVDO, so basically it should work all over the world.
W61s is a 5.11 mega pixel Cyber-shot slider phone featuring the ‘Exmor’ CMOS matrix used by Sony in their line of Alpha D-SLR cameras. This baby also features Sony’s ‘Smile Shutter’ technology for detecting smiles. The phone has a remarkable 800 x 480 pixel display (WVGA) at 2.8 inches - now, that’s the way to roll! It’ll come in three colour variats; Spectrum Pink, Shadow Black and Prism White.
W62s is a more simple clamshell phone with a less extravagant 2 mega pixel camera and a display with the “mere” resolution of 432 x 240 (WQVGA) pixels, and a 128 x 36 pixel external display. However, this phone supports both GSM networks as well as CDMA EVDO. The design looks quite stunning to me, and also this one will come in three colour variants; Black / Rose, Silver / Leather and White / Lime.
Digitimes.com reports that Sony Ericsson outsources the production of their newest entry level handsets to Taiwan manufacturers.
Arima Communications will produce T270, T280 & R300, while Chi Mei Communication Systems is going to deliver the R306, their sources state.
Additional info given by digitimes:
Including the T270, 280, R300 and R306, Sony Ericsson is expected to launch a total of 5-6 entry-level handsets targeting emerging markets in 2008 with the company likely to outsource 1-2 more models to Arima and an additional model to CMCS during the year, the sources indicated.
Sony Ericsson purchased about 8.5 million handsets from Taiwan-based OEMs in 2007, according to an estimate of market sources.
We have already told you about Sony Ericsson’s newly announced PlayNow offerings and additions, and now we bring you a very cool video showing how the new features work. It’s definitely one of the coolest commercials from Sony Ericsson - at least that’s what I think
Today I received a Sony Ericsson P1 review model from UIQ Technology. Here is the unboxing of the beauty. Some accessories are missing (Bluetooth GPS, docking station), I know, but it’ll give you a pretty good idea of the handset either way. More photos after the jump
Sony Ericsson today silently announced the W580im - the i-mode version of the slim W580 Walkman phone, that has been extremely popular in many European countries. The new W580im won’t bring much news apart from the usual i-mode features, that includes an i-mode web browser, iMMS and iMail. Furthermore, the phone supports DoJa, which is a platform for running applications and games.
The W580im was announced in a Style White colour edition - it is yet uncertain whether more colour editions are to be released.
The glamorous South of France was the setting of Sony Ericsson’s unveiling of a deal with ten major record labels, which will add more than 5 million tracks to its catalog. The announcement was made at the MIDEM conference and it also saw Sony Ericsson launch PlayNow Uncut (formerly M-Buzz), which is a place for unsigned up and coming artists to be promoted.
The partnership with the record labels takes in major global players as well as regional labels: Sony BMG, Warner, EMI, The Orchard, IODA, The PocketGroup, Hungama, X5 Music, Bonnier Amigo and VidZone. The deal adds over 5 million tracks to Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena. More deals with other regional labels are expected, which will further expand the range of music available from PlayNow Arena as well as allowing Sony Ericsson to better reflect local tastes.
Commenting on the PlayNow Arena service Sony Ericsson Executive Vice President Anders Runevad:
- We are delighted to announce deals with such high calibre record labels. This will help realise our vision for PlayNow™ arena as a service that will be developed in collaboration with our partners. Our commitment is to work with the industry to ensure we are building an experience-based and intuitive content delivery platform, enabling the development of an ecosystem that provides a unique experience for the consumer and a business model where everybody prospers.
The Play Now service also saw the addition of 250 new games and Sony Ericsson claim that their customers download more games to their handsets than users of other devices.
Initially PlayNow Arena will be available in Scandinavia and Finland in May this year whilst further European markets being added at the end of Q2. There will be further markets added throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe going into Q3 and Q4 with SOny Ericsson predicting that the service will be active in around thirty markets by the end of the year.
Sony Ericsson has just won the “2007 Most Popular Game Equipment” award at the 2007 China Game Industry Annual Conference (CGIAC) held in Suzhou, China, on the 15th - 17th of January. The Chinese Developer Team was present and to accept the honorable reward was Liu Peng, Manager of Sony Ericsson Developer World China.
- I am very honored to take the award on behalf of Sony Ericsson. We really appreciate the great support from our partners and end-users. Sony Ericsson Developer World will continue to assist and support China’s wireless developers so they can offer more quality mobile phone games in the future, Liu Peng said.
The Chinese Developer World has only launched in May 2007, and has already won this large award - quite impressive, I think!