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!
‘Paris’ is the codename of the speculated high-end phone P5.
Sliding keyboard and different home screens you can navigate between by pressing left and right. Also, we’ve got a sliding mechanism on the back of the phone as a lens protector for the camera. “5 MP” is also stated on the back near the camera. It comes with a stylus even though the user interface can easily be used with your finger as well. It’s black and a bit smaller than P1. It has a built-in GPS (NaviLink 5.0 NL5350) with WayFinder 7.0 built-in as well as a weather application and the new Opera Mobile 9 with intelligent zoom and widgets. Based on OMAP34xx hardware platform.
Paris is going to be announced along with Beibei, if everything goes as planned, which it should.