2008 March | Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog

Archive for March, 2008

Sony Ericsson Has Announced New Head of Marketing

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Sony Ericsson today announced the new Head of Marketing. Lennard Hoornik, Corporate Vice President and Head of Asia-Pacific region, Sony Ericsson, has been appointed the new Head of Marketing, effective 1st of April.

- The time I have spent as head of our business in Asia-Pacific has been very rewarding and enjoyable. I am delighted to have been appointed the new global Head of Marketing for Sony Ericsson where I can use my regional business experience to strengthen our marketing efforts and position worldwide. I will be relocating back to Europe and based in London, said Lennard Hoornik in a press release.

Lennard has been responsible for Sony Ericsson’s business in the Asia-Pacific region since January 2006. Before this, he was in charge of the Sony Ericsson global customer unit for Vodafon. Lennard initially joined Sony Ericsson as Vice President of Marketing and a that time, he was responsible for launching the growing Sony Ericsson brand in the Africa, Europe & Middle East. Lennard joined Sony Ericsson from Sony Corporation where he was in charge of marketing and sales.

Posted in corporative | 2 Comments »

CTIA: Expect XPERIA Information

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Numerous unannounced devices have been rumoured to be announced today. However, today will apparently not be a day of announcements (unless Sony Ericsson pulls “a T68″ like back in the Ericsson days?). It will only be about some further details on the XPERIA X1 Windows Mobile based smart phone. Will Sony Ericsson finally admit that it uses Windows Mobile 6.1 and thereby let people try it out? Only time can tell…

Update! This will be about Windows Mobile 6.1 in X1.

Posted in announcement, rumour, windows-mobile, x-series | 4 Comments »

Maintenance upgrade

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

We’ll be doing a database upgrade of Wordpress now, so the blog might be a bit on/off during the upgrade. We expect to be back fully functional within 30 minutes.

After that, we should have an in-depth going review of the low-end W380 ready!

Update! We’re back, now on Wordpress 2.5!

Posted in useb | 4 Comments »

A Few Thoughts On UIQ 3.3

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

UIQ Technolology announced UIQ 3.3 a few days ago and so far no manufacturer has announced any phones with this platform. However, this does not mean that there won’t be Sony Ericsson-branded smart phones running UIQ 3.3 – there will! I had it confirmed earlier today that both manufacturers (Motorola and Sony Ericsson) will be announcing products making use of UIQ 3.3. I’m guessing this will happen within a month’s time.

BeiBei is one of the unannounced smart phones from Sony Ericsson that is most likely to use UIQ 3.3. Lots of signs point to this as being the platform used.

G700 and G900’s operating system and platform (UIQ 3.0) includes parts that are very much like BeiBei’s platform, so it is not unthinkable that a future firmware update could bring the UIQ 3.3 platform to these two phones (maybe also P1 and W960?).

I tested out a beta version of UIQ 3.3 yesterday and it generally seemed pretty stable with a few exceptions. Opera Mobile 9.5 crashed time after time and Bluetooth as well as WLAN wouldn’t work (hardware problem?). Other than that I am really liking the UIQ dashboard and HTML widgets. It’s a fun feature that’ll work great!

That’s it for now. Will report back when I hear something new

Posted in exclusive, rants, rumour, uiq, upcoming | 12 Comments »

UIQ 3.3 Announced – When Will The Phones Come?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

UIQ Technology today announced its latest version of the Symbian based smart phone user interface. Latest version is called UIQ 3.3 and I am certain this will be the last in the series of UIQ 3.x platforms.

UIQ 3.3 is the first UIQ platform based on Symbian OS 9.3 and it includes major enhancements in line with market requirements and is optimized for extensive user interface customization. Other new features include;

Opera Mobile 9.5 web browser – fast rendering, pan & zoom features, widgets & full web experience
UIQ dashboard – mobile widgets and a dashboard accessible system wide by pressing the widget button (this will be great!)
Native HSDPA support – for fast mobile internet

I’m looking forward to seeing this version of UIQ on phones. When will they be announced?
PS. Sorry about the late post. My new PC with Vista is of course acting up, and froze multiple times while writing this earlier today.

Posted in uiq | 22 Comments »

Latest Previews & Reviews

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Eldar Murtazin at Mobile-review has posted an article about upcoming phones where he talks about G700 and Z770. You can find the cool article that includes some hints, right here.

GSMArena has posted a cool review of the soon coming W760 Walkman phone with built-in GPS. You can read the large review here.

Lastly, PhoneArena has had a hands-on with the upcoming Sony Ericsson C702 and C902. You can read the hands-on article here. PhoneArena has told us that they expect to publish previews in a matter of days.

Posted in c-series, g-series, preview, review, w-series, walkman | 4 Comments »

Game, Set & Splash! Williams & Nadal Treads The Waters

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

As a world’s first, Sony Ericsson celebrated the opening of the tennis tournament Sony Ericsson Open (starting today!) by hosting a tennis match on water!

Two of the best tennis players in the world, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, tried their luck on this challenging court yesterday. The game took place at the top of the Gansevoort South Hotel in the 110 feet swimming pool near Miami’s South Beach.

This special and cool looking court took 7 days to build and consists of two invisible platforms. This is not really a Sony Ericsson related news (well it is, but not that much), but I simply had to post it because of the cool court!

Posted in entertainment, news | 2 Comments »

Dee Dutta Leaves Sony Ericsson At End Of March

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Dee Dutta is the current Head of Marketing at Sony Ericsson and has been in this position since 2003. He has done a brilliant job with Sony Ericsson’s marketing and is also a great part of Sony Ericsson’s tennis sponsorship. He’s a really nice guy, so I’m of course a bit sad to say that he’s now leaving his position at Sony Ericsson in just a matter of days.

- Dee has made an outstanding contribution to the growth of the Sony Ericsson brand and our sponsorship in tennis. We would like to wish him the very best for the future, comments Dick Komiyama, CEO at Sony Ericsson, on Dee’s departure with Sony Ericsson.

Although Dee is leaving, it seems he has been very satisfied working at Sony Ericsson for the last 5-6 years.

This has been a wonderful journey of both personal and professional growth for me. I am very proud of the achievements that my team and I have made in growing the brand and look forward to the next challenge in my career, said Dee Dutta.

Sony Ericsson will announce Dee’s replacement in due course.

Posted in corporative, news | 6 Comments »

Gallery: Sony Ericsson K660

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Along with the W380, I also received a K660 HSDPA-enabled phone targeted at the youth. Here goes a gallery of this phone as well. I am not yet sure when you’ll see a review of it, but I’ll try to do it within a reasonable time frame! So far I’m not really that impressed…