Archive for August, 2008

W980 wins EISA award for best music phone

Friday, August 15th, 2008

The Sony Ericsson W980 has just been awarded with the EISA award for Best European Music Phone. EISA is an assiocation of 50 special interest magazines from a total of 19 countries – each year they select an array of EISA award winners in lots of different categories, and this year, the Sony Ericsson W980 won as the best music phone. Here’s the official EISA comment;

“Who could resist this piano-black Walkman-series phone? It’s a quad-band handset loaded with 8 GB of internal memory, a 3.2 Megapixel camera, an FM tuner, Bluetooth stereo, and a music player that operates even with the phone flip-lid closed. Opened out, the handset reveals its 2.2-inch QVGA display with 262k colors and stunning picture quality. One incredibly valuable innovation is the built-in FM radio transmitter. This broadcasts phone-based music playback to a standard car radio, even transferring artist and track details via RDS. The music player handles a wide variety of audio file formats, and automatically sorts tracks according to a range of criteria. Finally, two excellent features are the SenseMe and Shake control. These group tracks by mood, enabling track changes and entire playlist shuffling with just a simple flick of the hand.”

Although it doesn’t say much about the audio quality, the W980 is a monster when it comes to audio quality. This has been proven by German TESTfactory, and I can do nothing but agree. The audio quality really is top notch.

Congrats, SE! :)

Gallery: Sony Ericsson W980

Friday, August 15th, 2008

I received the new Sony Ericsson W980 yesterday. It’s actually a lovely phone, and I am in love with the FM transmitter – it’s such a cool feature and it works brilliantly! Anyway, here’s a gallery of the W980. I’m sorry about the immense amount of dust specks, but it was absolutely impossible to get rid of it. Enjoy!

New President brings Bravia to India

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Four days ago, Sony Ericsson appointed a new President to lead Sony Ericsson India. His name is Anil Sethi, and even though he’s only been in the chair for a few days, he’s already got major plans about bringing Sony’s high-quality TV / display brand, Bravia, to India.

- In Japan if you see we have already integrated the brand Bravia in the handset business and with the time we will do that in India too, says Sethi.

It seems like a great and long-awaited move. Hopefully it’s not just branding for the sake of it, as explained in this rant, but being that I’ve never personally tried any of the Japanese handsets with Bravia branded displays, I cannot comment on that.

Sony Ericsson’s market share in India is at about 13 percent, and compared to Nokia’s huge market share of 62.5 percent it might seem like a dead end, but Anil Sethi believes otherwise:

- We are aware of people’s need to be connected. The people is rural India will be using our AM phones so we know that there are special needs there and we know how to fulfil, he says in an interview with NDTV Profit.

In addition to this, Sony Ericsson India is also getting ready for the 3G technology to kick off in India. It is expected by Sony Ericsson that India is to contribute almost a quarter of the global mobile phone business over the next two years, so the whole 3G preparation might not seem like a bad idea.

Source: NDTV Profit

Someone needs a wakeup call…

Friday, August 8th, 2008

It would be impossible for me to do a comprehensive, technically detailed write-up of how Sony Ericsson turned the million Euro incomes to expenses, and I’m sure it’d be rather uninteresting for you as well. That’s why I’m not going to do that nor try to do it. I will, however, try to sum up what went wrong and how. As you’d expect, this rant will reflect nothing but my personal opinions and thoughts on Sony Ericsson’s past and current decisions, as well as what seems to be Sony Ericsson’s future plans. Also want you to know that I’m uncertain whether or not this piece is finished. I can’t make up my mind on whether I should add more to make it more clear, or leave it as it is, so apologies in advance if parts don’t make any sense to you.

The copy/paste-strategy

Sony Ericsson changed its product strategy a few years ago. The company saw huge advantages of making use of the same hardware and software platforms with only few minor changes. Initially, the strategy worked out very well – probably because it was still of limited use.
Sony Ericsson announced the rather amazing K750 back in very early March 2005. The K750 is one of Sony Ericsson’s most innovative phones ever, period. It was such an immense update from K700, and the camera – which was the most interesting feature about it – was built upon the camera of the S700, and greatly enhanced. I doubt it came as a surprise for K750 users when it was announced the best camera phone of the year. The K750 wasn’t one to miss, and sales surpassed all expectations. (more…)

Gallery: Sony Ericsson C905

Friday, August 8th, 2008

We’ve got a nice little treat for you today – a gallery of the Sony Ericsson C905, which is undoubtedly the best camera phone from Sony Ericsson ever, period. Enjoy the pictures :)

Sony Ericsson T700 pictures

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Sony Ericsson made it official a few hours ago, so here are some pictures of the Sony Ericsson T700. There are no high quality press pictures of the Red on Black or Shining Silver variants yet, although you can find smaller versions on SE’s website.

(more…)

Sony Ericsson T700 is the new T610

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

We were first to report about the T700 with this post when we only knew it by Remi, which is its codename. Later on the same phone was leaked in a massive photo series over at SE4M forums, and just recently again by us compared to the T610.

T700 is going to be announced tomorrow morning, and to be quite honest, there’s not that much to say about it. It’s basically a generic W890, which means they’ve put it in another suit and removed the Walkman player. All other features are the same – 3.2 megapixel fixed focus camera, 2-inch display, HSDPA network support, very thin body and light weight. The phone itself is also made of premium materials, and it looks just as stylish as the W890.

It will be launched within two months, so expect it to be out in early Q4. Its price will end up at about 270 Euro or about £200 SIM-free and without contract. It is going to be available in three colours – we’ve seen one of them. Another one is very similar to a special T610 colour variant, and the third one is all silver.

Unfortunately we cannot post any pictures of it yet, so you’ll have to wait about nine hours…

In case you’re wondering… The T700 is the only phone to be announced tomorrow. Not the G705, it seems it was leaked too early. The next announcement is planned to be in September.

Put On Your Dancing Shoes And Do The Fanwalk!

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

MTV invites all music lovers to search for their dancing shoes and participate on a trip from London to Liverpool’s European Music Awards — the so-called fanwalk. For nine days (29.10. – 06.11.2008) the 100 winners will blog, do interviews and photo shoots on fanwalk.tv.

To become one of these 100, you have to get a nickpage on the above site — that will launch on August 11th — and get as much votes for you as possible.

We assume it will be available in other languages from 11th.

Source (romanian) via useb|de.

Sony Ericsson (re)announces James Bond’s new phone

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Sony Ericsson today (re)announced(?) James Bond’s new phone – the C902. Sony Ericsson did the same thing back in 2006 with the silver K800, and they’re now doing it again with a Titanium Silver variant C902.

Apart from the new colour and the fact that it’ll be preloaded with some content from the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, there’s nothing new to this phone.

The “new” C902 will be avaiable for a limited period only. We would have left you with pictures of this new phone, but the press media library has not been updated yet, so you’ll have to do with a regular C902. These two do look a lot like each other, though.

Source: Press release

Themes Creator 3.29 – now with Flash & XML flavour

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Sony Ericsson released an update of their Themes Creator lately. Now at version 3.29 you get support for previews of FlashLite standby images.
Furthermore – and more important to most themers – there is now an XML editor included for direct editing of the theme.xml. (more…)