Now that both have been cancelled after a long development period, we thought it wouldn’t hurt anybody to shed a bit of light on these phones.

Paris was going to be Sony Ericsson’s first slider in the P-series line-up. While it was partly based on old hardware, Sony Ericsson had made several software enhancements that would significantly speed up the phone. In addition to this, the Paris would have been based on UIQ 3.3. Anyway, what I wanted to show in this blog post was that Sony Ericsson realized that the business segment no longer has to be connected to boring colour schemes. It can be black and grey while still looking like a million bucks! I’ve known about the three colour variants for Paris (black/blue, silver/red, and black/orange) in about two months now, and this was one of the things that I liked about it - they’re trying to break the habit of “one colour variant” business & enterprise phones. Let’s hope they’ll keep it up in upcoming S60-based business phones.

Beibei was the mainstream UIQ 3.3-based smart phone that was never announced either. Beibei would - in my opinion - have been the better of the two. It brought along lots of innovation and new-thinking, one being the way you’d control the device with the scroll wheel. Just like Paris, Beibei would have shown up in three colour variants; black, black/blue and the white/red one. I’m hoping to get my hands on one, and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it if I succeed!

As some may already be aware both Paris and the G702, otherwise known by the codename BeiBei, have both been cancelled. Whilst this might not be news to some of you we have a new twist on the story that might be. There is the suggestion that both of these handsets were cancelled due to a large volume of criticism from reviewers and other industry watchers, including recent articles on Mobile-Review.com

The story doesn’t end there because we are hearing that whilst Paris and the G702 may have been cancelled in Europe, they might still make an appearance in Asia.

Our good friends over at Mobile Review have published a preview of the much talked about Paris. There are plenty of screenshots and M-R promises that new spy pictures will be leaked soon. An interesting tidbit to come out of the preview is that Paris will retail for 400 euros. Head over to M-R to read the preview.

This is probably the first picture without seeing Paris in a hand with fully slided out keypad.

As you probably can see the keypad is illuminated blue

You’ve probably already seen the picture we leaked of the upcoming UIQ smart phone, named Paris. In this post, we’ll go through its design and briefly tell about some features.

The slider form factor is going to be the form factor of Paris. Sony Ericsson has picked out some very nice materials for us, such as the shiny, mirror-like front cover, and metal has been used on large parts of the phone. Paris is quite slim (16 - 18 mm?), and we apologize for posting a picture that made it look a bit thicker than it really is.

The front of the phone holds a large touch display (with UIQ 3.3 supporting WQVGA, VGA & WVGA), a video call camera above the display, a minimalistic D-pad and two call keys making use of the same material as the rest of the front. This is quite nice, actually, and does affect the overall look of the device, more than you’d probably think it would.

Slide open the phone to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard beneath the exclusive-looking front. The keyboard consists of a number of multifunctional keys, like on M600 & P1, with the left part painted white and the right part painted black. This also looks much better than what your first thoughts may be. The phone is quite wide, making great room for this keyboard (and the large flush display, which pretty much fills out the device in width).

The back of Paris seems to have been made of metal. It looks quite nice, yet very simple. A sliding lens cover is protecting the 5 mega pixel camera on the top of the backside.

So, let’s talk about features. Paris features W-LAN 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, 3G and USB 2.0 cable transfers. It has a built-in GPS and comes bundled with Google Maps pre-installed, and we’re quite sure that WayFinder 7.0 will also be pre-installed on this device. The default web browser in Paris is Opera Mobile 9.5, as on other UIQ 3.3 devices.

So, when will we leak more pictures and what about that video, you guys talked about? Well, all in good time, but for now I can say that we plan to leak a set of three more pictures. One showing the shiny front (tomorrow), one showing the keyboard (Wednesday, next week) and one showing the backside of the phone (Friday, next week). The coming pictures will be of higher quality than the first posted one, but mind you that they are still screen shots from a video, so it’s far from perfect. Furthermore, we hope to be able to post a full video of this product within the next 2-3 weeks, but this has yet to be decided. You may be wondering why we’ve decided not to give it all at once. The reason is quite simple - this little ‘game’ we’re playing has to be fun for both us and Sony Ericsson, meaning that we do not wish to hurt Sony Ericsson in any way by publishing crucial pictures of upcoming phones.

I hope you found this at use, and that we’ve answered most of your questions.

People! The storm is coming, and we just beat Sony Ericsson at announcing it. We’re of course talking about the mysterious, super high-end smart phone, often referred to as ‘Paris’.

We’ve gotten our hands on the official product video of Paris, and even though we won’t be able to show you the video at this point in time (wait two weeks!), we can show you a few screen shots from the video with the most crucial parts blurred out a bit.

Paris will feature a full keyboard in known P1-style - below the screen, that is! Why? Well, Paris is a slider! It looks drop-dead-gorgeous and is set to slay, yes SLAY, other competitors on the market. It runs UIQ 3.3, and well, have a look at the picture. That pretty much says it all.

Paris will be announced before the end of May, and will be available in shops as early September! We haven’t got a price tag on this baby as of yet, but we’ll definitely be trying to sniff it up! So, picture after the jump! We’ll show you a picture of the back a bit later on Continue reading “Exclusive: Unveiling Sony Ericsson ‘Paris’”

Greenpeace has once again found the ‘greenest’ mobile phone and this year it happened at the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany, where the Sony Ericsson T650 was awarded best for the environment. Sony Ericsson received this award due to the battery used in the T650 and the fact that it contained only few hazardous materials.

Not only did Sony Ericsson win the 1st prize, the P1 got in on a 3rd place which is also a great achievement. Guess who came in second - Sony with their Vaio TZ11 computer. Nice going Sony / Sony Ericsson!