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!

On the 17th of June Sony Ericsson invited me for their press event in Amsterdam. The day started as usual with a slide show by the head of Sony Ericsson in Benelux. At first he wanted to remind us of the fact that Sony Ericsson has already sold 66.5 million Walkman phones and 22 million Cyber-shot phones. Here some more numbers about Sony Ericsson as a brand;

Continue reading “The newly announced products”

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

I came across an interesting little article that was linked on Engadget. The article in questions reported that Jaakko Kaidesoja, Nokia’s head of gaming, has been making some bold statements in relation to the much rumoured PlayStation phone. Mr Kaidesoja is quoted as having said “I’m not scared about anybody.”

This was followed up by Mr Kaidesoja questioning Sony Ericsson’s ability to produce a gaming handset: “The real question is how do they [Sony Ericsson] do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We’ve been doing this for two years and it hasn’t been easy.”

They are certainly interesting comments for Nokia’s head of gaming to make in public. One obvious interpretation would be that Nokia see Sony Ericsson as the manufacturer best placed to release a gaming handset, no doubt parent Sony’s expertise in the field and the PlayStation brand having much to do withsuch a perception.

The other point that one may infer from the comments is that Nokia take the idea of a possible PlayStation handset seriously enough to publicly comment on it. Of course that isn’t proof that such a handset will come to fruition, but it will no doubt add fuel to the rumour conflagration that is blazing brightly around the idea of a PlayStation handset.

Pocket Gamer via Engadget

Ah the T68i … my favourite handset. Why discuss a seven year old handset, I hear you ask? Why not? The T68i was a pioneer in its day, introducing some of the features we now take for granted, and as a result it was ahead of its time. Even today the T68i is still a viable choice as a handset in my opinion.

Continue reading “T68i - A Pioneer of its Time”