So there is only one possibility left: It’s a new generation XPERIA PLAY! To be honest it doesn’t look very different to the current PLAY. Maybe it’s a upgrade like the Vivaz Pro was? Anyways we’ll keep you updated about this thing!

Source: SE-Xperia.com

[via Gizmodo]

A recent patent application filed by Sony Ericsson indicates a technology that will enable front-facing cameras to click a user’s photo and analyse it to find the user’s mood and selec a playlist accordingly. A method may include playing a first song on a device, capturing an image of a user, performing facial expression recognition of the user based on the image, and selecting a second song based on a facial expression of the user.  Pretty neat!  This tops even the Sense Me application in my opinion.

Via: CellPassion

Sony Ericsson’s W64S has been availabe under Japanese operator AU for a while now, but only to Japanese customers.  Previously, AU phones never worked outside of Japan unless you are a customer and subscriber of AU’s mobile phone service in Japan.  Well it looks like that is beginning to all change.  Rather new, a few tech geeks managed to create an unlock for the Sony Ericsson W64S, as shown above.  This unlock, still in the preliminary stages, does not require an external hypersim and is said to be “99.9% stable and perfect.”  A few business owners have managed to get a hold of this and are now beginning to sell unlocked Sony Ericsson W64S.

The Sony Ericsson W64S is available for an average $700 CDN, or appoximately $556 USD and €439 EURO.  The W64S is aviable in four colours, Snow x White, Diamond x Pink, Lattice x Black, and Mist x Blue.  The Lattice x Black, by the way, looks much darker and only purple in certain angles in reality than rather than the following renderings.

Reviewing the specifications of the W64S, it has obviously a flip phone with a rotating/swivel screen.  This allows it to be used as a TV/Media Player or used as a 3.2 megapixel camera, located on the back of the phone.  The screen is a 16M colour WFVGA 2.8 inch screen.  On the front, there are hidden notification lights that glow when there are new text messages, missed calls, and ringing alarms.

For more information regarding the W64S with more specification, commercials, and media campaigns, visit Sony Ericsson’s W64S Product Website (Japanese).  I would highly recommend watching the W64S demo, even if you don’t understand Japanese.

There is a catch with this phone.  Well, there are catches with all Japanese keitais.  For one, one cannot use the internet browser or use anything that involves the internet, such as GPS and downloading of applications and games.  This is locked only to the AU by KDDI USIM.  TV is not an option either as the signals are only available in Japan.  But with all AU by KDDI phones, unfortunately and at the moment, text messaging does not work at all.  Nevertheless, this is a ground breaking discovery and spark more AU by KDDIs available.  You never know, you might be picking up a Walkman Monster Premier3, Cybershot Flagship S001, or the endless customization RE soon.

You know those cool mini-sites on Sony Ericsson’s website? Yeah, the interactive ones with all the cool animations and… stuff. Well, guess what? SE have put up two new campaign sites in connection with W705’s forthcoming release (that’s 27th Feb, if you’re wondering). The first one has 2 modes you can switch between – one that’s about W705’s features in general and another about the “Clear Audio experience”. Yes, it does indeed resemble W980’s campaign site. Here’s the link:

Great Sound

The second one is your usual run-of-the-mill 3D view of the phone (again, with mini presentations about its features):

W705 in 3D

Source: SEMC Blog

As any self-respecting Sony Ericsson fan will know Sony Ericsson have been announcing and cancelling handsets like it’s going out fashion over the past year. Some have been wee gems like the G900 or the C902, others have been … well less than stellar. There have been a lot of handsets and  to be blunt some of them have been either unnecessary given the existence of other handsets in SE’s portfolio or just haven’t added much to the market that previous handset’s didn’t already offer. It seems that Sony Ericsson is finally confirming what the rest of us already knew, namely that they over-diversified.

The admission started last week when Sony Ericsson President Hideki Komiyama said that he is aware that Sony Ericsson has problems and that they are working on innovative products. Now we have Mr Lindoff, speaking at the launch of PlayNow Plus, saying that Sony Ericsson over-diversified in Q3:

There were probably too many devices in the portfolio in Q3. We developed products that have not been ranged by operators. It makes no sense to develop it if we are not damn sure it’s ranged.

It’s good to see Sony Ericsson recognising this issue because hopefully it signals the start of a turn around for the company that sees them release great handsets again like they did in their early days with the likes of the T68i, the T610, the P800, and the K750.

Mr Lindoff had more to say though as he also talked about Sony Ericsson’s smart phone plans. He made the claim that the X1 is primarily aimed at the U.S. market, which seems a little strange given that it will be released there after being released in European markets:

Operators have demanded a Windows Mobile device for the past five years so it’s driven by them for enterprise customers. Yes, you could say it is primarily for the US market.

The claim isn’t so strange when taken in this context given that Windows Mobile has arguably a stronger presence, or at least a stronger image, in the American market than it does in European markets where Symbian rules the roost.

Mr Lindoff wasn’t one for stopping and he continued his comments by talking about smart phone platforms. Android, Google’s open source mobile platform, is something that Sony Ericsson are apparently interested in at least, but Lindoff was cautious in commiting to it. He commented that Sony Ericsson might develop an Android handset, presumably as part of the Xperia line given previous comments by Sony Ericsson to the effect that Xperia isn’t tied to WinMo. However, he cited a lack of resources as preventing Sony Ericsson from realising this any time soon.

Symbian Foundation appears to be more important to Sony Ericsson though as Sony Ericsson already have Symbian Foundation handsets in development, with the first coming next year as part of the Xperia line. The good news for mobile geeks is that it is promised to be very high-end! Lindoff is quoted as saying:

We will launch a Symbian Foundation handset in the next year. There will be really high-end Xperia devices.

Sony Ericsson should allow Mats Lindoff to speak more often!

Source: Mobile News

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.

At the same day the K750 was announced, Sony Ericsson also announced another very similar phone, which featured the same stunning camera features, while also bringing the Sony Walkman brand into the mobile phone market. The W800 was born.

This is where Sony Ericsson’s now heavily used segmentation has its roots, and it wasn’t long until another Sony Ericsson trend arose. About nine months after the announcement of the W800, Sony Ericsson announced the W810 – a slightly updated W800 with a few hardware upgrades, such as adding quad-band GSM and EDGE functionality rather than tri-band only, and a slightly updated user interface, not to mention the arguably nicer design. And that was about it… Even though not much had changed compared to W800, the W810 sold very well, and Sony Ericsson managed to keep up the hype about their products, for now at least.

A month after the announcement of W810, Sony Ericsson announced the M600. And just about a week after that, the W950 was announced. Both phones were built on the exact same platform with the exact same operating system, with only minor differences to each. The M600 featured a full keyboard, whilst the W950 featured a rather regular keypad. It was obvious that Sony Ericsson had just taken its product segmentation to the next level with the M600 being a business phone, and the W950 being a music phone, although they were 99 percent the same. Have a look at the more recent P1 and W960 smart phones – the story continued.

Later that month, the K800 was announced. This was the successor of K750, and to make it even more obvious that this phone was “a camera”, Sony Ericsson hooked up with its Japanese parent company and branded it the very first Cyber-shot phone. Back then, Sony Ericsson said that only the best digital cameras would wear the Cyber-shot brand, and at the same time promised that the quality of the photos would be beyond the usual. Do you think they’d still be proud to say that about the C902 and K850 today? Personally, I doubt it when it comes to these two in particular as they’re short on quality compared to other market offerings, but I wouldn’t doubt for a second, that they’ll be prouder than ever to say it about the C905.

So, the K800 brought along some hardware upgrades and an entirely new software platform. It took a whole year for Sony Ericsson to announce its newest Cyber-shot flagship, which – in most cases – was no different than the K800. Once again, Sony Ericsson had added the quad-band GSM and EDGE functionality, slightly updated the software, and changed the design to a more appealing one.

By now, Sony Ericsson was slowly starting to fall behind, and had now made it pretty clear to most that they weren’t going to change this “hardware/software swap” trend – and well, they didn’t. As far as I can tell, the portfolio included more than forty of these phones from about 2005 to now. These are:

C902, D750, G502, K310, K320, K530, K550, K630, K750, K770, K790, K800, K810, M600, P1, S302, S500, T250, T270, T280, T650, T700, V640, W300, W302, W550, W580, W600, W610, W660, W700, W710, W800, W810, W890, W902, W950, W960, Z530, Z555, Z710, Z750, Z770, and Z780.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve missed some, or if some of you disagree with me, but fact is that the above mentioned phones are each very similar to at least one or more of the other mentioned phones.

Cutting down on the high-end products

Because of Sony Ericsson’s almost endless line of similar phones, many high-end consumers have left the company for others. Although it is not the only reason for Sony Ericsson’s decreasing phone ASP (average selling price), this has without doubt been one of them.

Sony Ericsson used to be a manufacturer delivering very high-end offerings with basically no comprises on features or size. Lately they haven’t been up for the challenge of keeping up with the game, and were late at incorporating newer, more advanced features into their phone portfolio. Here we’re talking about features such as GPS and WLAN. Sony Ericsson’s portfolio is still very limited when it comes to phones with these features, and while most of the new smart phones feature WLAN connectivity, none of them include a built-in GPS unit. If we’re going to take a look at the feature phones, it’s rather clear that only a few feature a built-in GPS unit, and only one – for now – does also feature built-in WLAN.

And when it comes to features, how many of Sony Ericsson’s latest phones would you say have brought anything new to the table? Not a whole lot of them, I guess, and the stuff that was brought to the table is nowhere near being as innovative as it had been just a few years ago. Take the recently announced T700 as an example – it brings absolutely nothing new to the market, and W890, which seems like the better and cheaper choice, is already on the market and has been for some time. The only thing new about the T700 is its design, and that’s what Sony Ericsson wants people to buy it for. In my opinion, that’s no way to run a company – to create products and hope that they’re bought based on their looks rather than functionality and features. Have a look on over at Motorola in USA, and you’ll know what I mean.

Will this change? Yes, and as a matter of fact it is currently changing, and started changing when Miles Flint gave his chair to the current President, Hideki Komiyama. Sure, it’s taken almost a year now, but I don’t think it’ll be that much longer now. Hideki has made it clear that the situation wouldn’t be much changed in Q3, but that they’re going all in on the fourth quarter of the year, and I must admit that they’ve got a strong line-up for the mass market, while still not forgetting all about the business segment.

Branding – just for the sake of it?

Sony Ericsson has currently got two Sony brands to go on segmented Sony Ericsson products; the Cyber-shot brand, and the Walkman brand. The use of the brands is one of the things Hideki Komiyama has to do something about.

At the moment, Sony Ericsson’s portfolio includes a total of nine Cyber-shot branded phones, from the low-end K550 to the high-end C905. Sony Ericsson’s portfolio also includes no less than 26 Walkman branded music phones, again from the low-end ones, such as W200 and W300, to the high-end ones, such as W902, W960 and W980.

Seeing there is such a great difference in these products varying from the very cheap end of the line-up to the more expensive ones, how is it that even the very low-end phones can wear the same brand of quality as the high-end ones? Well, it’s nothing but a marketing gig.

I am personally finding it very hard to believe that the W200 really “deserves” this Walkman quality brand. In my opinion, it was merely because the Walkman range didn’t include any really cheap offerings, so they just smashed on the Walkman brand, and went on hoping no one would notice. The same goes for the Cyber-shot range and many of the phones in it, especially the K550. They can’t seriously think that this phone is going to replace a digital compact camera. If so, they’re barking mad! Once again, this was just to make the range a bit more complete. What’s worse is that the K550’s Walkman copy, the W610, is actually a better camera phone than K550, because of the – in my opinion – horrific post-processing of the Cyber-shot camera software. Believe it or not, the difference is there, and it is evident.
The same thing goes for the Cyber-shot branded K770 and its generic sibling, the T650. Although the difference is less noticeable in this case, mainly because the camera module has been replaced for an excellent Samsung module, it should be clear to most that – up until now – the branding has been done just for the sake of it. By the way, the T650 remains one of Sony Ericsson’s best camera phones in terms of quality – even without the wonderful Cyber-shot brand.

Some will wonder why I’m writing “up until now”. This is mainly because Sony Ericsson recently announced the C905, that can actually replace a low/mid-end digital compact camera, and because most Walkman phones are actually decent music phones, although the majority are still victims of Sony Ericsson’s heavy segmentation, meaning the cameras are just about worthless in most cases.

Discouraging financial results

I don’t know about you, but I loved every single bit of the Q2 financial results, and I even laughed when I read the part about the huge profit drop. The results were indeed very discouraging, and I’m hopeful that they were discouraging to such a degree that it opened Sony Ericsson’s eyes.

The operating income turned negative. I’m most certain this means they’ve manufactured too many phones that simply didn’t sell. I blame a large part of this problem on the amount of similar phones, and Sony Ericsson’s excessive software modifications for each of its two Sony brands, especially when it’s far from up to the level it should be.

One thing I loved about the financial results is that Sony Ericsson claims that the market is proving challenging. I think someone needs a wakeup call, ASAP! It really can’t be that hard to understand that the market doesn’t want three different variants of each phone, where the only difference is the branding and price. In addition to that, it really can’t be that hard to understand that the expenses will triple when manufacturing and marketing three similar phones instead of just one.

Conclusion

So, is it really as bad as it sounds? Well, partially. So far I’ve only mentioned the bad stuff and how it went bad. Sony Ericsson has come up with some fabulous phones recently, including the C905, G700, G900 and X1. These represent the very best Sony Ericsson has to offer, and this golden league will soon welcome a few very much needed additions.

The fact that Sony Ericsson’s sales didn’t go down substantially also means that there are still many people out there that do want to buy Sony Ericsson products. Lately, Sony Ericsson’s strategy just hasn’t been any profitable, mainly because the number of similar phones has been growing a lot.

Another factor that goes to prove that Sony Ericsson knows about their problems is the fact that about 2,000 employees are to be sacked. How can this possibly be a good thing, you ask? Well, Sony Ericsson’s portfolio has been flooded by – let’s just call them copy/paste phones – and lots of them! It’s been reported that Sony Ericsson had expanded its portfolio by about fifteen mobile phones year on year, and I suspect the majority are copy/paste phones. For each phone a massive crew is needed of more than 100 employees. Yes, that’s for each phone, even if they’ve been through the photocopier! That means the majority of the 2,000 employees that are to be sacked could come from the development and marketing of copy/paste phones. Official spokespeople have even said that a great part of the cuts will be in Sweden, which adds up perfectly to the above mentioned theory.
But wait, what about the rest? Well, it’s not exactly unusual for a company with such an immense profit drop to lay off a number of employees, and I guess that’s also the reason in Sony Ericsson’s case.

I’ll leave you with that, and wrap up this rant. It’s not all bad, and things are (slowly) turning, although it’ll definitely take some time. If you’re willing to wait, you should do it. If not – well, you might want to reconsider, and keep in mind that it really isn’t as bad as it looks, although it might sound harsh and feel like the most stupid thing in the world to support Sony Ericsson at times.

This technology will bridge the Java ME platform and the Adobe Flash Lite platform in a new developer platform for fast & clean user interfaces, both graphically and code-wise. The technology will among other things make it possible to use Java ME in the application codes, while being able to use Adobe’s Flash Lite technology for the application interface.

- Sony Ericsson is excited to introduce our new bridging technology to the global developer community as it further strengthens our relationship with this community and underscores our ongoing commitment to support an open, healthy and thriving mobile ecosystem, said Rikko Sakaguchi, SVP and Head of Portfolio and Proposition at Sony Ericsson in a press release. We are dedicated to exploring opportunities that enable us to provide innovative and energized user experiences. To achieve this, we work with world class partners and technologies, on both platform and product development, Sakaguchi continued.

Sony Ericsson plans to make this technology available in second half 2008 (new phones!!), and will demonstrate the technology at the JavaOne Developer Event in San Francisco, May 6 – 9, booth 718 in the Pavilion.

Go here for the full press release.

[thanks Karun!]

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!