Along with the launching of Entertainment Unlimited, Sony Ericsson showcased an upcoming mobile phone by the concept ‘Idou’, which is going to give us a glimpse of what lies ahead for us, and what Sony Ericsson is currently working on. The ‘Idou’ is one of a number of projects that will be launched this year under the umbrella of Entertainment Unlimited.

The ‘Idou’ is a cameraphone with special focus on media. It will feature a 12.1-megapixel camera with auto focus and an array of advanced camera touch features and a xenon flash. I’m guessing the sensor in this phone will the Sony’s new 1/2.5-inch 12.25 megapixel sensor for mobile phones. That would be awesome! The Media menu will now be fully optimized for the 3.5-inch 16:9 widescreen touch screen, and will enable you to tap directly into your favourite movies, TV-series, video clips and tracks.

The phone will be based on what will become the Symbian Foundation operating system, which means that thousands of applications will be available online. PlayNow will be pre-installed, and will allow you to personalize the phone.

- “Entertainment Unlimited is at the core of Sony Ericsson’s philosophy, building on the strength of our great entertainment assets such as Walkman and Cyber-shot phones and our unique service and applications integration.  Many of the strategic initiatives we’ve announced in the past year have laid the internal framework to launch this new consumer proposition to the market and Sony Ericsson is now ready to drive the next wave of market development with Entertainment Unlimited”, said Hideki Komiyama, President at Sony Ericsson, in a press release.

The ‘Idou’ will be available during the second half of 2009 – naturally marketed by a different product name.

Also announced today is the C901, which is a bit of a surprise to me. It’s not a global announcement like the other products, which is why I didn’t expect it would be announced today. The C901 will be available in selected markets only.

In terms of features, the C901 is very much like the C903. All the same camera features, including a 5-megapixel camera, auto focus, Smile shutter, BestPic, Smart Contrast, Face detection, PhotoFix, geo-tagging, etc. On top of that, it adds a xenon flash instead of a photoflash LED.

Other features include chat view messaging, YouTube, Fm-radio with RDS, built-in accelerometer, Bluetooth, 3D gaming, video calling, Google Maps, etc.

The battery is good for up to 9½ hours of talk or 430 hours of standby time.

The phone measures 105 x 45 x 13 millimetres and weighs 107 grams. It’s a quad-band GSM / dual-band HSPA phone.

It’ll be available during Q2 in three variants; Noble Black, Sincere Silver and Precious Peach.

You can find much more about the C901 right here!

More pictures of the C901 after the break!

Along with the W395 and car Bluetooth accessory AB900, Sony Ericsson also announced the midrange C903 Cyber-shot phone. If you ask me, the C903 is one of Sony Ericsson’s most important products in a long time, as it combines a great deal of features, a small size and a decent price tag.

The C903 is a rather stylish Cyber-shot slider, making it the second slider phone in the Cyber-shot range of products. Its unique design touch has to be the sliding lens cover on the back, which makes it look a lot like a real digital compact camera. Behind the lens cover is a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus, as well as a Photoflash LED.

It’s got quite a bit of photo features, this one… Face Detection of up to three faces; Smile Shutter to automatically snap a picture when a person is smiling; BestPic to rapidly take up to nine full resolution pictures in a second; Snapfish printing service by HP; Photofix to apply minor corrections to your images, geo-tagging with the built-in a-GPS; TV-out; photo /video blogging; image / video stabilizer; and finally support for both Flickr and Picasa on your mobile. Phew.

- The C903 Cyber-shot adds a creative and stylish mobile phone to our mid-range segment, said Daniel Sandblom, who’s the Global Business Marketing Manager at Sony Ericsson.
- The C903 Cyber-shot furthers Sony Ericsson’s digital camera heritage and makes capturing special images even more memorable, he continued.

Okay, enough about the camera. What kind of phone is this, anyway? Well, it’s a quad-band GSM phone with support for EDGE networks / dual/tri-band HSPA (850 / 1900 / 2100 MHz) phone, depending on the variant. There’ll be a C903a with tri-band HSPA.

It’s got a 2.4-inch scratch-resistant TFT display, capable of displaying up to 262.144 colours. The resolution of the display is QVGA – 240 x 320 pixels.

If we take a closer look at its features, we find chat view messaging, Bluetooth, Java, motion gaming using the built-in accelerometer, FM-radio with RDS, Media, YouTube, Walk Mate and Tracker applications, PictBridge, Google Maps, 3-month trial version of Wayfinder Navigator, and so on.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that the C903 will in fact be Sony Ericsson’s first phone to include an e-manual on the phone. This was first mentioned some months ago in a post about Sony Ericsson aiming to be the champion of sustainable development.

The phone measures a good 97 x 49 x 16 millimetres and weighs only 96 grams. One could say that it’s a slightly stripped version of the C905. Battery life is said to be 10 hours of talk or up to 400 hours of standby time.

The C903 will be available in selected markets in Q2 this year in three colour variants; Glamour Red, Lacquer Black and Techno White. No final price has been set as of yet, but considering it’s a mid-range product, it’ll be relatively low.

More pictures after the break!

Sony Ericsson has a trend of creating these small, cool mini-sites that either feature a product (range) or a specific new feature or application. Therefore, it’s not surprising to see that they’ve published a mini-site for the newly announced C510, mainly focusing on its Smile Shutter technology, while throwing in a handful of nice photography tips and tricks – most of them are definitely worth checking out. You can check out the mini-site for yourself on the link below.

www.sonyericsson.com/smileshutter/

The C510 features a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus, Smile Shutter as mentioned before, Face Detection (detect up to 3 faces at a time), PhotoFix, geo-tagging (by cell ID), lens cover, illuminated camera shortcut keys and much more. It doesn’t come with a memory card bundled, which is a bit of a bummer seeing this is a camera phone, but its internal memory of 100 megabytes should hold a fair amount of pictures.

If you feel like printing your pictures, the C510 features HP’s Snapfish service, so you can send print orders right from your phone and have them delivered at home.

- “We have been leaders and innovators in the camera phone segment since the company was started,” said Sven Totté, Head of Imaging Marketing at Sony Ericsson, and continued: “Now we are delighted to unveil the C510 Cyber-shot, our most accessible Cyber-shot phone to date which includes a host of new features normally found on more premium phones. Features like Smile-Shutter, YouTube integration and Snapfish by HP integration make the C510 Cyber-shot a really fun mobile phone to use. This phone will enable us to engage new markets and consumers to our Cyber-shot phone experience.”

The C510 also features a built-in accelerometer, FM radio with RDS, conversation messaging (chat view), and access to YouTube via the YouTube client.

According to Sony Ericsson, the C510 will be Sony Ericsson’s most affordable Cyber-shot phone to date. It looks like they’ve realised that the overall price of the Cyber-shot branded phones is too high, and that they need to lower it a bit to match the sales figures of the Walkman branded handsets.

The handset measures 107 x 47 x 12.5 millimetres and weighs 92 grams. Talk time on the C510 is up to 10 hours on 2G networks and 4 hours on 3G networks, and standby times are up to 400 hours on 2G networks and up to 350 hours on 3G networks.

The C510 will be available in selected markets by February in two colour variants; Future Black and Radiation Silver.

Read more about the C510 at the official website.

Today we received the new Sony Ericsson C905. It comes in a pretty standard piano black box with “8.1 megapixel” printed on it. It’s pretty obvious that Sony Ericsson wants to compete against its competitors with what is technically speaking a false statement, but let’s not go into details about that now.

When you get the C905 in your hand for the very first time, you get a feel of quality. The rubberized backside feels exquisite, and the sliding mechanism really is top notch. Fortunately, some might add, as it would have been an utter disaster had it not been.

Our review unit is the black version of the C905. It looks classy, and there’s not really a lot to come for on a visual point of perspective. The handset is roughly the same size as most other Sony Ericsson phones, albeit it feels a bit thicker and a tad heavier as well. In our opinion though, the weight plays an unimportant factor as it adds to the quality feel of the handset. One gripe with the design of the phone however, would be the lanyard eyelet near the bottom of the phone. It protrudes a few millimetres from the rest of the body, and although it hardly sounds like an issue, I expect it to be an annoyance factor.

The 2.4-inch TFT display looks very nice. It is bright and vibrant, yet it manages to sport a better contrast than most others. It still isn’t quite up to levels with the contrast levels of the K850, which in our opinion features one of the undoubtedly best displays on the market.

The user interface is really quite fast and it’s incredibly easy to learn as well, as one might have expected. Icons are large and intuitive, and the tiny animations throughout the interface makes it that much more fun to use.

There’s no doubt the camera is the main selling point of this phone. The C905 features an entirely new camera sensor, that, along with new software algorithms, produces pictures of noticeably higher quality than what we’ve seen so far. The camera resolution is at eight megapixels, and the C905 features auto focus along with a variety of other camera-related features, including a xenon flash, SmartContrast and face-tracking.

Going through the menus in the Cyber-shot camera interface has been much improved compared to what previous members of this photographic family had to offer. It’s now a lot quicker and without the annoying lag that happened all too often.

When it comes to picture quality, colours, noise levels, etc., the C905 is rather impressive. Given the right circumstances, you can actually end up with pictures of very high quality and detail, as well as excellent colours. The xenon flash is quite powerful as well, and we’ve got to give Sony Ericsson props for improving the camera software so the flash can now also be used for macro shots without causing too much over-exposure. Night pictures and pictures in poor lighting conditions have also gotten a positive overhaul.

Here are a few camera samples for now, but expect a lot more in our full review that will be published early next month (that’s our target, anyway).

The C905 is Sony Ericsson’s first feature phone to sport built-in WLAN functionality, and our initial thoughts on it are positive. It’s a lot faster than anything else we’ve seen from Sony Ericsson, and it seems awfully easy to set up and use. We have yet to test out just how good it is at picking up signals, though.

A GPS unit is also built-in, but we haven’t had a chance to try this out yet. Media is excellent on the C905, and the built-in speaker is really loud. Definitely among the loudest from Sony Ericsson to date.

Based on our first impressions, we’re quite pleased with the C905. You can look forward to our upcoming gallery of the C905 as well as unboxing video and video preview. All of this will come relatively soon (partly depending on the weather). We also plan on doing an in-depth camera comparison between the C902, C905 and a middle class Nikon digital SLR camera. Watch out for that one!