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Taking a look back at Paris (and a bit on Beibei)
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!
Filed under: Exclusive, G series, P series, Prototype, Rants, UIQ
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
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No offense as I’m not trying to question you, but what innovation did Beibei bring other than the scroll wheel? To be honest, with what I was told about it, I cant think of anything it had that wasn’t already seen on SE phones, other than the wheel.
It had GSM 850 and Wifi b/g and UIQ 3.3 …combination which no other SE phone has
i wonder why did sony ericsson canceled this 2 phones…
are they going to do more work on it and relaunch it?
but seeing this post here i guess not? it would be such a waste that the phones goes to the dumps…=(
Again and again…SE should reconsider and continue BEIBEI but I can’t say the same thing with the P5. But the stylus on BEIBEI needs to be redesign…
LG and Samsung are running rings around SE right now. Every UIQ phone is a year too late, or, in the P990i’s case, 6 months late and buggy as hell. My P1i’s keypad works pretty well, it’s a shame they lost the plot. I reckon the P1i puts the N95 to shame in terms of RAM (can multitask without closing apps), battery life and is much more solidly built. The BeiBei’s stylus was an afterthought, and the mess of buttons under the screen reminds me of when Nokia were making weird key designs just because the phone used S60. Paris should have been much more iPhone-like, like the Prada or Viewty, but with a proper keypad… could have been much better executed. Maybe they were killed to not make the Xperia X1 look bad?
SE should reconsider the BEIBEI with a bigger screen like iphone and more cpu power.
Is that scroll wheel the “+Jog” from Japanese SE phones? Should comfort a few of those who complain about Japanese features not showing up in non-Japan phones.
Rumours are saying that the Paris is being reworked massively into the “Hecaro” prototype. Let’s see whether this is true or not….
Michell, can you please more and higher resolution pics of paris in all these colors???
I wouldn’t be too happy to do that, Harry
I’m glad they have been canned and you can’t get your hands on them. They are shockingly bad in terms of software and hardware. Built from cheap material and has same feature set as the G700/G900 with only added GPS.
If these phones did make it to the market I would of hated to see the slating SE would of got…lucky escape.
Am I the only one who wanted Paris to be made available as a finished consumer product? The above pictures show that Paris really is beautiful, IMO one of the best looking designs we have seen from SE this year. It would have brought full web browsing with Opera 9.5, a better camera, wifi b/g, nicer (larger) screen than what you get with G900/G700, only new SE model with a keyboard (WM aside), a rare touchscreen competitor in the smartphone market (WM aside), it would have brought GPS functionality which G900/G700 is lacking, quadband, HSD(U?)PA, good memory, great media centre and being an SE, it would boast better battery life than any of its competitors. Now I agree I am dissappointed with the use of old hardware and insufficient specs in some areas, so I hope this ‘Hecaro’ which is rumoured really is a proper remake of Paris the way it should’ve been. But IMO, this one really was worthy of a spot in SE’s line up because it would still have been the best UIQ device SE have ever come up with, and therefore would still have been the smartphone flagship. I see alot of repeated devices now with similar specs and similar designs, so I would really like to see this level of choice in the high end/smartphone area. So why remove the one thing that was actually different? Heh you will miss all the nice UIQ touchscreens when you are forced into using S60.
you mean SE would really use S60 OS and then abandon UIQ? need your insight here, michell
@Tigershark You are not the only one
I was also going to have it.
Yep, thotee.
Why would it make you sad Michell, if I may ask???
It wouldn’t, it would just not be good
But these were cancelled and we never got to see decent pics of the black version of paris… I never disliked paris other than it’s only 2.6 QVGA screen with the same old processor, but otherwise I have always wanted to see it announced… So can you please show me some pics???
i thought one of the most saddest things about getting rid of both of these phones was the quadband, SE is now starting to implement it on everything which is good but both these phones were unique and different in design then any other phone and in a good way too they will be missed and never forgotten(until x1 and c905 come out :D)
There are loads of pictures on the net, here are some
http://gizmodo.com/388376/first-live-shots-of-sony-ericsson-paris
The pictures of that Paris is pretty much the production version.
Slow in Market Trends,
Leaking long before Official Announcement,
Early in Revealing, Late in Launching
… Is what SE is now.
What happen with SE?
Should we not leak any of SE’s upcoming phones? Most of the leaked SE’s phones were cancelled. Alicia + Leaked = Cancelled, and also Paris + BeiBei + Leaked = Cancelled. Except the Walkman reborn series. Perhaps they are SE’s special phones, so they announced early. And Remi hasn’t got any announcement yet…
I try to be optimistic and hope that these phones were canceled because they have something better in the works…
…maybe the second quarter earnings report is enough as a slap on the face for them to wake up.
Come on people… whats so good with bei bei… its almost the same with the G700 except for the updated software.. (which by the way looks too much like S60 )
@Nishaj
Yeah, they should do just that. My W960 is begging for more CPU power. I believe they have been using the same processor since the P990.
Paris is so beautiful in that picture! Makes me regret y it has 2 b cancelled :( You started this Michell it’s your fault! But I can forgive you if you show us the full pictures
:)