Phones

Two of the more-interesting handsets announced in recent times, the Nokia 6500 Slide (left) and Sony Ericsson’s K850i Cyber-shot, have just turned up on O2’s Coming Soon page.

Sony Ericsson W53s is a new BRAVIA clamshell for Japans market. W53s has huge 2,7 inch 240x400 resolution wide 16:9 BRAVIA screen and 2 megapixel CMOS camera. It also has another screen (128x36) and JOG dial above the number keypad.

Virtually all experts agree that growth in the mobile phone industry is coming from the developing world, so Sony Ericsson is pinning much of their strategy on the vision of cheap phones be used everywhere in the world.

A similar technology, “audio fingerprinting,” which compares slices of audio until a match is found, already is common. MusicBrainz, for example, can go through your MP3 files and try to guess which songs they are so you don’t have to label them yourself. Shazam lets you hold a cellphone up to a speaker and tells you, via SMS, what song is playing. Some Sony Ericsson phones have a similar feature.

The first Sony Ericsson handset to carry Cyber-shot branding, this 3G phone has a 3.2-megapixel camera with auto-focus lens and a real flash instead of the usual weedy LED “torch”.

Sony Ericsson M600i is a Symbian OS smartphone which has QWERTY-keypad, 262,144 colour TFT (240x320 pixel) touchscreen, 60MB internal memory and and of course it’s 3G and it’s designed for business and home office use. M600i weighs 112g, it’s 10,5 cm long and 5,4 cm wide.

Is this Sony Ericsson's aswer to Motorola's slim phones? It could be... At the moment Sony Ericsson Doesn't have any slim phones...

Sony Ericsson release the latest UIQ series of Sony Ericsson phones - P990i, the second UIQ 3g phone.

Interesting how we’re so caught up in the frenzy to preserve memories that we snap and snap away at everything and anything we see — in the process of trying to archive something so evanescent we distort it so that the emphasis is on the preserving rather than the memory itself. I counted 5 Sony Ericsson phones with 2.0 megapixel cameras, mine included.

Since my cellphone contract with Bell expires this week, I decided that it was time for me to get a new phone. I wanted a phone that I could also use as an mp3 player. In the end, I was interested by the Moto RAZR and the SE W810i. I chose the latter, and I’m glad I did.

But now we have Juvino, a new Java application which runs on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones - though more handsets will be supported in due course.

Although my phone has died on me and the first tests showing (or proving) that it won’t work on anything other that Sony Ericsson phones, tomorrow will see the first dry run of Toupix at a ‘real’ event.

Sony Ericsson just announced to integrate Google free blogging service - Blogger (or blogspot) into its handsets. Meanwhile, Google web search will be added in as well.

This is a lot like the Xensaxion docking speakers for the ROKR, except that it’s for phones that don’t suck. The MDS-60 will playback and amplify the music coming out of either the W810, W600 or W800 Sony Ericsson phones.

Sony Ericsson released a barrage of new devices today. But the phones that stole the show were the new K800 and K790a, aka the blogging phones.

Sony is displaying 4GB and 8GB models of the Memory Stick Pro Duo cards in the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. These cards will work with most Sony products, including the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which will enable the unit to truly become a portable media player. They are expected to be released later this year, but no specific date is set yet. When this is released the the PSP will be able to hold just as much content as the iPod Nano. The only disadvantage with this is the price. The 1GB card currently costs around $75 and 2GB card cost about $150-200. The 4GB card is expected to cost around $400 when it is first released and to drop later on. And finaly the 8GB card might cost $800! Also the PSP is not the only type of device that can utilize this. Many Sony HI-RES cameras (Sony DSC-R1 10.3 Megapixels) support this so that there will be plently of storage space, since such large photos may take up over 10MB per shot. Sony Ericsson Phones that play Mp3s will also support these cards making them more powerfull than any iTunes Moto ROKR phones.

Well it’s been about 2 years since I purchased my last phone, the SonyEricsson P900. I did a lot of research when I brought my last phone and 2 years ago, it was years ahead of all of the other smart phones on the market. 2 years later, the rest of the phone market has just about caught up with the capabilities of the P900. This coupled with the beating my phone has taken over the last few years has prompted me to begin the search for it’s successor. I’ve considered several phones, including a , the Motorola Ravr V3 and the Treo 650, to name a few. All of these are pretty good, but then, low and behold something caught my eye…

There’s only one major problem with ProfiMail. Because it’s so non-standard, it doesn’t use T9 for text inputs. Ooohhh NO!! It has a nice little pop-up like on the Sony Ericsson phones which tell you which letter you’re keying is, but there’s no predictive text at all. That makes using ProfiMail for composing email pretty much a non-starter. I need my T9!! Hopefully the guys at Lonely Cat Games will see this major flaw and do what they can to add it in the next rev.

With the inevitable downfall of thin phones, music phones may be the new fad. I’d look towards Samsung and Nokia to push out next year’s big hits. I like Sony Ericsson phones as well, but they’ve been unable to get their products on U.S. carrier line-ups. As for Motorola, unless they stop recycling old phones, consumers will drop them like a brick, regardless of how beautiful the packaging is.

But obviously that’s a fluke. We did get quite a number of really interesting (and genuinely tech) questions as well. From a query as to whether Apple’s Air Ports can be daisy chained to extend their range ("yes they can be daisy-chained"), to whether the Treo 650 is still worth getting given the rumors of an upcoming Treo 670 ("yes, since it’s still a rumor"), to whether or not the Sony Ericsson K750i’s camera is really the same as that of the W800 ("yes, because the W800 is essentially a spruced up K750i").

While many find that Nokia’s Operating System is generally easy to use, those more familiar with the Sony Ericsson phones may find themselves slowed down a little bit. The joystick is the sole controller for the interface, allowing selection as well as directional abilities.

But it can’t last forever and it may, just may, already have a rival! Sony Ericsson’s new K750i’s focus on its super duper mega pixel camera quality is building a fan club. Dramatic scenery, vivid picture quality and a spectacular, if ridiculous, finale is making waves and getting its message across, autofocus and all.

Bhute recently purchased a Sony Erricson P910i which, despite its ugly body, is a revolutionary convergent device. It is a serious PDA-killer with amazing audio output (unlike Nokia phones) and a reasonable camera to boot. Its QWERTY keypad though a vast improvement over P800 wouldn’t be your preferred input device.

I mentioned, in an off-hand way, when talking about Backpack a couple of weeks ago that I had got a Sony Ericsson P910i. Those with long memories and high boredom thresholds might remember that I used to have a Treo 600, and might be thinking, “Oh, that Bsag, she’s been hankering after new gadgets again�. Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t far off.

Sony Ericsson wants to simplify the update process by letting customers update their own phones at multimedia kiosks installed in busy stores. The cylindrical kiosks, about 0.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters tall, contain a small PC and feature a touch-sensitive flat-panel display and a docking cradle for a mobile phone. Customers will be able to slot their phone into the cradle after first removing the SIM card, then follow the on-screen prompts to update the firmware. The process will take about seven minutes, Sony Ericsson staff said. The kiosk's...

You may view the progress of the event on the Web site and participate in an online game that offers a grand prize of an around-the-world trip for two and such prizes as Sony Ericsson phones, Akono headsets and vouchers for "luxury design hotels."

According to Mobile Tracker, there is nothing new about a cell phone with a built-in ability to record phone calls, following yesterday’s hoopla over a new Japanese cell phone (cf Cell phone recording feature raises hackles). “Lots of phones already have this functionality (including other Sony Ericsson phones such as the T610 and T68i)”.