And briefs on priorities – push email and music, not TV and S60!
By Keith Dyer, at 3GSM in Barcelona
“Traditionally we launch one smartphone a year,” Mike Pauwels, Sony Ericsson’s senior manager of global product marketing, told Mobile Europe, “so it may be a surprise to see this launch as well as the M600 bring an extra one to the market.”
The K610 (Sony Ericsson loves those three numbers after the success of its T610) is “the lightest and most compact 3G phone out there” according to Pauwels. “The development is getting to the stage where you can distinguish between 2.5G and 3G,” he said, referring to the phone’s small form factor.
“If you look at the S700 which we launched a year ago with a 1.3 mega pixel camera on board, it was still quite bulky.” (Ha! Bet that wasn’t Sony Ericsson’s line at the time – ed). “But such is the evolution this phone has a 2 mega pixel camera and still has a very compact and stylish form factor.
The phone is targeted at the “standard business user, who wants a discreet looking phone but with full connectivity options, including push email, bluetooth and an expandable memory.”
Sony Ericsson has licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync so it can offer push email “in the long run” on its own proprietary OS-based devices, as well as its Symbian devices, Pauwels said. It will implement the OMA standard for push email as well, he added.
Adding a comment to the news that Vodafone may make Nokia’s S60 its preferred platform, Pauwels said that the operator “hasn’t said it doesn’t like UIQ” (UIQ is Ericsson/ SonyEricsson’s UI environment for Symbian phones). Asked if he could envisage Sony Ericsson licensing S60 to meet operator demands, he said, “We haven’t made any announcements yet!”
Despite the TV buzz at 3GSM Pauwels said that he thought music was the greater immediate 3G opportunity, with TV to follow once music is sorted. He intimated that Sony Ericsson was still going through interoperability and useability testing for mobile TV. So does that mean that manufacturers that are launching TV phones are moving quicker than Sony Ericsson, or are doing so without having gone through interoperability testing?
“These devices on the market – do they have full channel selection, are the services and content available? This is one of those applications where all the key pieces need to be there.”
There were still issues with codecs and DRM around music, he added, and once those were sorted operators would be in a stronger position to attack TV.
“The key buzzword at 3GSM is music, and we have not exploited the full potential yet,” he said. “Codecs, DRM, dual delivery to phone and PC, these are key issues and 3G is the key enabler.”
“If customers don’t get a great experience first time they won’t do it again.”