It’s been a long and painful hiatus here at clubsonyericsson, but we’re officially back to reporting all Sony Ericsson news, starting with something that’s not so news, but pretty hot.

What you see on the photo could be Sony Ericsson’s first Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld enabled device, a feature they say will be on every model in the future. It could play videos and digital TV streamed wirelessly and even record them in its internal 10gb memory. That would allow for some live time-shifting too. It could be the first to be operated in landscape mode (except during calls, obviously) and to introduce an iPod-esque clickwheel for scrolling and fast-forwarding AS WELL as the traditional 5 or 9-way joystick it surrounds. It could have two additional softkeys to the right of the 3.5″ 800×600px screen that would replace the “back” and “C” buttons and make the interface even more flexible and powerful. It could also sport a Memory Stick Micro slot to support those 32gb cards that Sony claims will be available some day not soon.

It could be all that, but it’s not. These aren’t even spy shots. But they certainly aren’t fake. This is a concept *I* (not Sony Ericsson) made for one of my classes (product design), and the photos have been stolen… from my K750 . I want to make this clear to all german lawyers around before they rush to write a cease-and-desist letter [ADDED NOTE: and to all websites that are publishing these photos pretending it's related to Sony Ericsson the company. Again, it's not]. Look guys, it doesn’t even have the official Sony Ericsson logo on it (but a huge one with the UCSE font engraved on the back instead ).

The project was to take a cheap-ass ugly pda-looking electronic Sudoku and turn it into something else. Some of my classmates went for Star Trek Klingon transceiver and such, but what would I do other than a Sony Ericsson? Here’s a bunch of photos of the final model, including the clickwheel+joystick thing I mentioned. The design is inspired in the white M600 with several speakers at the back based on the J220’s speaker, and Walkman-orange accents around the border, the joystick and the front speaker. I hope you like it.

Here are some early ideation sketches:

Another design direction that was way more difficult to produce:

And the donor!

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