They’ve gone nuts: look what Sony Ericsson is preparing during the SE Championship Tour for the nights of November 9th and 10th in Madrid, Spain, as the first in a series around the world: black tennis court illuminated solely with UV light, 8 players wearing neon clothes, a bright ball and background live DJ music from no others than Groove Armada and Darren Emerson, as well as neon-wear catwalk fashion show from Ruben Gomez Navarro, all deep into the night. I’m not exaggerating a bit: in Darren Emerson’s words: “I’ve DJ’d in interesting places and situations and also weird ones, but this is going to be the most amazing of all”.

Free tickets are available to Spanish residents via SMS so if you’re going to be around the capital by next week, check out our spanish post on this topic for more details, or go to Nighttennis.es. No word on what is going to be the next city to welcome another Night of the Dancing Neon Mobile Phone Freak.

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How long have we been dreaming about this? It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s for real, Sony Ericsson has finally made a Bluetooth Stereo Headset in the shape of a couple in-ear headphones and a main unit with a display and keys for volume, track skipping and call answering, all weighing just 27 grams. Yes, there’s still some wires involved, but the main unit hangs lightly around the neck and the phone is in the pocket with no strings atached. The sound quality promises to be as outstanding as the HPM-70, and the battery life is not awful bad at up to 6 hours talk time or playback time, and 300 hours standby. Now here’s something interesting, if you check the compatibility list in its Official Page, isn’t every single Bluetooth phone since the S700 listed? Half the phones there didn’t support the A2D profile for stereo Bluetooth music streaming, did they? UPDATE: They corrected the list, now only the ones with A2DP (P990, M600 and W950 to date) are supported. The price is yet to be announced, but I really don’t care; when it comes out in Q2, I’m getting it no matter what. [Thanks Emil for the quick post]
Read the Press Release

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We do have an excuse if you didn’t find news around here for a while, even if there was a lot of spy shooting lately (to which we have something to say about, but later on that) or you sent in news or cool stuff (all will get published); it’s been the holidays, our comeback to California, the yearly server slowdown/upgrade, and the resulting technical problems in the forum, altogether. So while we’re updating the latter, here’s a little trick I found myself the other day and will certainly surprise more than one or two readers out there. Were you, like me, furious about the first so called music phones, W800/K750 and W600, not having dedicated music buttons other than the pretty basic “music button”? Will I make your life happier if I suggest you to press-and-hold the volume buttons from any menu, keypad locked or not, during playback, and you found yourself skipping songs? Oh yes! now go tell everybody, you SE prophet!

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And if you already knew, why the heck didn’t you tell us!?

UPDATE: Steve tells us it also works in the V800, so it may also be a feature of the K600, K700 and S700?

-109 x 49 x 24 mm and 148 grams (versus the 107.5 x 49 x 24.5 mm and 137 grams of the S700)
- Black and White
- Swiveling keypad form factor with Automatic rotating effect (opens with “the lightest of touches”)
- Triband GSM 900/1800/1900 and UMTS
- 2.2″ 320x240 (QVGA) 262k color TFT screen
- 2megapixel camera with autofocus, flashlight and 8x digital zoom with video recording at 30fps
- Frontal VGA camera for videocalls
- Full screen video playback at 30fps
- Bluetooth, Infrared and Fast Port
- Memory Stick PRO Duo slot (with cards currently available up to 2gb, 4gb in the future)
- 470mb internal memory (for between 120 and 240 songs)
- Stereo Handsfree with remote control and 3.5mm headphone jack
- Radio FM with RDS
- Support for MP3, AAC, AAC+, MIDI, WAV and XMF
- 40-tone polyphonics
- Megabass
- Java2ME with high performance 3D gaming engine (Asphalt Urban GT 3D, PowerBall Arcade 3D and QuadraPop games included, some played horizontally)
- Macromedia Flash Lite
This toy will be commercially available in Q4 2004 (isn’t that like tomorrow?) as W900i for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and W900c for China mainland. Read the Press Release or go to the Official Product Page. Click below to see all the high resolution official pictures.
Discuss this in the W900 Forum Thread

Continue reading… (more photos)

Official specs are fairly what we were expecting, plus some secondary goodies:
- Symbian 9.1 with UIQ 3 interface
- GSM Triband 900/1800/1900 and UMTS
- WiFi 802.11b
- 2 megapixel camera with autofocus and flashlight
- 2.8″ (same diagonal size as its predecessors) 320x240 pixel 262k color touchscreen.
- Front (VGA?) camera for videocalls
- Radio FM with RDS (that came as a surprise)
- 80mb user internal memory (who said 1gb?) and 64mb Memory Stick Duo card supplied
- Memory Stick PRO Duo slot (cards available up to 4gb so far)
- Flight mode lets you turn on WiFi
- Media player supports playlists and streaming
- RIM Blackberry
- Activity menu (like the one in K750/W800/W600/etc. I’m guessing)
- Highly customizable themes (animated icons, skins, transparent .PNG’s)-
- Java MIPD 2.0 and Java 3D
- Macromedia Flash Lite Edition
- Opera 8 web browser
- Integrated handsfree
- New side music, volume, “back” keys and lock screen/keypad S700-style slider key
So how big is this baby? 114 x 57 x 25 mm weighing 155grams with the flip attached (wait, they don’t mention it’s actually detachable! and no photos of the phone without the flip! let’s not panic and wait for confirmation), which is basically the same as P910 (115 x 57 x 24 mm and also 155 grams with flip). The Press Release says it’ll be available in Q1 2006 as P990i in Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and as P990c in China Mainland. A visit to the Official Product Page is worth your time. All the official high-res pics after the link.
Wanna complain? applaud? Discuss this in The P990 Forum Thread

UPDATE: Sorry about the flip thing, the press release and the lack of pictures confused me. There’s pictures in the full Official Product Page with the flip detached. Swedish site Mkf.se has some live pictures, one of them showing the impressive camera viewfinder interface.

Continue reading… (more photos)

What you see on the right (click to enlarge) is a spy shot appeared in Mobile-review’s forums of what looks (from the photo and the rumors) to be a new S700 successor with the same 320x240 pixel screen (notice the definition), 3G functionality (frontal VGA camera plus videocall shortcut button under the d-pad), and Walkman stuff (play/pause and next-previous track icons on the d-pad, about time!). According to Eldar Murtazin, this is not the Sakura, but a model below. That info, added to the rumours that say it’ll be a bit smaller than the S700 (it does look thinner) and the fact that a 3G phone is really difficult to keep in small size, makes me think this one features the 2megapixel camera, and not the expected 3megapixel. That should appear on the Sakura. I’m looking forward to see what improvements in the paint/color/material are made to the commercial version, I don’t think we’ll see “Fisherprice Yellow” in the official specs in autumn. Want names? “S750″, “S800″, “S850″, “P850″ (not smartphone), “W850″…
Discuss this in the Ophita/Sakura forum thread

UPDATE: New photos of a nicer-looking white version have appeared on Sep 23rd, setting up a lot of confusion on whether we’re actually talking about the Sakura or Ophira.

I’ve got the press releases since today morning (Sunday 12) but I haven’t been able to publish the news until now (It’s 2:00am GMT). The good part is that, of course, we have new phones! And Ellen has a pretty new name —S600— and really interesting specs, like 64mb internal memory, HTML browser, 176x220 pixels 262k color 1,8″ screen, integrated double stereo speakers, 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, USB support and a bunch of 3D games that can be played holding the phone horizontally (with the support of two extra buttons at the right of the screen), conventionally, or in “L” shape, with the rotating keypad open. The bad part, for the moment, is that Sony Ericsson hasn’t uploaded the official photos to their website and we won’t know if it also looks good until 9:00 am or so (six hours to go).

Zoe, surprisingly, seems to be a nice little clamshell phone with decent features. Its official name becomes Z520 and excels the Z600 with a VGA camera, 16mb of internal memory, MP3 support, USB support, integrated handsfree speaker and a series of colorful leds all around the perimeter of the phone that flash in costumizable fashion (even synchronized with the melodies) when someone calls or an sms is received. The press release highlights the small size of the phone. The internal screen is the same of the Z600 (a TFD with 65k colors and 128x160 pixels), and the external is a 4k color 101x80. The Z520 gets the honour of being the first quadband Sony Ericsson: it supports the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 GSM bands. This two phones use the new charger-data connectors.

The J200-based J210 and the K600-spec’d K608 won’t be any great surprise but we’ll have to wait for the photos to see if they’re any cooler than the phones they’re based in. The J210 upgrades the 128x128 pixel STN display from 4k to 65k colors while keeping the Infrared, 600kb internal memory and triband support. I’ve heard that the K608i will be an operator exclusive but I’d say it could be a sim-free version of the Vodafone V600.

By the way, new accesories have been also announced: the HBH-610 headset with Bluetooth 2.0 support, the HCB-700 car handsfree kit with a screen, the sporty HPS-60 wired stereo headphones and a new PC card that combines UMTS and WiFi access, the GC99. Nothing is said about the future 4gb Memory Stick DUO cards but this was confirmed to me by a Sony Ericsson representative.

Continue reading for complete spec tables of the phones (NO PHOTOS): Continue reading… (more photos)

This must be the most unusual Bluetooth accesory since the CAR-100. The ROB-1 is an 11cm tall spherical moving camera that can be controlled remotely and wirelessly from any Bluetooth enabled Sony Ericsson through the joystick or the touchscreen in the cases of the P series. While you play with it, you will see what the camera is watching directly on your phone’s screen, and take a photograph whenever you want. You can even tilt it in a range of 90º. Sony Ericsson claims it can be controlled from up to 50 meters away, and one of the photos clearly shows a miniUSB port. It is a limited edition (just like the CAR-100 in the beginning) and I honestly don’t want to know the price.
Read the press release or click on more to see more photos.
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Continue reading… (more photos)

I’m heading for the press conference in 10 minutes, but from what Mobile-review has already published, It might seem like we had been shifting our expectations a bit too much for the past couple of weeks. No P915/P1000, no multi-gigabyte Walkmans, no double speakers, no innovative form factors, just two high end models and two low ends. Anyway the K750 and W800 do look like amazing phones, and they finally released a cool flash add-on. Here’s a quick review of the specs.
K750: appart from the specs we already know, the Memory Stick Duo support goes up to 2Gb.
W800: The same as K750 with some added music features like the ability to play MP3 with the phone switched off (that’s a battery life of 30 hours) and a line-out accesory for connecting it to a Hi-Fi system. However, it only supports Memory Stick Duo cards up to 512Mb. UPDATE: Not exactly, it does support cards of 2Gb, and it includes a 512mb card in the package.
J300: A J200 with exchangeable covers, antenna loop and slightly smaller screen.
K300: A J300/J200 with VGA camera.
I’ll come back with more details and live photos in a couple of hours.
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I really really wonder what some lawyer must be thinking right now . It turns out that a friendly project developer of the Clara/K750 offered an interview to Mobile-review’s Eldar Murtazin in which they talked about pretty much everything about the company’s future. Especially the near future concerning what will finally be 4 models to be unveiled the day after tomorrow. Surprisingly, the guy states every one of them is as ostentatiously featured as the K750; where’s the low end K300 gone then?. We’re talking about quite a lot of features we have never seen before in Sony Ericsson phones or even other manufacturers. That includes an evolution of the MusicDJ that will be called VideoDJ and supports the creation and remix of videoclips including music and photos, a new Activity Menu (sort of “Tasks / Notes / Bookmarks / Call and Message history” altoghether) and the small but important detail that the Radio FM applications now include RDS for text broadcasting (that’s you see at least the name of the radio station in the phone). Memory Stick Duo Pro cards up to 1gb are supported by the K750 and in some Walkman phone you’ll be able to listen to the music through double loudspeakers with channel separation. 3 megapixel cameraphones don’t seem to be appearing until summer or even later, but everything they talk about the K750 camera sounds so promising that its 2 megapixels / autofocus / macro / 1632x1124 resolution specs will be more than enough for the average user. In fact Sony Ericsson is expecting this phone to not only repeat the T610’s success but to exceed it. Fair expectations from the company that sees itself “as one of the strongest [companies] on the market speaking about developing and integrating new functions”.
Read the interview
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Eldar Murtazin from Mobile-review.com just posted some info about an upcoming Sony Ericsson smartphone in his forum. Under the unexciting name of “P915″ he talks about some kind of upgraded P910 that sounds to me much like the P1000 I talked about a few months ago. That’s QVGA screen, WiFi, some megapixel camera, no 3G, and form-factor wise, no flip; which means a QWERTY keyboard placed under the screen (Treo 650 and Benq P50 style). Whether it will be called P915 or P1000 is of course uncertain, but if this one is unveiled next week (March 1, keep an eye for then) we’ll have to wait a few more months to see the real smartphone killer, 3G and all.
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I just received my invitation to the press conference that Sony Ericsson will be holding in Madrid (and presumably in some other cities around the world) on March 1st in which they will:

1. Release new multimedia phones and advanced multimedia accesories focusing to the new concept of music.
2. Presentation of the first Walkman® Sony Ericsson.
3. Expectations for 2005.

So yeah, that means at least three new phones (Walkman, Clara and K300?)
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Just a quick note to let you know I have just received a press release from Sony Ericsson talking about new phones Z800 and K600. The Z800 is just the unvodafoned version of the V800 with different —and more appealing— covers. The K600 is quite a surprise. A 3G improved K700 (dual UMTS/GSM Triband 900/1800/1900) or a candybar V800/Z800. From the specs that’s what it looks like (sort of): 1.8″ 262k color screen, 1.3 megapixel camera with active lens cap and Radio FM. Not the most detailed press release in the world, certainly, but we can guess the screen is 177x220 pixels and that it has MS Duo support (probably not Pro). From the photos I also guess the camera on the front, just for videocalls, is only VGA or less (0.3 megapixels), as the one in the Z1010. The TrueUSB support borrowed from the V800 and the side shortcut keys from the good old japaneese Premini add up to the exciting pack of features. A poll about why they called it K600 being better than the K700?. By the way this is NOT the so-called K750i, since the camera is 1.3mp and not 2mp as the K750i. UPDATE: The K600 supports NO external memory, at all!
Go to the K600 forum thread (photos)
Go to the Z800 forum thread (photos)
Go to the K600 official site
Go to the Z800 official site

Having finished the 2004 season of product presentations, in which Sony Ericsson introduced 7 new phones to the market, all expectations now point to what’s rumored to be an exciting 2005, with at least 8 new models. We are all logically looking forward to what should come to life before the Cebit in March, but we will see no P910 subsitute so soon. An official source confirmed to Club Sony Ericsson that there will certainly be a “P1000″ (improbable name) with some of the stuff we are expecting such as WiFi and megapixel camera… but —and this is the news— it will not be a 3G phone. There must be of course a marketing reason not to make a P800-concept based UMTS smartphone yet, but we enthusiasts will be dissapointed without fail with this decision. Other exciting entertainment-focused phones (3G and not) should keep the thrill up however.
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