Now this is how you do business. It seems like Sony Ericsson invested last year’s well earned profit in broadening their portfolio like we’ve never seen before. With todays 6 phones it’s already ELEVEN headsets unveiled in just the first two months of Q1 2006! Most of them being really intresting; some of them being certainly innovative, even revolutionary.
Revolutionary within the brand is the new K800/K790 combo, the first to sport the Cybershot brand (and features) from Sony, and the best camera ever seen in a SE: 3.2 megapixels with Autofocus, Xenon flash, image stabilizer, 16x digital zoom, auto red eye reduction, DPOF and PictBridge direct-to-printer connectivity, and BestPic technology, which takes 9 pictures in a time sequence (4 before and 4 after the actual image captured). The feature set of no less than the K750’s successor goes on: 2.0″ 320×240 pixel 262k color screen (also first timer in SE), 64mb internal memory, Memory Stick M2 slot, Radio FM with RDS, Bluetooth 2.0, Infrared, A/B buttons on top of the screen for horizontal gaming, integrated blogging and picture blogging powered by Blogger, integrated Google Search and RSS feeds. And of course, Walkman music player This bunch of great features need space, and that’s a weight of 115 grams (16 heavier than the K750) and a size of 106 x 47 x 18mm (6mm taller, 2mm wider and a couple mm’s thinner, although the lens cover area adds 4mm to those 18). The difference between K800 and K790? The K800 is UMTS/Triband GSM/GPRS (no EDGE) and has a frontal VGA camera, while the K790 is Triband GSM/EDGE with no 3G and no frontal camera. We’ll have to wait no more than Q2 this year to find them in stores, as K800i and K790i for EMEA, K800c and K790c for China Mainland (GSM900/1800/1900), and K790a for Americas (GSM850/1800/1900). All the official pics of the new flagship candybar and short summary of the rest of them after the jump, and info on the rest of the new products in a little while.
They mention it twice in the review, and the sample photos are indeed 1280×1024 pixels resolution… but their EXIF data reveals they were taken with a K510. Caught! One thing that surprises and pretty much infuriates me is the little effort Sony Ericsson has put in making the icons in the monochrome external display look right. They’re just inverted versions of the positive ones. It just looks so cheap. Bad SE, bad!
The design of this clamshell is unusual – the pictures provoke the feeling of the handset’s disproportion, however in practice, the phone turns out to be a very attractive appearance, owing to its small size (…).
A small mirror, as well as an objective glass of a 1.3 Mpix camera, is placed right above the display. The camera module is made in a common way for Sony Ericsson and doesn’t bring anything new of any innovative solutions(…).
NetFront browser is applied as a standard in phones by Sony Ericsson (…). There is no work with html-pages containing complex formatting, or exceeding 500 Kb in size. In many respects the standard browser is optimum, but use of Opera Mini is more preferable, as it gives more capabilities(…).
Model Sony Ericsson Z530i looks poorer compared to Walkman-series phone, it has worse display [65k color STN-UBC versus 262k color TFT], the memory card is only 64mb, the headphones are similar to ones in Sony Ericsson K750i, which means that they are made of plastic, however it has exchangeable covers. This provides 40-50 euro difference in price(…).
The price of Sony Ericsson Z530i by the end of May and beginning of June will be around 175 Euro, meanwhile W300i will cost around 220-230 Euros.
Sorry, third-parties, all JAVA-enabled Sony Ericssons now have official support from Microsoft to run their new Windows Live Messenger Mobile application. MSN/Windows Messenger site Mess.be found this goodie in a chineese MSN website. Well, actually, functionality may be a little below some other JAVA clients, but if you’re like me and only need your contact list and being able to chat with some few emoticons, you’ll take this Windows Live themed instant messenger over anything else. Apparently these download links (be careful to chose the version for your model) are completely legal and free to download, but after a couple of months they will stop working unless you pay a small unknown monthly fee. Hmm, let’s just enjoy it in the meantime and we’ll talk again in January. Check some screenshots of it running on K800 inside this entry. [Via Mess.be].
If your exact model number isn’t listed here, make sure your phone supports JAVA and then download the version of models using the same screen pixel size.
Tired of my K750’s remote control template for Media Player lacking a couple of functions, I have customized it a bit and thought I should share it with you. As you can see in the background image, it’s the same template but adding the Shuffle, Repeat, Full Screen and Mute functions of Windows Media Player. If your phone has a smaller screen resolution than 176×220 you can resample the image and edit the template with the Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Remote Control application.
We missed this CeBIT report on time, but Olav from Esato.com did a pretty good job posting (big) photos and first-hand impressions of the new Sony Ericssons (and others) from Hannover:
Entry level phones J100, K310, K510, W300/Z530 and W810 [?]: Weighting only 70g makes [the J100] the lightest model ever by Sony Ericsson. (…) An untrained eye could have misstaken the Sony Ericsson K310 with a K700. (…) I was told the new M2 cards could be used with an adapter in older Sony Ericsson models.
Hands on Sony Ericsson M600: This is an exciting new feature found in M600, W950 and P990. The new spell checker. Once you start writing a word, the M600 list the best suggestions. The list of suggested words is based on the sentence content as well as word grammar. Very cool.
P990 showing very cool features: Joseph started typing “Dear ” using the stylus with handwriting recognition. The P990 responded with inserting “Sir” as a suggestion to the next word in the sentence. After clicking on “Sir”, a space was automatically inserted, and the next word “and” was typed. To finish off, P990 suggested “Madam” as the final word when this was typed in “Dear Sir and “. It did not need the “M” to suggest “Madam”. Impressive.
Sony Ericsson K800: The two buttons you see above the display is short cuts to common settings when capturing photos. The give you direct access to scenes and shoot modes
Hands on Sony Ericsson W950: The W950 should be equipped 4GB memory. The file explorer reveals that this prototype only have 64MB installed.
This is Sony Ericsson’s approach to bringing the Walkman experience to the mass market. Apparently that wasn’t the W550/W600, with its better screen and camera (leave that stuff for Cybershots ). The W300 uses a humble 1.8″ 126×160 pixel screen with not-so-humble 262.000 colors, and as you know, the camera is just VGA without flash and 4x digital zoom (although SE’s VGA cameras can interpolate images to megapixel resolution without much quality loss). The external screen, while it is 101×80 pixels and monochrome, shows a cool orange on black background design rather than the old black on gray or blue. The star in the package (and advantage for music users against the W550/W600) is the Memory Stick M2 slot (up to 1gb cards available soon), and the 256mb card included in the box; the internal memory being just 20mb. The side volume keys integrate a play/pause music button, I wonder how tactile they feel; how easy or not is it going to be to press the actual key you want to press. Other features include Radio FM, MegaBass, Bluetooth (doesn’t seem to support A2DP), Infrared, EDGE, Quadband GSM connectivity, and the usual Walkman stereo headphones/handsfree, in either black or gray depending on the color of the handset: Shadow Black or Shimmering White. We’re all fearing that it’s going to be a brick, but despite the bulky looks, at 90 x 47 x 24 mm it weighs the same 94 grams and it’s “only” 7mm taller than the tiny Z520 (which in some way it’s replacing); same width and thickness. But the Z520’s loop antena was huge compared to the W300’s, making it look a lot smaller than in numbers, so let’s wait till Cebit comparison photos for the veredict. Not the most beautiful SE design lately, but it certainly doesn’t hurt anybody to see external memory support in a low/mid range handset, don’t you think? Available all over the globe from Q2 this year.
Some photos have appeared of what seems to be the final design for the first clamshell Walkman, but not much has been improved in the aesthetics deparment since the first spyshots. From the looks of it the features may seem be a little dull —let’s not forget this is the entry level Walkman—, but as we pointed out the first time, it will very probably come with a Memory Stick M2 slot and the same remote control with screen and music buttons as the W900. Could be unveiled on Monday or Tuesday along with the also leaked K800. [Via Se-nse, thanks n3o for posting it]
UPDATE: The rumour says there could be a non-Walkman version (thus the two codenames), although both batches of spyshots show the logo.
A dozen photos have appeared clearly showing a Sony Ericsson Walkman branded little clamshell. I’ve found no info but some people’s comments on this being a low end phone, which just doesn’t make sense to me. The clamshell-like W550/w600 already have the lowest specs a music phone can have, how would they do a Walkman phone with even less memory? For a reason they decided not to produce the 64mb S600. This is a rumour, so here’s my contribution: it has a Memory Stick Micro M2 slot. The camera has no flash, so it probably won’t even be megapixel, and the lack of music buttons suggests the inclusion of the W900 stereo handsfree with remote and LCD screen; all of this making the phone as small as possible, placing it in the Walkman range between the W550/W600 and W800. Now that’s starting to make sense, isn’t it? Check out all the photos in the original post in a Chineese forum, and a compilation of the most representative ones, including a collage of the parts of the phone where I see the M2 slot, after the link below. [Via Engadget and thanks to Bengan_fbk for posting fast]
This bunch of great features need space, and that’s a weight of 115 grams (16 heavier than the K750) and a size of 106 x 47 x 18mm (6mm taller, 2mm wider and a couple mm’s thinner, although the lens cover area adds 4mm to those 18). The difference between K800 and K790? The K800 is UMTS/Triband GSM/GPRS (no EDGE) and has a frontal VGA camera, while the K790 is Triband GSM/EDGE with no 3G and no frontal camera. We’ll have to wait no more than Q2 this year to find them in stores, as K800i and K790i for EMEA, K800c and K790c for China Mainland (GSM900/1800/1900), and K790a for Americas (GSM850/1800/1900). All the official pics of the new flagship candybar and short summary of the rest of them after the jump, and info on the rest of the new products in a little while.
Tired of my K750’s remote control template for Media Player lacking a couple of functions, I have customized it a bit and thought I should share it with you. As you can see in the background image, it’s the same template but adding the Shuffle, Repeat, Full Screen and Mute functions of Windows Media Player. If your phone has a smaller screen resolution than 176×220 you can resample the image and edit the template with the 
