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Four months after announcing they were acquiring UIQ, Sony Ericsson invited other phone vendors to become shareholders of the Symbian interface (press release), to ensure a strong alternative to the S60 platform for everybody and to improve its financial position. Software, telecom and IT consultant OVUM questions the need of this and suggests an alternative: opening its source. They point to several different advantages that make it sounds like a good advise, but probably so did the advise of opening to investors. There’s no “best” strategy, and we wish Sony Ericsson the best of luck with theirs. After all, by not open sourcing a tiny bit of code nor even basing it’s strategy on third party applications, we all know what Apple is going to achieve with the iPhone and succesive iPhone nano’s, micro’s, etc. Here are some extracts from the article:
It could be perceived that Sony Ericsson is trying to have its cake and eat it, by wanting the strategic advantage of owning its own smartphone platform but at the same time wanting other phone vendors to subsidise it. (…)
[Open sourcing] UIQ would also benefit from developments made by other phone vendors using the UIQ framework, lowering its operating costs. OEMs could then make use of these developments without sacrificing their own differentiation. A move to open source by UIQ would also put Nokia under pressure to re-evaluate S60 software licences and fees.
Sony Ericsson is relying on user-generated content to promote their latest Walkman Phone, the W950i. Participants stand to win a chance perform with British radio DJ Zane Lowe live during his Tour, or a brand new phone.
Created by Iris Experience, the campaign calls for users to upload their own remixes of songs, as well as listen to the work of others, at Zane Lowe’s official website. The site’s users will then vote for the best remix and winner (who created the track) wins the chance to play (remix) with Zane himself on the final night of the Sony Ericsson sponsored event, DJ Zane Lowe’s Home Taping Tour. Runners up wouldn’t go ‘home’ empty handed, either: they’ll get a brand new W950i. What’s almost cooler, ringtones and other contents will be available to the users at the gigs via Bluetooth. [Via BrandRepublic and Zane Lowe]
“Nokia shamed by Sony Ericsson in battle for margins” is the title of a report of London-based consultant agency ARCchart in which the differences in philosophy of the eternal enemies Nokia and SE are summarized: while Nokia has veered towards share and shows a strong growth in low-end sales and moderate in high-end, Sony Ericsson has boomed high-end sales while keeping one of the best mid-range portfolios, thanks —in my opinion— key points like the interface, power of the music and camera functions, and the appeal of the Walkman and Cybershot brands.
But aside from the cameraphone sales, what’s interesting is to see how many people actually take photos with them and therefore to see which phones give a better “digital camera” experience. The graphic above made with Flickr stats shows a competition among several Sony Ericssons and Nokias as the most used to take serious shots. We see the K750 as the stable king of cameraphones and the K800 rapidly gaining popularity along with the also relatively nwe Nokia N73.
Which brings us to Quesabesde.com’s comparative (in Spanish) of these two contenders to the K750’s throne, focusing on the cameras, of which I translate some interesting conclusions after the jump:
The Spanish Television and Press Graphic Reporters Association (accronym banned) has awarded the K800 the distinction of the Best Cameraphone of 2006, as an outstanding product that helps the professional photographer optimize his job.
In the United Kingdom, Sony Ericsson has also been awarded by consumers with the Best Manufacturer Of The Year award, the Best Mobile Phone Of The Year award to the K800 —which also was voted the “Readers’ Dream Phone“—, and the Best Music Phone award to the W810.
Finally, the German edition of the Connect magazine granted, with readers’s votes, the awards of Best Cameraphone to the K800 (45,2% of the votes, and the apparently-not-so-old K750 being in third place), Best Music Phone to the W810 (with 59,9% of the votes), Best 3G Phone to the W900, and Best PDA Phone to the P990 (hmm…).
To summarize, Sony Ericsson nowadays seems to be losing the “best phone with wheels and facial hair” category only, or whatever. Unstoppable! [Via Spanish Press Release]
Sony Ericsson, in a surprising movement (at least to me), has decided to acquire the UIQ Technologies division of Symbian. They must have their reasons, but can’t stop thinking one of them surely is the multiple critics that P990 has gotten since its launch. Until now, UIQ couldn’t focus its development in any particular manufacturer, because Symbian is a company owned by multiple cellphone companies, and being so, they must develop a standard product which can be implemented in multiple and very different devices from different brands with minimum modifications software-wise. This approach has its advantages, but it doesn’t come without drawbacks, and one of them is that the interface must work in different kind of terminals, which limits it quite a deal. Having full control over UIQ’s development will enable Sony Ericsson to custom the interface to their likings, making it as good as the one in the rest of the Sony Ericsson terminals.
Another question to pay attention to is whether this could affect UIQ’s popularity between developers. Right now, there are only 3 UIQ 3.0 terminals in the market: the M600, W950 and P990. This is a very low number compared to UIQ 2.x, which was adopted not only by Sony Ericsson, but also by Motorola and BenQ, to name a couple more. The difference translates in the number of UIQ 3.0 users in the market, which is quite lower than UIQ 2.x back at its time. And number of potential users is a very (if not the most) important factor for a software developer, when it comes to decide whether to develop software for that platform or not. And UIQ, without third-party software, doesn’t worth much. Sony Ericsson claims that the rest of the manufacturers will be able to acquire Symbian UIQ licenses just like they have been doing until this moment. The real question is if they will want to do that, once Sony Ericsson decide to adapt UIQ more and more to their devices.
The transaction is expected to be completed over the next few months.
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.
Sony Ericsson is back to the Smartphones Big Guys’ scene, thanks to the P990, M600 and W950. The company has re-entered, after a long absence, at fourth place in the top five smart mobile devices companies in the EMEA market, with a 3% share. This also has had a positive effect on Symbian’s market share in smartphones, which is now at 78.7% (it was 76.6% last year).
It seems that Sony Ericsson is doing it right with its Sony-brand linking strategy for their products, like Walkman and Cyber-shot (and we all hope Handycam soon). Sony Ericsson, with a 43% annual growth rate, has taken the position of the fastest-growing mobile vendor in Q3 2006, a position that Motorola has held since Q1 2005, now with a rate of 39%.
This trend is even clearer in Taiwan’s market, in which Sony Ericsson has surpassed Motorola in sales volume, making it the second company in Taiwan’s handset market (being Nokia the first). With a total of 700,000 Sony Ericsson units sold in Taiwan in the first nine months of this year, the prediction is that it will exceed one million in 2007, something quite feasible knowing that Yeh Shun-fa, president of Sony Ericsson Taiwan, claimed that his company will launch five new models in October.
He who doesn’t know the original won’t get what is a Sony TV set commercial doing in a Sony Ericsson fansite, but the fact is that that one deserved to appear even in a crochet work website. So keeping up the trend it started, we post the new one:
187% increase in before-tax income compared to last year’s Q3, unit sales increase of 43%, sales increased 42%, and market share increased by an important whole one percent, reaching 8%. The average selling price increased to 143€, thanks, predictably, to the following:
Our strategy of using flagship products to give Sony Ericsson a lead position within a product category such as imaging with the Cyber-shot™ megapixel camera phone or music with the Walkman® line-up is creating a halo effect over lower-end models in the same category and encouraging new users to try our phones
Celebrating the 5th birthday of the joint-venture, and all the achievements that made it possible to become the 4th mobile phone manufacturer in the world (and one of the most appealing), SE has started a new campaign featuring the “liquid entity” logo replacing the heart in many “I ♥…” phrases; in what could represent the first tangible result of Sony Ericsson’s recent adoption of Saatchi & Saatchi as their new Global Advertising Agency. It’s not confirmed that the skyscraper-high and suburb ads will make their way from Photoshop phase to reality, but the rest of them will appear on magazines and probably on the walls of the new Sony Ericsson exclusive store in Kensington High Street, London.
Sony Ericsson will do a public live webcast on October 12th to announce Q3 financial results. The host will be Miles Flint, the president itself, so it’s not crazy to think they could announce something else too (certainly NOT the Adriana ).
What happens if you get too enthusiastic after net profit no less than tripling in Q1 of 2006? Your future looks too bright. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic to see Sony Ericsson sales growing at a faster pace than market growth, with their own expectations for 2006 being outpaced by about 30% (too bad LG keeps matching these results by means of some sort of sorcery, putting both companies at fourth position draw in the global market share competition).
But saying all mobile phones are going to have mobile TV in a couple of years, as Miles “Presi” Flint told Reuters, is being far too optimistic. They are testing the MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) technology with operators in Sweden, although they don’t disregard DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld) at all; Flint even thinks about using both at the same time. Haven’t these guys had enough of a hard time trying to keep 3G handsets compact? The thing is that even now, many years after the birth of UMTS, such mobile phones represent a very small percentage of the market, and a small portion of the company’s portfolio, too. How is mobile TV —an old form of one-way entertainment more than a more popular interactive communication— going to win all of our hearts where videoconferencing and broadband access didn’t? It doesn’t make sense to put a TV in every phone if few people actually want it, and even if many do, there will still be a need for handsets without it, just as there is a need for low end phones or handsets without cameras (and SE has proven to know this). If mobile TV is going to be free well… okay, but then again if I have understood it correctly, The President’s statement is not the most realistic.
Do you really eagerly await mobile TV in a future K900 or P1000 more than a 4megapixel camera with optical focus? I don’t.
Anyway, keys to this good results include the ever lasting success of the Walkman line (with already 8 models in the lineup) and will continue thanks to having a flagship in all three strategic areas: music (W950), imaging (K800) and enterprise (P990).
Have you found some interesting news, photos or information? Don't hesitate to tell us by email to Lgcc at clubsonyericsson.com.
Four months after announcing they were acquiring UIQ, Sony Ericsson invited other phone vendors to become shareholders of the Symbian interface (press release), to ensure a strong alternative to the S60 platform for everybody and to improve its financial position. Software, telecom and IT consultant OVUM questions the need of this and suggests an alternative: opening its source. They point to several different advantages that make it sounds like a good advise, but probably so did the advise of opening to investors. There’s no “best” strategy, and we wish Sony Ericsson the best of luck with theirs. After all, by not open sourcing a tiny bit of code nor even basing it’s strategy on third party applications, we all know what Apple is going to achieve with the iPhone and succesive iPhone nano’s, micro’s, etc. Here are some extracts from the article:
Sony Ericsson is relying on user-generated content to promote their latest Walkman Phone, the W950i. Participants stand to win a chance perform with British radio DJ 
The Spanish Television and Press Graphic Reporters Association (accronym banned) has awarded the K800 the distinction of the Best Cameraphone of 2006, as an outstanding product that helps the professional photographer optimize his job. 
Sony Ericsson is back to the Smartphones Big Guys’ scene, thanks to the P990, M600 and W950. The company has re-entered, after a long absence, at fourth place in the top five smart mobile devices companies in the EMEA market, with a 3% share. This also has had a positive effect on Symbian’s market share in smartphones, which is now at 78.7% (it was 76.6% last year).
It seems that Sony Ericsson is doing it right with its Sony-brand linking strategy for their products, like Walkman and Cyber-shot (and we all hope Handycam soon). Sony Ericsson, with a 43% annual growth rate, has taken the position of the fastest-growing mobile vendor in Q3 2006, a position that Motorola has held since Q1 2005, now with a rate of 39%.
Celebrating the 5th birthday of the joint-venture, and all the achievements that made it possible to become the 4th mobile phone manufacturer in the world (and one of the most appealing), SE has started a new campaign featuring the “liquid entity” logo replacing the heart in many “I ♥…” phrases; in what could represent the first tangible result of Sony Ericsson’s recent adoption of 
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