last100 » Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson “explains” Satio battery discretion

Steve O'Hear — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:48:06 +0000

And I believe in the tooth fairy.

Some stories are best left alone but that hasn’t stopped Sony Ericsson (or me) from following up on my original story — Is Sony Ericsson short changing Satio users? — regarding why the company’s flagship Satio smartphone appears to be shipping with a smaller battery than the one in the possession of Anders Westin, Sony Ericsson’s Head of Software Relations, Symbian Software.

On Friday a Sony Ericsson PR rep called (and emailed) to explain that there had been a misunderstanding. Apparently Anders’ Satio does have the same sized battery as the retail version — 1000mAh — but that the “first ‘0′ had been scraped half off, so it looked like a ‘3’.”

Ahh, that explains it then.

Although I’m sure I recall Anders saying it was a 1350mAh not a 1300mAh, which would require two numbers to have been defaced. And, as one colleague pointed out, it’s pretty hard to scratch a battery that spends most of its life living under a battery cover. But what do I know?

(Wish me luck next time I request a Sony Ericsson review unit.)

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Is Sony Ericsson short changing Satio users?

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:29:20 +0000

I’ve just got back from the Symbian Exchange and Exposition (SEE09) at London’s Earls Court where I had a one-on-one press briefing with Anders Westin, Sony Ericsson’s Head of Software Relations, Symbian Software.

We had an interesting chat about the company’s “commitment” to Symbian, whether or not Sony Ericsson can continue to afford to support a multi-platform smartphone strategy (Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile), and the issue of app store fragmentation. I was quite direct in my questioning and Westin kindly played game.

However, it was when I raised some of my criticism of the company’s flagship Symbian smartphone, the just-released Satio, that things turned a little odd.

I asked a very simple question: Why did Sony Ericsson ship such a small capacity battery – 1000mAh – with the Satio, a 3.5 inch touch screen device with serious Internet ambitions and one that sports a power-hungry 12.1 megapixel camera? Battery life on the Satio isn’t great.

“1000mAh?”, Westin replied. “Don’t you mean 1350mAh?”.

At which point he pulled the back cover off of his Satio to reveal a 1350mAh battery inside.

To say I was stumped would be an understatement. I’ve had access to a retail version of the Satio bought from Carphone Warehouse here in the UK for a couple of weeks now and I was sure that said device ships with a 1000mAh battery. Maybe I was wrong.

After leaving the briefing I bowled up to the Sony Ericsson stand on the exhibition floor where the Satio was on show and inquired about battery capacity. “1000mAh” was the reply. When I returned home, I also checked our Satio again.

Yep, 1000mAh.

Is this a case of Sony Ericsson not eating their own dog food? And if the Satio has room for a much needed higher capacity 1350mAh battery, why isn’t the company shipping it with one?

All theories welcome.

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Back from the Sony Ericsson Satio launch – first impressions

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:21:49 +0000

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a really fun Sony Ericsson launch party – a kind of rebranding of sorts underpinned by the slogan ‘make.believe’ and used to officially launch the company’s new flagship Satio handset. The night also involved a fantastic live musical performance: A modern interpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, co-produced by Goldie (and others), featuring artists such as Miss Dynamite and Kano accompanied by The Bays and The Heritage Orchestra.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the tech. Here are my first (brief) impressions of the Sony Ericsson Satio.

The 3.5 inch touch screen device is much more svelte in real life than photos suggest. And the protruding lense cover protecting that headline grabbing 12 megapixel camera is a lot more subtle too. It gives the impression of being practical but also adds a defining design cue that I really liked.

The Satio is a lot lighter than you’d expect too but feels very solid and of high build quality. There was no obvious weak spots in the casing from my brief hands-on. Aside from the camera’s specs, the other standout feature is the screen itself. While it’s resistive (and we all know how I feel about resistive screens), it has an nHD (640 x 360 pixels ) resolution and in the dimly lit night club where the event took place, simply looked stunning.

On the software side, Sony Ericsson’s starting point is Symbian S60 5th edition – think Nokia’s Xpress Music 5800 or to some degree the N97 – but they’ve redesigned the UI for some of the phone’s key applications, such as its media features where it borrows from the PlayStation’s XMB UI, for example (see the video above). It’s a big improvement over standard S60 5th but it falls down in that SE haven’t given the same treatment to other parts of the OS. The device on show was also not the latest firmware I was told and it definitely had a few software bugs, which was a little disconcerting so close to release, although I was assured that many of these kinks have already been ironed out. Watch this space for a full review soon.

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Friday’s Internet TV news links: Flip, Sony Ericsson, HDMI, Android, and more

Steve O'Hear — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:15:46 +0000

Here are few links for some Friday/weekend reading. All Internet TV-related.

Next-gen HDMI Turns your TV into an Internet Hub. New HDMI standard to carry Ethernet connectivity meaning that an Internet-connected TV could act as a hub: “Instead of a having tangled mess of cables behind your TV, the HDTV itself will act as an Internet hub for all those wired goodies in your living room.” (PC World)
Video recording on G1 (Cupcake update). New version of Google’s Android mobile OS adds video recording capability, paving the way for support for live video streaming services, such as Qik. (Digitalwerks)
Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena movie download service ready for June launch. “Direct on-phone downloads over WiFi or 3G would be awesome, but as most of these services tend to operate, PlayNow Arena will require that users select and download movies on their PCs, cable up their phones, and transfer the media the old-fashioned way…” (Engadget Mobile)
The Streaming Content Is There, Just Not Enough People Watching It — Yet. Dan Rayburn gives a great overview of the limited penetration of Internet TV services and hardware. (GigaOm)
D7 Video: Pure Digital Demo. Pure Digital (Flip) have demoed a new online video sharing site that aims to be easier to use than YouTube for sharing and viewing home videos with friends and family. A range of playback devices are said to be supported not just a PC. (AllThingsD)

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MWC: Five handsets that caught my eye

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:00:32 +0000

This week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona has seen a flurry of handset announcements boasting, amongst other features, more megapixels, support for HD video, OLED screens and touchscreen UIs. Here’s five handsets that caught my eye.

Samsung Omnia HD

Not content with competing on megapixels alone, the Omnia HD, as the name suggests, is the first smartphone to both record and playback High Definition video. And that’s proper High Def (720p) unlike the slightly misleadingly named Touch HD from HTC. However, there’s much, much more to like about the Omnia HD, not least its 3.7″ AM OLED touch screen, which if the screen on Nokia’s N85 is anything to go by (I have one on loan right now), will be absolutely stunning. The device also has full DLNA certification, meaning that it’s possible to share media shot or stored on the handset with other UPnP AV devices, such as a PlayStation 3 connected to a High Definition TV.

OS-wise, the Omnia HD uses the latest Symbian OS and the touch-friendly version of S60, although Samsung have customized the home screen quite a bit, including various widgets as first seen on the Tocco.

Nokia N86

The successor to the N85, Nokia’s N86 bumps up the phone’s camera specs to 8 megapixels and features a wide-angle Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, with claims to SLR-like quality. There’s the usual N-series goodness too, such as access to all of Nokia’s Ovi web services (share on Ovi, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music Store, Contacts), along with support for the company’s N-Gage gaming platform, including dedicated gaming keys. As well as being a general upgrade from the N85 – utilizing the same 2.6 inch AM OLED screen – a welcome addition is the kick stand, a feature borrowed from the flagship N96 (see my BBC iPlayer on N96 review).

HTC Touch Diamond 2

With the successor to the Touch Diamond (see our review), HTC’s Touch Diamond 2 continues in its attempt to put a finger-friendly UI on top of the aging Windows Mobile 6.1. This time round, however, HTC claims that its TouchFlo 3D UI goes a little deeper and that users should be able reach a lot more of the phone’s software features before being dropped into the standard and non-finger friendly Windows Mobile. To assist in its finger-friendly-ness, the size of the touch screen has been increased from 2.8 to 3.2 inches with WVGA (480 X 800 pixel) resolution. A neat looking feature is the new ‘zoom bar’, a touch sensitive area below the screen that can be swiped in order to zoom in and out of web pages and other documents, similar to the Palm Pre’s gesture bar. Additionally, the camera has been upgraded to 5 megapixels.

HTC Magic

Another new device from HTC, this time the Magic runs the Google-led Android OS and is the second phone of its kind following the G1. The HTC Magic differs from the G1 in a number of ways, most notably ditching the slide out keyboard for an onscreen virtual QWERTY a la iPhone. T-Mobile has been replaced in favor of Vodafone as the time-limited exclusive carrier, and the phone’s camera software has been upgraded to include video recording capability. The HTC Magic is also a lot thinner than the G1 and overall looks quite stylish in comparison.

Sony Ericsson Idou

Even though this one wreaks of vaporware – even the Idou name isn’t final – Sony Ericsson’s latest handset announcement has some headline grabbing specs.

First up is the phone’s 12.1 megapixel camera. And while megapixels alone don’t guarantee good photos, it carries the Cybershot branding, so it’s likely to be decent enough. The Idou is another touchscreen affair — see the trend? — and when finished will utlize the new open source version of Symbian. From the looks of things, Sony Ericsson have put their own eye candy (and there’s plenty of it) on top of Symbian/S60, and from early hands-on videos the UI is both pretty and responsive. Hardware-wise, the handset is unsurprisingly thin, as you’d expect from a flagship SE device.

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Sony Ericsson dumping Windows Mobile for Android-powered Xperia?

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:17:00 +0000

Sadly, my T-Mobile G1 – the so-called Google phone powered by the Android OS — has to be returned tomorrow (it was only a one week loan) but at least we know that there’s plenty more to come.

The Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the industry consortium setup to oversee and lend support to the Google-led Android mobile operating system, has added 14 new members. The most notable of which are Sony Ericsson, who have reportedly confirmed that a new high end device powered by Android will be released next year, alongside mobile carrier Vodafone, as well as Garmin, who’ll likely utilize Android in a new GPS-based navigational device rather than a cell phone.

Sony Ericsson join the original thirty strong lineup, which also includes other handset makers HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola and Samsung, but not Apple, RIM, Palm or Nokia who have all invested heavily in their own competing mobile operating systems.

Sony Ericsson Xperia 2 to ditch Windows Mobile for Android?

When Sony Ericsson announced its new flagship Xperia 1, the first handset from the company to use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Operating System, we described the device as “minimalist sexy” and a serious challenge to Apple in the smart phone looks department. That was largely matched by the hardware specs, which includes a 3-inch VGA touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard in a metal-finish “arc-slider” design. However, while most reviews have heaped praise on the Xperia’s industrial design (despite repeated requests, we’ve yet to get our hands on the device), as we feared, the phone is ultimately let down by poor software that, like HTC’s attempts, tries to mask the aging Windows Mobile operating system.

Enter Android.

Report: HTC’s Android-powered “Google phone” may be delayed after all

Daniel Langendorf — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:08:23 +0000

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Developing a phone — even if it is just an operating system — is not something you do overnight with a bunch of cajoled software developers.

Just a week after High Tech Computer (HTC) said it was on schedule to deliver Android-powered cell phones by the 4Q of 2008, another report surfaces Thursday that says HTC is “having structural problems to incorporate Google’s demand feature set” and “demanding a guaranteed minimum revenue surety from Google,” according to Barron’s Tech Trader Daily.

Barron’s picked up a research note from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research saying his “contacts” contend that HTC’s Android handset — the so-called Google phone — will be delayed until the first quarter of 2009.

Additionally, Chowdhry’s “contacts” tell him that another problem Google is having is attracting software developers to the platform. They’re too busy writing code for Windows Mobile, Nokia (Symbian), Research in Motion (BlackBerry), and Apple’s iPhone.

That’s no surprise. These guys actually have phones, real working phones, to develop for and test.

And while we’re on the subject of handset manufacturers, where’s mention of everybody else besides HTC? HTC, the world’s leading maker of smart phones as an ODM, has publicly stated it plans to come out in 2008 with an Android phone. Google swears there will be Android this year.

But what about Samsung? Or Motorola? Or LG? They’re supposedly going to deliver Google phones in 2009, but how’s that going? Sony Ericsson has fallen on hard times lately, so it’s conceivable that it’s worrying about its own problems, not the Gphone.

And let’s not forget that, while Apple has received mostly praise for the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 software update, the grand opening of the Apps Store, and the arrival of third-party applications for the platform, there’s still a lot of complaints about the OS crashing and buggy first-gen apps. It hasn’t been a super-smooth road for Apple, either.

So why do we think that HTC — or anybody else for that matter — is going to introduce an Android-powered phone in the 4Q of 2008? If someone does, chances are it will be a Gphone, loaded with Google apps, because from what we see there’s not even a hint of an Apps Store-like place for users to buy third-party applications written for the platform.

It’s not that I’m against a Google phone. Far from it. The cell phone world, especially in the U.S., needs Google, and Apple. These two can challenge other manufacturers to develop innovative new phones and together (hopefully) they can knock the siloed, we-don’t-really-want-openness-and-change carriers on their keisters.

Google should have developed its own damn phone. And even then, there’s no guarantee it would be ready for 4Q 2008.

Illustration credit: Android wallpaper, samuraispy on flickr

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HTC launches first true iPhone competitor just as Apple is about to take its phone to next level

Daniel Langendorf — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:02:20 +0000

It’s about time. Well, sort of.

Taiwanese smart phone manufacturer HTC launched the Touch Diamond today and, as expected, it’s small, sleek, sexy, very iPhone-esque, and promising.

Unfortunately for those of us in the U.S. or Latin America, the Diamond will not be available until the second half of 2008. If you’re in European markets, the phone begins shipping in June, followed by Asia and the Middle East.

As you know, much has been said about the iPhone since its launch last June. Ever since then, any phone released by any manufacturer is compared with the iPhone.

But so far, no one has come close to the iPhone’s design, interface, usability, user experience, and overall satisfaction, although Nokia’s offerings are popular. One “phone” promised to take on the iPhone, but the so-called Gphone, running Google’s mobile operating system Android, hasn’t been released by any manufacturer yet, it isn’t expected until the fourth quarter, and is completely untested in the market.

The Touch Diamond certainly has impressive specs — a 2.8-inch, 680×480 VGA display, quad-band, 3G, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, HSDPA support, a 3.2-megapixel camera, 4GB internal storage, 256MB flash memory, 192MB RAM, and SD external storage. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and a full Web browser in Opera. And, as previously stated, its darn attractive.

But without having one to play with, it’s impossible to say how the Touch Diamond stacks up to the iPhone experience. For sake of argument, let’s hope HTC’s new phone is compelling and scares the pants off Apple in the name of competition.

Chances of that happening, however, are slim as Apple is about to move into the next phase of the iPhone’s life — as evidenced by all the rumors of the coming 3G phone, expected to be announced in early June with availability following shortly thereafter.

If Apple has played its hand right, the iPhone is poised to enter 2.0-land far ahead of everybody else, especially with a 3G offering, enterprise support, and third-party applications coming soon. HTC, Nokia, Gphone makers, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and BlackBerry have yet to even hit with successful 1.0 products.

Apple also has a marketing and publicity advantage in the U.S., where Nokia is well known but doesn’t sell as many phones as it does worldwide. HTC has almost no name recognition, although it is slowly gaining in prominence.

While the HTC Touch Diamond appears to be a compelling product worthy of challenging the iPhone, we’ll have to wait and see it in action here in the States. And by then, iPhone 2.0 will be out. Will anybody even remember HTC?

Additional coverage: engadget, gizmodo, Cnet.

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