Sony Ericsson may have had one bad quarter, perhaps reflecting the slowing handset market which has all but done for Motorola, but it is now falling back on a number of brands and capabilities that it has either borrowed from the Sony side of its parentage, or which it has experimented with, and which are now ready for prime time.
The four legs that Sony Ericsson will build on ‘ the PlayStation, the Sony Cybershot cameras, its recent Gracenote music identification and protection acquisition and its PlayNow portal ‘ are all evident in announcements this week of new devices.
In January Sony Ericsson rebooted its PlayNow portal to include 5 million music tracks, many of them inherited from the now defunct Sony Connect platform which tried to rival iTunes, and added new record labels, a hip new edgy element called Uncut for unsigned artists, and 250 new games from EA Games, Gameloft, and others. Now it has added a new handset designed to be its first gaming handset, with shadows of the PlayStation Portable in the design, a new 8.1 Megapixel Cybershot branded phone, a new handset that uses the Gracenote track ID system, and almost all of them with access to the PlayNow Arena portal.
PlayNow has already launched in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in May and will see expansion within Europe, the Americas and Asia during Q3 and Q4 and reach 30 countries by the end of 2008 and virtually all top end Sony Ericsson handsets will be PlayNow ready.
One of the features of PlayNow has always been TrackID, since it first launched in 2004, but now it owns Gracenote which is the company which with its technology partner Philips’ watermarking technology helps keep track of music piracy. Back then the service was getting 200,000 hits a day and that can only have gone up. Whenever you hear a song you let your phone listen to it for a couple of seconds, and then it will identify it and offer it to you to buy. Gracenote licenses this technology to other music services but how many of them can supply 5 million different tracks? The track purchase can be made on a PC or through the air to the handset.
But the cream of the crop must be the emergence of PlayStation elements in the new Sony Ericsson F305 (the F stands for Fun and this is an entire new genre for Sony Ericsson). It sports a brand new Motion Gaming capability which works almost like the Nintendo Wii, and you move the phone in your hand to do things in-game, like bowling or casting a fishing rod or riding a horse, using advanced motion sensor technology. So if you see some idiot waving his phone around like he’s demented, ask how good the F305 is?
And of course more and more games for this device will come from the PlayNow portal and all of them will use the motion sensor so that when you change the game around, it will follow your orientation on the screen. This is perhaps where the iPhone is hoping to go with games and Nokia with its NGage, but Sony has a phenomenal lead here and more games than you can shake a stick at.
The device has stereo speakers, which also come in handy for sharing the latest track on the media player and a 2 inch screen.
The whole issue with motion sensors is that people think Nintendo invented them. In fact Sony was the first to include a miniature motion sensor in a portable device, but had issues with some other haptics (force feedback) on its devices, getting itself into intellectual property issues (now resolved). All that meant that Sony steered away from using some of these inventions in its PlayStation 3, and PSP and has had to retrofit them. Now at least Sony Ericsson is putting that to rights.
About a year ago a patent filed by Sony made a handset look too much like the PlayStation Portable, with a controller on either side of the device, whereas the F305, has the controls just to one side (the left) and is a slider phone. We expect Sony to continue experimenting with device shape until it gets a hit with a gaming phone and to push on from there.
The massive market lead that Sony has in Charge Couple Devices (the active components in digital cameras) has meant that it has ousted global camera leaders such as Canon, Nikon and Olympus, and taken the lead in world digital and video camera markets. Now it is taking that know how and driving it into its handsets, and the latest is the 8.1 megapixel C905 Cyber-shot.
To highlight this Sony Ericsson has launched the world’s biggest mobile camera competition with a trip worth £10,000 as the prize. This is now an annual event called World View. Last year it had 70,000 entries, and anyone can enter with any picture taken on a handset.
The new C905 has a flash and is being sold as a viable alternative to owning a digital camera and comes with face detection auto-focus, smart contrast and an image stabilizer, to get around camera shake.
Sony is also taking advantage of its own brand memory stick formats, for delivering Flash memory cards for games devices and cameras, and is offering a broadband USB plug in to a PC, which is HSDPA compatible but also doubles as a memory stick.
Finally Sony Ericsson added two entry-level phones the J132 and the K330, with music capability with additional torch functions, FM Radio aimed at developing markets, which use the Track ID service from Gracenote.
We expect Sony Ericsson to continue to leverage the Walkman and all the other Sony brands in its handsets, and that the games phones in particular will stand it in good stead as the handset market tightens up. Last year Sony Ericsson delivered 100 million handsets, which is roughly what Nokia does in a quarter, so it still has a long way to go.