Sony Ericsson has immersed its mid-range with a spattering of the Cybershot and Walkman brands which previously only top of the range handsets could afford. And in keeping with the way MP3 players are adaptable to cars, it has come out with Bluetooth powered in-car speaker accessories for the Walkman.
The Bluetooth AB900 Car Speakerphone allows you to play favourite tracks while making and receiving calls. The music naturally pauses when you take an incoming call on hands free. The speaker system has 26 hours of talk time 40 days of standby time. Sony Ericsson boasts that car speakerphone can also be used for conference calls. Interestingly MP3 players usually achieve the same trick by outputting a weak local FM radio signal, which a car radio picks up and plays. The Sony Ericsson approach has the benefit of allowing the speakers to be portable in and out of the car.
The new low end Walkman phone is the Sony Ericsson W395 which is a slider with built-in stereo speakers. Like all the more expensive Walkman’s it has access to the PlayNow music services (PlayNow Arena is a pay per track service, PlayNow Plus is the MusicStation subscription service) depending upon where you are. It has the familiar equalizer, what it calls stereo widening (which accentuates the stereo effect) a 1GB memory card, FM radio and of course the Sony Ericsson owned TrackID for identifying any music heard anywhere and allowing you to acquire it over the air. The device has 8 hours talk time and 480 of standby with over 12 hours listening time. Make no mistake this is a cheap stab at the 2G iPhone and going on past performance of the Walkman devices, it will perform far better.
The company doesn’t actually give a price but talks about it being its most affordable Walkman to date and it is purely a 2G phone for GSM, GPRS and Edge and it is available later this quarter.
The other brand reaching down the price curve for Sony Ericsson is the Cybershot brand, the most popular digital camera in the world, rapidly becoming one of the most popular camera handsets through the new C903. This comes in both 2G an 3G versions, available next quarter.
This one only has a 5 megapixel camera, compared to its bigger brother’s 8.1 megapixel, but has all the electronics ‘ the Face Detection feature in particular is about ensuring up to three faces are in focus even if they are at different distances from the camera, and the Smile Shutter which waits until it detects the pattern that the camera believes is a smile on all three faces and then just clicks. It also has a feature called BestPic where you can shoot 9 pictures in quick succession and then pick the best and delete the rest.
The Cybershot 903 also has a movement sensor to pick up rotation, and responds by changing the screen from vertical to horizontal. And as GPS is becoming more and more standard on camera phones to locate where you took the pictures, so the C903 has that built in too. It also has a TV out plug so that pictures can be viewed on the TV screen.
Once again this is a mid-range phone, but it won’t have any concrete prices until a local operator announces it, but this is all part of the process of driving more and more function down into cheaper and cheaper devices, to kickstart the handset market.