Sony Ericsson this week came out with its response to weakening product sales and the pressure of the iPhone, with a huge emphasis on music with 3 new Walkman music phones, and a list of accessories which leverage off the legendary Sony music quality and introducing new ‘shake’ control for controlling volume and track skipping.
Sony has many of the world’s leading patents for speaker systems with different methods of canceling noise in ear phones, and delivering full stereo speaker sound in stand alone speakers, and it has rolled them all into the new range, designed to give it incremental revenues in the run up to Christmas.
The three phones are simply three stepping stones up the price scale with the W302 the cheapest device at the bottom end, with just a 512MB memory stick, a 2 Megapixel camera and built in FM radio ‘ this will be popular with the cheap end of its new earphone range, and will suit emerging and mass markets because it is only a GSM/EDGE phone. The other two devices the top of the range W902 and the W595, are both 3G dual band with GSM, have a 2.2 inch QVGA scratch resistant screen, offering high quality video and image playback, and have more memory and better cameras ‘ the W902 sports a 5 MP camera and a full 8GB memory stock which will hold 8000 songs, the W595 has 2GB and a 3.2 MP camera.
Although the announcements don’t mention the fact, all of these cameras will be able to buy songs and interact with the company’s increasingly ubiquitous PlayNow portal which can work either with a download to a PC with sideloading or through a cellular link.
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. In June it 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 those devices had access to the PlayNow Arena portal. Effectively in June it refreshed the Camera line of phones, now it’s the music phones turn.
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 Sony owns Gracenote which offers the technology with partner Philips’ watermarking technology, which is used to protect against music piracy. The idea is that your handset can ‘listen’ to any song you hear and link to PlayNow to buy the track or tell you what it is, to buy on a PC later. All three of the new phones have TrackID built in and the two top end devices each have shake control built in, using a motion sensor to enable volume control and track changing with a simple flick of the device.
This is a key strategic move for Sony Ericsson as the iPhone rolls out across the globe, because so far it claims market leadership in music phones with 77 million sold to date (only Nokia claims a slightly higher number), and this is the natural territory for iPhone designs to hit (both the 3G and GSM versions).
The accessories have something of the iPod/iPhone accessory feel about them, mostly Bluetooth connected speakers (dubbed the MBS range) and headsets (dubbed HBH), all with superb music quality where an incoming call pauses the track or turns down the speaker sound. One claims to be the first noise canceling headset that is powered by the phone, cutting out 75% of all ambient noise.
While these devices will certainly sell (prices were not given), there is nothing here in the Sony Ericsson locker that will stop the iPhone invading its markets, and the feeling is that this is a business as usual launch in a world where business is anything but usual, in music and media phones.