Sony Ericsson to get back on track

The Financial Times recently interviewed Hideki (Dick) Komiyama, president of Sony Ericsson. He admitted things were going bad at Sony Ericsson, but also said how things were being turned around.

What Mobile has for many years moaned to Sony Ericsson about the division of mid-high end handsets, opting to disable camera features on Walkman models and holding back on multimedia functions on Cyber-shot models. The success of Nokia's Nseries, and indeed Sony Ericsson's early releases like the all singing, all dancing T68i (and the T68 under the Ericsson brand before) prove that people don't want to compromise.

Of course, the lack of profitability in the low-end emerging markets, didn't help but we don't pretend to have much knowledge of that segment of the market.

We fully expect that at the Sony Ericsson event on the 28th May, we will see a final announcement on the forthcoming Idou - the 12-megapixel multimedia monster that will use the new Symbian Foundation Operating System. We hope it will be more stable and actually run on the new Symbian Foundation OS instead of a slightly modified version of Nokia's Series 60 5th Edition (on which the Symbian Foundation OS is based). It could also get a proper model number, and have a confirmed release date.

We also believe another Xperia product may be announced, although with Sony Ericsson now admitting the X1 was not the success they hoped (claiming it was "a king of experiment"), we do have to wonder what they're going to do if they keep using Windows Mobile.

The slide below (courtesy of Esato) shows how Sony Ericsson is planning to segment the market. There were also categories mentioned at a recent business meeting, although we don't have full details. You'll have to make of it what you will.

• Sony Ericsson.challenger
  Evolving our core products into high-tier device segment through Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian Foundation products.
  
• Sony Ericsson.frontier
  A new converged mobile and consumer electronics market space that offers competitive differentiation and new value.
  
• Sony Ericsson.local
  Limited and highly focused range of high volume, entry 3G products for selected key emerging markets.

Slide showing the shift towards open operating systems

The slide clearly shows the continued use of Windows Mobile, along with Symbian Foundation, Android and a touchscreen compatible version of the existing Java based UI used on ordinary Sony Ericsson models.

We also hope to start seeing more devices that use Capuchin, as shown last year when we visited Sony Ericsson in Lund, Sweden. Capuchin will allow third parties to develop their own front-end for Sony Ericsson models. Rather than simply developing themes and ringtones, you will be able to create entire Flash-based menu systems, applications, icons and much more - and replace the standard UI with them. Don't like the calculator or clock view now? Simply change it for an all new suite of applications!

The best part will be the flexibility, with virtually every part of the phone - from messaging and email to the phonebook and your media content - accessible to developers. Although not as powerful as Symbian, Windows Mobile or Android, Capuchin should totally revolutionise the non-smartphone market. In fact, it turns a closed operating system into a more open one - and from the slide above it seems that this is exactly the road Sony Ericsson wants to be going down in 2009.

We can hardly wait until the 28th. Until then, you can keep up to date on what's happening on our forum, or over at Esato.com