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The joint venture between Sony and Ericsson has finally borne fruit as Sony Ericsson released a number of new handsets and other products on Tuesday.
The release of the new products is sure to put pressure on market leader Nokia, which says it will launch 20 phones this year but has yet to ship a handset with a colour screen. The volley of new products from Sony Ericsson comes just five months after the creation of the firm.
The Japanese-Swedish company says it wants to displace Nokia as the top maker of mobile phones in the next five years. But combined the two companies controlled less than 10 percent of the worldwide handset market in 2001, versus Nokia's more than 33 percent share.
A spokesperson for Sony Ericsson said pricing details for the new models were not available and would vary from country to country. He also said that the firm's latest phones should be available in Ireland in matter of weeks.
The T68i, which will hit the market right away, is a mobile phone that includes a digital camera allowing it to take pictures and send them as MMS messages or e-mails. The T68i also comes with Bluetooth technology, allowing for image transfer from phone to phone, or phone to PC. It also comes with a full colour screen that acts a viewfinder for the camera. The phone can store as many as 200 pictures.
The company's next model is the P800, which also comes with a large colour touch-screen, in-built camera and Bluetooth connectivity. But this device allows users to also download video clips. Moreover the P800 is also a personal organiser running on Symbian OS v7.0. It can handle daily operations such as calendar, e-mail, address book and to-do-lists. All of these features can also be synchronised with most common office applications on a PC such as Powerpoint, Word or Excel.
"The P800 symbolises what we mean by mobile multimedia products, a phone that will change the way people communicate and that will help people create new ways of expression and interaction," said Katsumi Ihara, president of Sony Ericsson. The phone will hit the European market later this year.
Finally Sony Ericsson released the Z700 gaming phone for European users. The device combines a colour screen, Java, Bluetooth, and fast GPRS connection to create an ideal tool for playing games on a mobile device. The Z700 comes pre-loaded with Men in Black and Charlie's Angels games, and will be on the market during Q3.
The Z700 also comes with an HTML browser and sound recorder for creating polyphonic ringtones.
Other products released by the firm include its portable Bluetooth handsfree headset and GC75, a triple-band GSM data modem for laptop computers. Its line of phones for the North American market includes the T206 GPS phone, the T63u and the T61g.
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