Sony Ericsson: pay no attention to the OS behind the curtain

Few would argue the premise that, in the post-iPhone handset world, the user experience matters most.
Observers at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this week have noted the emphasis of substance over style, and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications executives emphasized that mantra this week as the joint venture launched a bevy of new handsets.
Conversely, few would argue that the new deal between SEMC and Microsoft Corp. to employ the latter’s Windows Mobile operating system on at least one smartphone model was not important, as SEMC executives also emphasized.
Rikko Sakaguchi, SEMC’s strategic planning director, told the International Herald Tribune in Barcelona that “Xperia (a new handset) is related to an experience, not to a particular operating system or platform underneath it.”
Most observers, in contrast, found the announcement interesting precisely for SEMC’s use of Windows Mobile.
SEMC will use the Windows Mobile OS in its launch of the Xperia X1 handset, an arc slider with a three-inch display and QWERTY keypad, due in the second half of the year in “selected markets” – no word yet on United States availability.
SEMC also launched two Cybershot model handsets that may also be destined for the U.S. market. The C702 offers a 3.2 megapixel camera and built-in GPS, which provides location information on resulting photographs. The C902 offers a 5 megapixel camera – the new standard among imaging phones. Both are touted as taking pictures with one hand for ease-of-use. Again, no word on U.S. availability.
SEMC also announced that the W980 handset, with 8 gigabytes of memory, that will work on U.S. spectrum bands; it too is expected in “selected markets” in the third quarter.
Sony Ericsson has been a Symbian investor and licenser is now half-owner, with Motorola Inc., of the Symbian offshoot, UIQ, which is a user interface that runs on the Symbian OS. So any move to employ an additional OS – particularly with Windows Mobile making small-but-steady gains on Symbian’s dominant market share – is noteworthy.
The diversification at SEMC comes as the dominant Symbian owner, Nokia Corp., recently purchased Trolltech and its Linux-based OS – thus diversification of OSs is in the air among several leading smartphone makers as they seek time-to-market advantages in pursuit of the most profitable and fastest-growing segment of the handset industry.