Bored with the buttons on your current phone and their limited functions?
Sony Ericsson says its new cellphones will features an Infinite Button that can connect you to your friends, photos, music, videos and more. Well, it will do this if it can actually deliver the phones with the buttons next year.
The joint venture between two venerable electronics giants is one of the many cellphone companies to entirely miss the rapid transition of the market to smartphones. It did well for a while selling CyberShot camera phones and Walkman music phones in Europe and Asia, but it never got much of a foothold in the United States. And sales have fallen sharply, with worldwide market share falling to 4.7 percent in the second quarter, down from 7.5 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner.
Times are tough for the company. It announced Wednesday that it would eliminate 1,600 jobs worldwide and move its United States headquarters from Raleigh, N.C., to Atlanta. That’s after losing 402 million euros ($602 million) in the first nine months of year.
The road back to profit and success, the company argues, now will come from new software for smartphones it calls Nexus, featuring the Infinite Button. When it started designing the software a year ago, Sony Ericsson decided the key feature it wanted to build was a way for people to integrate all their communication by e-mail, text, and through various social networking sites.
It turns out that is the same idea that lots of other smartphone companies had, including Palm, HTC, and Motorola.
Steve Walker, the vice president for planning the company’s portfolio of phones, argued that Nexus was distinctive because it linked areas that Sony was strong in — photos, music and video — with social networking.
“What social networking does is force the merger of entertainment and communication,” Mr. Walker said. “You listen to music, then you post your playlist to Twitter. The next minute, your friend downloads a song from a music store. Everything is mashed up into one.”
The Infinite Button is actually a small infinity sign that appears on a lot of the screens on the phone. When it’s next to a person, tap it and you’ll see a lot of the other information about that person—e-mail, text, social network updates and photos both on the phone and on linked photo-sharing Web sites.
If you push the same button when you are listening to a song, you will see other music by the artist you own, tracks for sale on Sony’s online store, YouTube videos of the artist, future concert dates, and so on.
Whatever context you are in at the time, the Infinite Button will provide infinite opportunities that relate to that thing, Mr. Walker said.
While much of this may be more sizzle than steak, Sony Ericsson promises one trick that could well impress your friends: photo recognition. Once you associate one snapshot with a name, the phone will find all the other pictures on the phone with a face that matches. And then the Infinite Button will appear on photos, allowing you to tap a face and see everything else you know about that person.
Interestingly, Sony’s Nexus software lives entirely on the cellphone itself. Some handset makers, like HTC, have taken that approach. But others including Palm and Motorola have added Web-based services that handle some of the work of integrating various messages.
The only handset Sony has announced that will use this new software is the Experia X10, which will be introduced early next year. That is a high-end model with an 8.1 megapixel camera and a 4.0 inch screen that uses Google’s Android operating system. In Sweden, the phone will cost 6,000 Swedish kronor or about $860. The price hasn’t been set yet in other markets.
Mr. Walker said that the company hoped to introduce other less expensive smartphones that use the Nexus software as well. Like Samsung and HTC, Sony Ericsson sees Nexus as an interface that it will put on its phones regardless of the operating system. The company also makes phones using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems.
Mr. Walker declined to say if the X10 or any of the other phones would be supported by carriers in the United States. Sony Ericsson has had trouble getting distribution in this country and has sold a number of phones through Sony stores to people willing to forgo a subsidy from a carrier. Since the company makes phones that only use the GSM standard, that leaves AT&T and T-Mobile as the only possible carriers.
There is at least one clue about Sony’s aspirations. It chose Atlanta for its new United States headquarters because that is the headquarters of AT&T’s wireless unit.
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Sony Ericsson says its new cellphones will features an Infinite Button that can connect you to your friends, photos, music, videos and more. Well, it will do this if it can actually deliver the phones with the buttons next year.
The joint venture between two venerable electronics giants is one of the many cellphone companies to entirely miss the rapid transition of the market to smartphones. It did well for a while selling CyberShot camera phones and Walkman music phones in Europe and Asia, but it never got much of a foothold in the United States. And sales have fallen sharply, with worldwide market share falling to 4.7 percent in the second quarter, down from 7.5 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner.
Times are tough for the company. It announced Wednesday that it would eliminate 1,600 jobs worldwide and move its United States headquarters from Raleigh, N.C., to Atlanta. That’s after losing 402 million euros ($602 million) in the first nine months of year.
The road back to profit and success, the company argues, now will come from new software for smartphones it calls Nexus, featuring the Infinite Button. When it started designing the software a year ago, Sony Ericsson decided the key feature it wanted to build was a way for people to integrate all their communication by e-mail, text, and through various social networking sites.
It turns out that is the same idea that lots of other smartphone companies had, including Palm, HTC, and Motorola.
Steve Walker, the vice president for planning the company’s portfolio of phones, argued that Nexus was distinctive because it linked areas that Sony was strong in — photos, music and video — with social networking.
“What social networking does is force the merger of entertainment and communication,” Mr. Walker said. “You listen to music, then you post your playlist to Twitter. The next minute, your friend downloads a song from a music store. Everything is mashed up into one.”
The Infinite Button is actually a small infinity sign that appears on a lot of the screens on the phone. When it’s next to a person, tap it and you’ll see a lot of the other information about that person—e-mail, text, social network updates and photos both on the phone and on linked photo-sharing Web sites.
If you push the same button when you are listening to a song, you will see other music by the artist you own, tracks for sale on Sony’s online store, YouTube videos of the artist, future concert dates, and so on.
Whatever context you are in at the time, the Infinite Button will provide infinite opportunities that relate to that thing, Mr. Walker said.
While much of this may be more sizzle than steak, Sony Ericsson promises one trick that could well impress your friends: photo recognition. Once you associate one snapshot with a name, the phone will find all the other pictures on the phone with a face that matches. And then the Infinite Button will appear on photos, allowing you to tap a face and see everything else you know about that person.
Interestingly, Sony’s Nexus software lives entirely on the cellphone itself. Some handset makers, like HTC, have taken that approach. But others including Palm and Motorola have added Web-based services that handle some of the work of integrating various messages.
The only handset Sony has announced that will use this new software is the Experia X10, which will be introduced early next year. That is a high-end model with an 8.1 megapixel camera and a 4.0 inch screen that uses Google’s Android operating system. In Sweden, the phone will cost 6,000 Swedish kronor or about $860. The price hasn’t been set yet in other markets.
Mr. Walker said that the company hoped to introduce other less expensive smartphones that use the Nexus software as well. Like Samsung and HTC, Sony Ericsson sees Nexus as an interface that it will put on its phones regardless of the operating system. The company also makes phones using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems.
Mr. Walker declined to say if the X10 or any of the other phones would be supported by carriers in the United States. Sony Ericsson has had trouble getting distribution in this country and has sold a number of phones through Sony stores to people willing to forgo a subsidy from a carrier. Since the company makes phones that only use the GSM standard, that leaves AT&T and T-Mobile as the only possible carriers.
There is at least one clue about Sony’s aspirations. It chose Atlanta for its new United States headquarters because that is the headquarters of AT&T’s wireless unit.
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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