Probably the most anticipated phone from Sony Ericsson for years has been the new Xperia X10, and now it has a baby brother and sister in the form of the X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro. The only differences between the two are that the Pro has a slide out qwerty keypad, is slightly larger, and is available in Black and red rather than all the other colours for the regular mini shown below. First hands on tests show this phone is fast and pretty much good to go (click here for a hands on test video). These two touch screen Android phones feature Sony Ericsson’s new signature application Timescape™ which brings all communication together in one place so users can see at a glance text messages, missed calls, and Facebook™ and Twitter updates, without having to open lots of different applications.  The interactive music player also uses an “infinite button” to pull together all music content from the music store and YouTube™ – a smart way to search for new tracks from a favourite artist. The phones will be available for release in the second quarter of this year. Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. If they live up to the hype the X10 range will be the phones that secure Sony Ericsson’s future as one of the world’s top handset manufacturers.   Main Specs:

• Android 1.6 operating system, with 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor
• 5mp camera.
• 4 Custom corner shortcut keys
• 2.5-inch QVGA touchscreen
• WiFi, Bluetooth (A2DP),
• Micro USB connector and 3.5mm headphone jack
• Sony Ericsson Timescape™, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®,
• A-GPS, Android Market™, Google Talk™, Google Voice Search™
• 128mb built in memory, 2GB microSD™ memory card inc in box

For the full Sony Ericsson press release click here 

         Sony Ericsson very kindly lent me their new Entertainment Unlimited branded phone called the Aino over the festive season and so I thought I would finally share with you my thoughts on it. To make things simple I have broken it down into my likes and dislikes. Likes: Firstly the Aino has a fab 3” hi-res touch screen, when the slider is closed the touch screen works very well allowing you to easily browse pictures, music, movies or radio. The keyboard and user interface are up the usual easy and logical to use Sony Ericsson standards. The phone also comes with a nice built in 8GB  Micro SD card, great Bluetooth headphones (great speakerphone too) and a very neat charging dock. It was also very easy to connect up to my laptop and sync all the contacts as well as working great as a mobile modem (wireless or wired took only a few minutes to set up). I didn’t get a chance to try out the Playstation 3 remote play feature, I’m more of an Xbox chap, but this feature allows you to stream music and films stored on your PS3 wirelessly to your Aino anywhere in the world !. Finally the Aino is also remarkably durable, after a couple of months heavy use it doesn’t even have a scratch on it.  Dislikes: The only slight problem with this phone is that the touch screen is for some reason deactivated when you slide out the keypad. Every person I showed it to tried to use the touch screen to navigate from around the menu, including me the first time. I guess once you know though you soon forget about it, but still think its a bit odd. The only other problem was when I first had the phone the software was very buggy, however after a week I updated it and now it’s been behaving nicely. Overall: A great phone if you want to get a touch screen / number keypad smart cellphone. The camera works well (see pics above) and as an entertainment unlimited phone I can honestly say its lives up to its name. More apps are constantly being released and the phone comes pre-loaded with facebook, Google maps and a nice selection of games. For full stats see below: Aino Touch Phone Specs

• 3 inch widescreen 16:9 touch screen and slide out Keypad
• 8.1 megapixel camera with Photo flash and intuitive touch focus, Video VGA 25fps
• Bluetooth™ stereo A2DP portable headphones included with docking base for phone/headphones
• 55MB Phone memory and 8GB MicroSD memory card included
• Remote Play for PLAYSTATION®3, Exchange ActiveSync®
• A-GPS with Google Maps™
• 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi, (Quad-band GPRS/EDGE and tri-band HSDPA)
• Talk Time: 13 hours, Standby time: 380 hours
• Dimensions: 104 x 50 x 15.5 mm, Weight: 134.0g
• PlayNow™ arena and Track id, Built in Step Counter and GPS tracker
• DLNA Certified™ (connect wirelessly to other electronic devices via Wi-Fi. i.e: See your photos on your TV)
• Media Go: Transfer your files from PC to phone wirelessly & automatically when docked (using Wi-Fi)

Sony Ericsson’s global Hopper Invasion campaign is well underway and thought it about time to give you an update on it (I first wrote about it here). The campaign promotes their new Entertainment Unlimited range of phones, namely the Satio, Aino and Yari. It all started a few months ago with a teaser site allowing people to create their own personalised online hoppers and a promo video showing 500 hoppers being let loose in Barcelona. They then did an online flash mob by taking over the yahoo.co.uk site for an afternoon using the personalised hoppers created by users online. (click here to see that) Next they created a fun interactive concept using twitter (with a unique hashtag), a warehouse full of deflated hoppers hooked up to pumps, and a dedicated website showing live video feeds from the warehouse. The general idea is that each time anyone on twitter types #pumpt the tweet is picked up at the warehouse and a hopper is given a burst of air in real time, all visible on the hopper website. The warehouse will stop pumping up hoppers on the 6th December and in the meantime Sony Ericsson are asking participants to tweet ideas for what to do with them. They will then pick the best one and make it happen. So far its becoming a great success, over 240,000 online hoppers have been created, and after just 7 days over 400 hoppers in the warehouse have been pumped up, and the #pumpt hash tag has been a trending topic on twitter. To follow the Hopper campaign on twitter click here, or to see the hopper live feed click here. (They also have nice Facebook and Picasa profiles set up)

Last week I was kindly invited to a Nokia roundtable event called “The way we live next 3.0”. The event was held at the new One & Only hotel in Cape Town and Nokia invited Missing Linking entrepreneur and legend Richard Mulholland to be the guest speaker. He shared his vision on the latest trends in the mobile space and where he sees these trends going in the future. The short of it was that mobile phones/devices will eventually replace computers and that for companies and leaders to be successful they will have to heed Alvin Toffler’s wise words: “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The other speaker was Nokia’s product marketing manager Patrick Henchie who talked about Nokia’s vision of what the future (see video above) and how mobility might evolve. Nokia also introduced us to some future products and let us have a play;

• N900: This is the first Nokia phone to run on the open source OS Maemo. Its basically a 3.5” touch screen phone with slide out keyboard. My brief impression was its a step in the right direction but still not an iPhone (and a bit fat). For the specs PDF click here.
• X6 touch phone: I didn’t get to play with this for too long but it was my favourite product on show. Its a 3.5” capacitive touch screen phone. It runs Nokia’s symbian OS and it just worked great. Also when you get the phone you get access to unlimited free music downloads from the Nokia Ovi Store (For the phone only but still is a great bonus and the phone has 32GB internal memory).
• Nokia Booklet 3G: This new Nokia laptop is pretty exiting, its made from a single piece of machined aluminium and feels great. It has shortcuts to the Ovi store and maps built in, as well as an integrated 3G HSPA modem. The machine runs Windows 7, has a 10.1” screen and has an incredible battery life of up to 12 hours. After a little play I thought it was very sluggish, but then I turned off the power saving mode and it worked fine. Great bit of kit if you travel lots and want to use it to access cloud services and do some light work on the go. For the specs PDF click here.

Overall the event was a great initiative and I liked the way they made the sessions intimate with only about 15 influential journalists, developers and bloggers invited, it gave us the chance to interact very easily with the speakers and products. On another note thanks to Olga from Nokia South Africa for inviting me even though she knew I’m a Sony Ericsson fan !   

Recently there has been a lot of rumours floating around for Sony Ericsson’s first Android based touch phone, code named Rachael (or possibly X3 or even X10?). Yesterday this teaser site was released and seems to relate to project Rachael in its source code. Details are thin but I have added some pics below of spy shots of the phone and some as yet unconfirmed specs. I want one. Sony Ericsson Rachael Specs:

• 16 GB internal memory
• Wi-Fi, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA 3G data, Bluetooth 2.0
• A-GPS
• GSM Quad-band
• 8MP autofocus camera
• 3.5mm Headphone socket
• Mini USB jack (for charging and media)
• Micro SD / Micro SDHC Memory Slot
• Android 2.0 SE customised touch Operating System
• Li-Polymer Battery
• Processor: Snapdragon 1 GHz Processor with dedicated 3D graphics
• 4″ capacitive WVGA touch screen

Love this little spot for UK phone store “The Carphone Warehouse”, on the history of communication. Very much like a bigger budget CommonCraft video. Found via Microsoft’s innovative blogger Steve Clayton.

  Just happened to check out the Sony Ericsson website while looking for some new apps for my W995 and noticed they have just done a huge great revamp. Normally I don’t chat about new websites too much but I really loved playing around this site and so thought I would share it with you. The main home page features movable 3D tiles that provide shortcuts to latest products / news, and a tab bar at the top with links to the main sections of the site (Phones/Accessories, PlayNow, Support, Community). My main highlights are as follow:

• All content can be easily shared via simple social media sharing “AddThis” buttons
• Sony Ericsson community driven developer creations are encouraged and supported well
• Page content is nicely spaced out and main points/features jump out the page (See pics above)
• Site load time is fast
• The community labs page shows latest  Alpha and beta apps all available for download
• Phone support and updates are quick and easy to find
• PlayNow Store has been massively revamped and extra content such as music, Themes, ringtones and games are all easy to browse, preview and buy

Check it out for yourself at http://www.sonyericsson.com

Following on from the #ukhols Map, Vodafone UK has released another great little twitter tie in app, this time called Real-Time Top 40. Vodafone enlisted the help of Ben Marsh again (the man behind the #UKhols site) and they created a live top 40 chart of what people are listening to on Twitter, to promote the Vodafone Music Store.  Real-Time Top 40 is driven by people voting for music on Twitter, using the hashtag #RealTimeTop40 followed by the name of the artist and song they are listening to.

The site also includes some nice little digital media sharing and aggregations tools allowing you to share the site easily and see more of what Vodafone are up to online.

Check out http://www.realtimetop40.com/ to see it for yourself.

Recently I stumbled across this new viral site from Sony Ericsson. Details are thin but from what I can see the general vibe is to get you to sign in, personalise a colourful hopper, name it, and then wait for an email with further instructions at a later date. (The email is still pending). What I do know is that this is part of Sony Ericsson’s new Entertainment Unlimited and Make. Believe branding and the coloured Hoppers certainly fit in with the new Logo colours.

When signing up they tell you “Be part of the world’s first ever online flash mob” so I’m wondering how they will use these personalised hoppers online?, maybe ask everyone to change their various profile pictures to the hopper on a specific date? Either way I’m intrigued and hope it works out for them. So far they have just under 2000 personalised hoppers made up and a short video of 500 hoppers being let loose in Barcelona !

To sign up and see for yourself go to: http://www.sonyericsson.com/hopperinvasion also Sony Ericsson South Africa have started up a twitter account that will no doubt keep us informed on this and other SE related goings on. Follow @sonyericssonsa

P.S. the Sony Ericsson W995 I’m still using just won an EISA award for best music phone ! I cant bring myself to send it back so sorry if anyone from Sony Ericsson reads this but you will have to come physically beat me for it if you want it back !

Love this little spot for Sprint’s new MiFi device. Its a neat little pocket friendly size gadget that takes a 3G signal and turns it into a mini WiFi transmitter allowing up to 5 people within a 30ft area to log on and surf the web. Great little devise, to read more on it click here. (Ad credit goes to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners)

Pretty awesome new U.S Cellular spot done by Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco. Great use of huge spotlights and shadow hand puppets. According to the very knowledgeable chaps at AdFreak they also have a second spot, currently in post-production (Click to view) featuring giant blow up octopus, whales and jelly fish amongst others, all roaming through the city streets. (Cant believe you have to pay to receive phone calls and texts in the USA ! Nutters)

Another gem from Leo Burnett, Chicago, for the new Samsung Solstice touch screen phone. A monkey playing a guitar can never fail ! For the last hilarious Samsung ad for the Alias phone also featuring Ozzy Osbourne just click here (Its a classic if you missed it).