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)

  This is the second addition to Sony Ericsson’s new Entertainment Unlimited brand and I think it just might have have gone to the top spot on my gadget wish list. Its called the Aino (not sure they thought that name through very well) and is a 3” touch screen phone with a slide down Keypad. The Aino is the first Sony Ericsson phone to team up with the Playstation brand and will work with your PS3. The feature is called Remote play, it allows you to connect to your PS3 from anywhere around the globe as long as you have either Wi-Fi or 3G internet access. When connected you can access all the music and video on your PS3’s hard drive as well as being able to control the PlayTV function (If activated in your country), this allows you to play pause and record TV from your PS3 ! The Phone also comes as standard with A2DP wireless Bluetooth headphones (with a 3.5mm headphone socket) as pictures above and a rather neat horizontal charging deck for the phone and headphones (see video 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
• Bluetooth™ stereo A2DP
• Video VGA 25fps
• Stereo Speakerphone
• 55MB Phone memory and MicroSD memory card slot
• Remote Play for PLAYSTATION®3
• A-GPS with Google Maps™
• Exchange ActiveSync®
• 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)
• Horizontal charging deck for Phone and Headphones included in box

  The Aino (really that name is crazy) will be available in black or white near the end of 2009.