Three in One?

So, last night I was the trigger happy snapper we had at the press event in London last night. As I write this I will be explaining my thoughts on each of the devices and what I think are their strengths and weaknesses for the market(s) that they are aiming for and I will go into what I thought in general about the presentation. 

The first thing I will say is, Sony Ericsson certainly know how to throw a nice bash. Lots of lovely food and free drinks to help smooth the atmosphere, which I must say from my perspective helped build a little more anticipation, as we all stood there with drink in hand waiting to be ushered downstairs into the main hall, where we were greated by Sony Ericsson’s “first 360 degree press conference”. 

Yes that’s right, they were positioned on a small center like stage in the center of the room, with a full 360 degree projection on the upper edge of the walls surrounding the square shaped room. So with this being my first press conference that I have attended, I have to admit, it did feel a tad weird. I only mean that in the sense of having other peoples cameras being pointed at you from across the other side of the stage.

After getting over this slightly odd sensation, after expecting a normal type of presentation, and wondering where to look next on the projections as each wall was showing different things, it was time to have a peak at the devices. Interestingly there were these marked crates dotted all over the room with “confidential” and “Top Secret” stamped on them, which I thought a nice little joke, especially as there were suited guards standing next to them, were they serious, who knows.

For some reason, Sony Ericsson has only now realised that people are getting confused between their different brands of “Cybershot”, “Walkman” etc, so there was very little mention of these brands last night, except for the fact that none of the devices are branded as such even though Satio would previously have been a “Cybershot” model due to it’s camera type. So Sony Ericsson have finally realised that these should be considered more of a type of specification, e.g. “this model could have a Cybershot camera and Walkman capability”. I think from a marketing perspective this is much more powerful than having individual models, it also means on the flip side that it’s cheaper for Sony Ericsson because they don’t need to create separate models to meet the other market requirements. 

Onward we march, Yari, I like this little phone. For it’s market segment (I suppose you could say a high-end youth phone, or low-end fun phone) it’s actually quite a clever little device. The UI is the usual type with a few nice amendments as I’m sure you all have seen from the pics. On this part, I must say that when you are flipping through the icons of the media thingy type thing, are actually quite small. For such a low res screen I do think even the younger users would need reading glasses to make sure they don’t strain their eyes too much. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is intuitive but it is fiddly. 

The first thing we did when we picked up the phone was roll our fingers around the d-pad, as it would have been fantastic if it was like this, but sadly it still is a d-pad. Maybe this is something that would be looked at in future, maybe not. 

Now, some people might consider this next bit a gimmick, I on the other hand think it could be useful for the physically challenged people out there. You might have guessed by now that I’m referring to the camera gestures. I was very skeptical about this when first hearing about it however, after seeing it in action (especially in such a busy environment) seeing the SE rep bounce left and right and seeing the little sporting avatar on the screen follow his every action, I thought literally for 5 seconds it might be funny for that 15 year old school girl have a mess around on the school bus. I think time will tell just how popular this type of technical application will be. 

I was somewhat surprised that there were no mentions of any time of gesture controls of the device in any way shape or form. Nudda, zilch, zippo, nothing. This is also the same with any form of haptic controls or feedback, which I think is such a great oversight as these phones have X/Y/Z accelerometers, such a waste…

So, Aino (pronounced I-no), I think was probably my favourite device of the three announced. I especially liked the docking station idea and the bluetooth headset all of which will be included in the pack when purchased. The UI amendments were superb to the point where I really fell in love with the fancy animation of the balls almost whooshing across the screen. Talking about the screen, the screen was simply astonishing for a phone especially while watching a movie in real-time being streamed over wi-fi from a ps3. This whole concept I think could seriously change things. Yes I know some of you will just say it’s their answer to Sling which has been around of ages, and yes the quality does deteriorate over 3G compared to a wi-fi connection. So I decided to ask one of the techy reps there (in actual fact a chap from Japan) just how much bandwidth does the application take, he said “It is nice on 300+Kbps (3G) and best on 500+Kbps”, but there is a catch which I haven’t seen anyone report on yet. You have to set it manually! It does NOT currently auto negotiate bandwidth setting for quality. I explained to the rep that this is surely a huge oversight as some people are not necessarily as tech savvy as myself to which he looked rather perplexed and dumbfounded. He may have been Japanese, a nation who love all they fantastic button ladened gizmos (just look at the Nissan GT-R), but this is not a Japanese device. Us Europeans like our simple things, you just have to look at the difference between a UK car and a Japanese car for proof of that (Split LSD what now?).

I was mighty impressed with the general quality when using wi-fi, the speed and the easy of use. Yet at the same time I did think it was rather mad that such a tiny screen was in essence trying to show a 1080p image, albeit compressed. Just look at some of the pics I took and you can see that the text at times is almost unreadable. At first I thought it was my camera blurring up, but no, it really was the screen unable to render some of the text. This side point was completely thrown out of the window when I saw the video in motion. In one simple word, WOW. It was literally pitched, that if you were in a hotel anywhere in the world, you could use their wi-fi to connect to your PS3 to watch what ever downloaded content you have or LiveTV (with separate tuner for the PS3) over said internet connection, then use the bundled bluetooth headphones to connect via a 3mm jack to connect to some speakers. So yes, this does sound very sling like but where sling has failed so far in it’s complexity I really think this application method may succeed in it’s simplicity. 

And Satio. Well what can we say here? Yes it is the Idou handset and it is the “Top end device for this year” but I have to admit, I don’t really feel like I gelled with it. I wass immensely disappointed at the lack of multi-touch support that many competitors have had, or are introducing already. This effectively means that SE won’t have one until at the earliest of next year. I’m not sure if it’s because Satio has a resistive touchscreen as opposed to the iPhone’s capacitive one, which in my opinion is far my useful and accurate. Bearing in mind that I have had a JasJar, M2000, SE P900/P910, and both iPhones. I know that Satio is still in early beta, but I really found it slow and cumbersome. Menus were disappointing mainly because they were so unnecessarily complicated. Too many clicks. At one point, I even got lost in what I was doing. Before I make a final decision on it I will wait until I have played with the final product, but from what I’ve seen this aspect needs quite a bit of work. 

I guess you’ll be wondering what the camera was like? Well in a simple word it is impressive, certainly no SLR but much improved for a camera-phone device. While fondling the device I specifically asked for a closer look at the promo pics on the wall, as from a distance I struggled to believe that they were actually taken from the device. And there it was a “here’s one I made earlier” moment. The picture was a rather complex looking still life image of fruit on a bowl with some cakes all nicely placed on a table. The picture provided was printed on an A3 size half center-meter thick piece of plastic, certainly not paper. The first things to notice were that the corners were nicely clear except the lower right corner, so I expect that finger focus was in effect there. The next thing I noticed was that aberrations although present in just one noticeable area of the picture (almost dead center on a piece of cake) it was pretty good, considering it was taken from such a small lens. I’m still not sure I understand why optical focus still isn’t being employed yet when competitors are using it, because as any person with the slightest bit of technical know-how will tell you, digital zoom is not worth the paper it’s written on. 

In general, I thought it was a good event with some good improvements on old habits, but still some big disappointments. The biggest being that, for Sony Ericsson to really get a good foothold in the market they really need to make up their mind with which operating system platform they are going to stay with. UIQ here, Symbian there, and Android over there? There needs to be a defined approach so that this can lead to proper apps being developed for a wide range of devices, and until this happens they will really struggle with their portfolio, no matter how much scope it has…