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"Nice phones, but too technological!" - City response to Sony launch

A joint venture with Sony, a commitment to multimedia on phones, and a lovely range of shiny new phones - all were not enough to please the financial analysts; and Ericsson finds itself regarded as "too technological" by the City of London. But our own analyst is impressed ...

Ericsson's new Sony-designed phones include one with a camera built in

Naturally, the "toy" freaks all loved it, even though it won't ship for six months or more, and even though it's not exceptionally small as phones go. And they liked it, even though nobody knows what its battery life is going to be like. And they even approved of its multimedia messaging service (MMS, a sort of super-SMS) software.

The technology freaks have all got excited about the fact that this phone - together with its new companions from Sony Ericsson - runs the Symbian operating system, not seen on an Ericsson phone since it launched the R380s - a combined phone and PDA, aimed at the market for nerds who are prepared to lug a huge phone around if it out-Dilberts the next guy as an "engineer's accessory."

But the financial analysts scorned the launch. "Sony Ericsson's new handset portfolio unveiled earlier this week continues Ericsson's ill-judged obsession with technology, and show the new joint venture company has been forced backwards into a strategy of focusing on comparatively small niche markets," said JP Morgan, according to Direkt.

Technology-philic Web site Silicon.com found plenty of analysts who felt the launch was a triumph for Psion spinoff Symbian, which "is fast becoming the handset manufacturers' platform of choice - in preference to Palm OS or Microsoft's Windows CE." And it quoted Bernt Ostergaard, telecommunications market analyst at Giga Web, who said: "Symbian 7 is hands down the most sophisticated smart phone operating system around," which may well be true - but financial market watchers were still not impressed.

They probably got a bit closer to the meat of the news at ZDNet, which focused on the Java engine inside the phones. "This is the first phone based on the Symbian 7.0 platform, which includes the same personal organiser functions as the old Ericsson R380 phone," said reporter Matt Loney. "Symbian 7.0, however, goes further than the old version 6.0 platform; it can download video clips for viewing on the phone, and enables the user to view Powerpoint, Word and Excel files too."

And, as you'd expect from a site with a significant game-playing readership, he added: "It also has the Java 2 Micro Edition runtime environment, so Java-based games and other applications can be downloaded."

Reuters decided that "fun stuff" could mean a breakthrough for Sony Ericsson, despite the technology features. Its reporter pointed to the "recent momentum the Sony Ericsson venture has seen in Europe with its hit color-screen T68 phone" - though it didn't quote sales figures.

And, just in case you imagined this was a positive spin, writer Eric Auchard pointed out, slightly sadly, that "Eye-catching phones full of data-handling and multimedia features also are due out this year from rivals including Germany's Siemens, Japan's Panasonic and Korea's Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics," adding that both Nokia and Motorola could be expected to launch similar products.

My take? Well, I think the Java platform gets a big boost from this announcement; it's the common theme in all high-feature data and games phones, whether Windows based, or Linux based, or Symbian-powered.

But one has to ask whether the opponents of Microsoft aren't whistling in the dark, here?

In its current form, it's too early to expect the .Net framework to be embedded in any ordinary phone - it uses memory, and it's very recently announced. And the Java engine is not just embedded in a lot of phones and PDAs, but has become embedded in the very fabric of the mobile industry since J2ME (mobile edition) launched. And yes, typically, embedded systems, once they have their hooks sunk into an industry, are hard to displace.

But the Microsoft framework which rivals J2ME is already in some PDAs, which have phone functions - like the PocketPC designs from Compaq and H-P - and little Symbian faces a huge uphill battle competing with Microsoft in the market for development tools.

It is definitely true that the Microsoft model offends some - as we reported in our recent interview with Alloy designer, Gus Desbarats who summed it up: "One of the hidden costs of the Microsoft/windows dominance, is that the user interface is hidden from the designer. If you think of Dell, you have no emotional attachment to their products whatever; the price and the performance has to be right, and you feel no loyalty to them or have any sense that they care about what happens to you."

But objectively, any operating system - including Symbian - is going to be faced with the same problem. And what .Net does have going for it, is that it is integrated far more deeply into the Windows CE platform than Java is into Microsoft's rivals.

As for the phones, they remain phones. The most important feature for mobile data users is going to be the Bluetooth wireless unit embedded into some of them; but not a single report on the launch has even asked whether Bluetooth is there.

The photographs taken by the new camera attachment are pretty pathetic, as photographs go. Displayed on anything other than another phone, they are grainy and blurry. But the reason they are there is simple: the phone networks are desperate for a high-data usage application.

As Vodafone's Jim Wadsworth remarked, introducing his micropayment system mPay, "There's a big market for people like us, if we can persuade people to spend a dollar here, a couple of dollars there. If you are prepared to spend a dollar or a Euro or so on a postcard, then we think you're equally likely to be prepared to click a button on your phone to send a photograph you just took of yourself on holiday in the sun to your friends back in the UK - even if it costs more than a post-card."

The phone may be a "technology niche" to JP Morgan, but it's one sign of the Holy Grail for all mobile network operators - a way of getting people to pay more for their mobile phone calls. I'll expect it to be heavily promoted by the networks.

So then, ask yourself, what you would do. If you have the choice between sending that photograph over the GSM or GPRS network at a cost of a pound or a euro or a dollar, and taking a minute or two to transmit it - or alternatively, sitting down next to a Bluetooth access point, and sending it free, over the Internet, in a couple of seconds, would you be pleased, or disappointed to discover your phone doesn't actually have Bluetooth?

For me, the fact that any of them can actually connect to the Internet via Bluetooth, using SyncML is what really matters. And yes, if you check Sony Ericsson's CeBIT show preview you'll find both Bluetooth and SyncML amongst the features.

Guy Kewney is Editor-in-Chief of the News-Wireless Network.