by Olav Hellesø-Knutsen

“Last week we were lucky to get a demonstration of the upcoming Xperia X10. The X10 is the device that can move Sony Ericsson in the lead again as a producer of high end mobile phones”

” Xperia X10 is Sony Ericsson’s first mobile phone running on the Android operating system . The prototype is not a final product so a couple of features could be changed in the final product. Thehardware are most likely final, but some software behavior can be different. It is around 4 months until the X10 will be available in stores. Rikard and Gustav from Sony Ericsson was flown in from Lund, Stockholm to Oslo to demonstrate what we can expect from X10.”

Xperia X10 facts:

4 inch TFT touch screen. 65536 colours, 854×480 pixels resolution, mineral glass with fingerprint coating

Size: 199 x 63 x 13 mm

Weight: 135 gram

Networks: GSM850/900/1800/1900, UMTS/HSPA 1900/2100 (and UMTS 800/850/1900 for America version, UMTS 900/1700 for the rest of the world)

WLAN

Bluetooth

Exchange ActiveSync

8.1 megapixel camera, auto focus, geo tagging, face recognition

GPS

Auto rotate sensor

Built in compass

X10 application highlights:

Timescape

Mediascape

Face recognition

The hardware is top of the range, but the real highlights are the two new intelligent Scape features.

Timescape is a features where the arrangement of the most recent events are in focus. A regular mobile phone order the incoming messages by time. The message you sent or receive last is listed before the older ones. Timescape are gathering many events like Twitter updates, Facebook posts, SMS, email, calls and pictures of your contacts into one single list. All events are tied to your contact list and a contact will be moved on top of the Timescape list when he posts something on Twitter or if you have received a SMS from the person. The events shown in Timescape can easily be filtered. Either by event source or event type. The X10 can recognize up to 5 persons in an image. So if you have captured a photo or sent an image of one of your contacts Timescape will move this contact to the top of the event list. By the introduction of Timescape, Sony Ericsson are focusing on the user experience in a way that the most used tasks are closest to the user.

Mediascape is a similar to Timescape, but this feature is focusing on media including videos, photos and music both online and locally stored. Each of the three content types have a dedicated home screen which is divided into local and online content. Clicking on an artist will list all songs by this artist stored locally on the device and online.

“The X10 can be customized in all possible ways. It is Android, so that is not very strange. For example. Some mobile phones have a feature where you use the dial keys to enter the name of one of your contact. When you start entering 4(ghi), 6(mno) 6(mno) 3(def), the call application will list all contacts where the name starts with character h, ho, hom and home. X10 only interpret the key stroke combination as numbers. By downloading an new application from the Android Market, it is possible to replace the built in dial app with one that interpret the number key strokes as a search for a contact name. The substituted app can be set as the default dial application. Again. The X10 we tested was a prototype, so this behavior could change in the final product. We just mention this to show you the possibilities with X10 and Android.”

Creative competitions at DreamHack

DreamHack Kreativ is the offspring from DreamHack Scene – a team to activate the creative part of You! DH Kreativ arranges competitions in creating digital art; both old school and new school. We have photography competitions as well as three different competitions for music composers. Are you skilled in creating awesome animations or maybe create a home made music video with your camrecorder? This is Your place!

Find a destination intuitive search application in the first place  Nearby Radar x-Radar Mobile x-Radar Mobile launched.

Sony’s, free on the Internet to provide “social mapping service” “Petamap (Petamappu)x-Radar Mobilen conjunction with ※ 2 mobile phone to search for information on nearby attractions, you can reach your destination based on intuitive navigation radar Type x-Radar Mobile (mobile radar X) (105 yen monthly fee) to provide, NTT DoCoMo (Nov. 9 days) and  at, we will sequentially…

X-Radar Mobile  is the phone’s GPS to determine your location using a feature about being registered 60 million ※ 3 Petamappu gourmet, shopping, sightseeing, wireless LAN spot information and a variety of attractions from a radius search application that displays three spots are within a kilometer.Just click on the dot leads to Petamappumobairusaito indicate the position of the spot, or check the route to the spot on the map, you can also view detailed information about the spot.
VAIO PCx-Radar We so far this year, Sony’s Personal Computer VAIO P released Mon Applications PC version of the Service series “x-Radar (Radar X)” has been pre-installed. This time, the mobile phone hardware to expand the services available, when you assemble anywhere at any time, the expansion of environmental. Rimashita can find fun and useful destination.
We will continue efforts to develop network services using hardware expand the fun, we will offer a lifestyle in the era of ubiquitous digital network.

X-Radar Mobile a Features:

Toward the desired spot

Direction of the spot, the middle portion of the screen (you) can check to match the direction of the shadow and grow from my shadow.  The shadow appears to calculate the direction of the sun and the relationship between location and time.
Also, from a simple information page on the spot “go see” Selecting the button will be connected by straight lines on the radar screen at the desired location and attractions.Straight and close to the desired spot turns blue, red and change away “is away” message that appears to support to reach your destination.

Continue read here: sony

By Stan M

“Hey guys and girls, looks like Japan and Europe get to update their Walkman X firmware which is said to improve online browsing (is anyone surfing the net on your X?):

This firmware update improves the following performance:

• Displaying and navigating Web sites will be improved.

Note
“NetFront” browser installed in your device will be upgraded with this update. After the upgrade, the browser will not display Thai language fonts anylonger. If you want to be able to display Thai language fonts, do not perform this update.

Let’s hope we get the same treatment in the US soon, as I understand it is a holiday season and Sony software engineers just need to tweak the installer to work on the US models. When I tried using the firmware upgrade from a European website, it does not recognize my Walkman model (NWZ-X1051/1061) as it is intended for NWZ-X1050/1060 models (even though the software agreement lists all the US legal language and the installer is for X1000 series).

Anyways, the good news is Content Transfer software is at version 1.3 now and you can get it here and install it without any problems on your English speaking VAIOs, Lenovos, Dells  and whatever else you are using.

Content Transfer software is an easy way to get audio, video and photos, as well as podcasts on your Walkman.”

Models:

NWZ-X1000 series

NW-A800 series

NW-S74x/S74xK/S64x/S64x

NWZ-W202

Via: sony

First Read sonyinsider

How much you want  to pay? $US 218

So…Try and convince us it is worth buying guys

Article and Text by Steve Litchfield

“It has been a long time since a new Symbian-powered smartphone was released with a true Xenon flash: the type used in just about every standalone camera of just about any budget. The argument about why this should be so has raged on within the AAS team. Theories about Xenon proving too costly, too bulky, too battery-unfriendly and too specialist, have all been shot down in flames at various points. We had the Nokia N82, a candy bar with small screen, then the Nokia 6220c, aping the N82 but with lower build quality and price to match, then the Samsung G810, an industrially designed chunky dual slider which also featured optical zoom but which was never supported or updated by Samsung, rather sadly.

And now we have the Sony Ericsson Satio, bringing a top notch 12 megapixel lens and sensor, along with Xenon flash and a LED video light, in addition to a giant 3.5″ touchscreen and S60 5th Edition. It’s true that Sony Ericsson hasn’t done much to the S60 codebase in general, that there’s no kinetic scrolling and that (as I write this) there are significant bugs right, left and centre, but there is a lovely new interface for the camera software and that’s the area I’m going to be concentrating on in this review part. See the final part 3 (to be published when Sony Ericsson has issued the first major firmware update for the Satio) for wider discussion of the Satio’s applications and general smartphone use.”

As described in part 1 of this review, the Satio’s camera is hidden behind the singlemost impressive part of the phone’s case, a steel sliding section that, when retracted, also starts the Satio’s Camera application. This is also tied in with all the buttons on the ‘top’ (as the Satio is held in landscape/camera mode):

• zoom out/in (though, as ever, digital zoom is strongly discouraged – you don’t gain any extra detail, you simply introduce extra digital artefacts into the centre of your subject area – it’s also worth noting that zoom in video mode is equally as bad, as on most other camera phones – there’s no intelligent digital zoom, as on the Nokia N86)
• the ‘Album’ shortcut (at any point, pressing this switches to a ‘review’ mode, where you can swipe through your photos)
• the stills/video toggle (soooo much easier than fiddling about in a menu or trying to hit an on-screen icon to change mode)
• the shutter button (this is large and of high quality, with nigh-on perfect feel under the right hand index finger)

In addition to the light sensor, video shoot notification (red) LED, video shooting (white) LED and Xenon flash, there’s also a strip LED which light up blue for a second or so after starting the camera – and I have absolutely no idea what this is for. Comments welcome. Maybe it’s just there to look ‘cool’!

Sony Ericsson has always had its own ideas of what a camera interface should look like and they’ve been tweaking it for their touchscreen phones, with status icons along the top of the screen and camera control icons down the left edge (the right edge is saved for application . And, to be fair, it works much better than Nokia’s attempt for their S60 5th Edition phones, which tend to be marred by a confusing mix of pop-up icon panes and traditional menus and dialogs. The interface on the Satio works very well indeed and I found it intuitive.

Down the left of the interface are:

• ‘Scene modes’: Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Twilight landscape, Sports, Document, Twilight portrait, Beach/snow
• ‘Shoot mode’: Normal, Panorama, Bestpic, Smile detection, Touch capture (this last is similar to the systems on other touchscreen phones, where you touch the point in the image that you wish to explicitly focus on)
• ‘Flash’
• ‘Exposure’
• ‘Auto’ – turning this on removes all the other controls, the Satio literally becomes a ‘point and shoot’ camera

The toolbox icon at the bottom right of the screen leads to a custom tabbed dialog with few surprises. Of note is that the default resolution of the camera is actually 9 megapixels, corresponding to a widescreen (16:9) image, scaled similarly to the Satio’s display. For the purposes of the photo tests in this review part, I used the full 4:3 aspect 12 megapixels (4000 pixels by 3000 pixels!) though, naturally. The average consumer certainly doesn’t need 12 megapixels, but what I’m going to be doing here is looking at maximum detail under extreme circumstances.

Photo testing

Here I was comparing identical shots on the Satio with photos taken on the Nokia N86 and Samsung i8910 HD, both also 8 megapixel Symbian smartphones, plus the slightly older 5 megapixel N96, for comparison.

Shot 1: Sunlight into a garage, high contrast, mix of bright and pastel colours, plenty of texture

(Above is the Satio’s photo, click to download the full 12 megapixel version. Note excellent handling of colours – nigh on perfect, detail and contrast. Very impressive all round)

(Detailed crops, clockwise from left: Satio, N86, N96, i8910 HD)

As I tweeted recently, the difference between the detail from the Satio’s images and those from the N96′s is startling. Remember that the Nokia N95/N82/N95 (and others) have had just about the best phone camera up until a year or so ago. And yet the N96′s 5 megapixel image is made to look utterly ordinary and rather poor. In the tweet, I proclaimed that, camera-wise, the Satio is to the N95 what the N95 was to the N70 (from 2005).

Looking at the images, the Satio’s has the best colour rendition and detail, though the i8910 HD was only very marginally behind, showing what Samsung’s camera can do under ideal conditions. The N86 made rather a mess of the colours in the wood and its wide angle lens also meant that there was only marginally more detail than the N96′s image. (mais…)

Review by Steve Litchfield

“It’s Sony Ericsson’s first ever S60 smartphone, running the same S60 5th Edition as the Nokia 5800, but with several Sony Ericsson extras, plenty of horsepower under the bonnet and a distinctive camera-centric tablet form factor. How well has Sony Ericsson adapted to the switch from UIQ to S60 and what’s the Satio’s hardware like? And can Sony Ericsson succeed where Samsung have been struggling in the battle to compete with the lesser specified Nokias?”

Prologue: You’ll have read this week about Sony Ericsson pulling the Satio from sale, pending fixes to some major bugs. As you’ll see from the text below, I also hit problems, but they’re not going to stop me looking at the raw hardware objectively. With the appropriate software fix-ups, just how good could the Satio be?

Flagships have a tough time in the phone world. Designed to include every function under the sun and to appeal to the most knowledgeable and tech-hungry users, they inevitably come up short. Witness the Nokia N96 and N97, for example, each plagued by bugs and issues in their first six months. In this company, it’s not a damning indictment of the Satio that it too is equally less perfect. As with the Nokia flagships, there’s lots of potential here – in fact arguably more, let down mainly by silly bugs and a few even sillier hardware design quirks.

Using one of the supplied themes – I do like black text on white background, for better visibility

Ostensibly a tablet along the lines of the Nokia 5800, and weighing in at 126g the Satio distinguishes itself by including the same 3.5″ transflective screen as the Nokia N97 classic – a good all-purpose choice and one which will work adequately even in sunlight, when out and about taking photos. The body’s almost entirely plastic, but solid enough. The huge camera bulge on the back (taking this section to 17mm thick) is understandable, given the Satio’s pretensions, but what’s not so clear is why the main body of the phone (around 55% of the remaining length) is kept so thin (13mm). Given that the battery here is only 1000mAh and that the Satio is patently underpowered, why on earth didn’t the designers allow more of the rest of the body to bulk out a little to accommodate a larger cell – the camera has already put paid to this phone ever being described as “razor thin”, after all?

Note the mix of materials – and I’d just wiped the plastic down on my sleeve!

The camera cover is stainless steel and gorgeous, but the same can’t really be said for acres of plastic around it. Both the (resistive) touchscreen and the battery cover are utter fingerprint magnets – (mais…)

By Olivier Cimelière

Ericsson has won a TelcoTV Vision 2009 for its home automation gateway “Gateway Connected Home., November 12 last Prices TelcoTV Vision reward products, services or applications most innovative and” visionary “presented in the telecommunications industry during the ‘year.

“Winner of the category “Customer Premises Equipment”, the home automation gateway designed by Ericsson is an application of multi-managed end to end. It provides a secure connection between the digital network the client’s home and telecom networks, and a single access point, for example, IPTV and communications services.”

To view the different uses in everyday life than the solution “Connected Home Gateway” Ericsson can watch the video here:

Solution Connected Home - Ericsson

by Emine

“KDDI has just announced that their new waterproof Bravia Phone U1 together with the IIda model PRISMOID and the PRISMOID phone will receive a new case, the SIWA, which has been made from Japanese paper. Available as of December.”

Via: http://www.akihabaranews.com