Everyone’s looking for a viability angle these days, and the latest is personalization of services, especially in the content porting and Web services arena. Accordingly, Sony Ericsson at Mobile World Congress unveiled a new strategy to take advantage of the blurring of lines between communications services and entertainment with content porting. It also showed off a new handset, the touchscreen Idou, meant to support the strategy, dubbed Entertainment Unlimited.
Entertainment Unlimited is meant to leverage the consumer-electronics maker’s full product line, including television, PCs and mobile phones, while allowing users access to unlimited media on a subscription basis. One example of the beginnings of the strategy is MediaGo, a service that lets users transfer movies, music and photos between handsets and PCs. Sony Ericsson said it will now expand the countries in which it’s available—though it is blocked in the United States because it allows unlimited DRM-free downloading.
Entertainment Unlimited will focus on high-end devices that blur device categories, like the Idou wide-display touchscreen phone with a built-in 12.1-megapixel camera, due later this year or in 2010. It will run on an open-source version of the Symbian operating system.
It’s tempting to call the idea a “me-too” concept: Rival Nokia is trying to do similar things on an Internet service basis, and carriers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless have been working on cross-platform, three-screen, multimedia options for some time.
However, one analyst says the real problem is that this is the same guiding principal Sony Ericsson has been following already. “It’s not too cruel to describe the ‘new’ strategy as staggering in its blandness,” said Steven Hartley, senior analyst at Ovum Ltd.. “It is little different to the joint venture’s founding principle that should have been guiding the company anyway. Instead of having music-centric Walkman devices and camera-oriented Cybershot phones, the new approach calls for something of a ‘Cyber-man’ approach. Full multimedia functionality is to be concentrated in a single device, as envisaged by the forthcoming W995 and Idou.”
Will it work? “The elements of the announcement expanding the user experience to other devices are crucial,” said Hartley. “Otherwise, Sony Ericsson will struggle to differentiate in an increasingly crowded high-end.”
