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Sony Ericsson to tap Windows Phone 7 Market - Is it really such a good idea?
Daniel Carey
Sony Ericsson has long held the title of ‘King of the Feature Phones’ — in fact, the company released stellar, after stellar, after stellar handsets — until one day they adopted the trend setting smartphone moniker. And low and behold, no more stellar handsets. But now, Sony Ericsson’s apparently looking at proper development of Windows Phone 7 according to a recent DigiTimes report.
With Sony Ericsson’s current track record in the smartphone department — *cough, we’re talking about their Android handsets, does the company really have the chops to take on another platform with their already faltering efforts?
Most will agree that Sony Ericsson has always made really good, usable, feature enriched low end dumphones to high end feature phones. The added ability to install Java applets left most happy during the beginning of the smartphone boom, however as platforms developed and matured it became apparent that Sony’s phone department would soon have to shape up or ship out. Depending on who you talk with, the company most certainly shaped up despite several poor choices. Most specifically the lack of Android software updates, underpowered phones, and lastly bloated custom skins. Whilst Sony’s skins were gorgeous to look at, they were developed with a “that’ll do” attitude; and in a market that moves as quickly as a cheetah on the prowl, that attitude simply doesn’t cut the mustard.
Now sure, Sony Ericsson’s got several good handsets in the pipeline, the recently announced Xperia Arc [featured below] comes to mind, not to mention (the still yet to be announced) PlayStation Phone aka. Zeus Z1. And while I’m hoping both will perform well when released, the pessimist in me can’t help but think they’ll mess them up somehow. Although I really do pray that I’m wrong.
With consumers beginning to pick up on the nuances in Sony’s smartphones, many have given up hope that the company will indeed release a decent handset, and that’s where the company is seeing the most amount of hurt. Just like it’s believed RIM received a wake up call after the poor sales felt by the original BlackBerry Torch, Sony needs to come out of their semi-comatose state and put their best foot forward. If they put as much effort into phones as they did their televisions, or the PlayStation 3 then it’s almost certain they’ll recover.
That brings me back to the original point of this article; with Sony looking at other means of revenue / development in their smartphone business it makes sense that the company has begun to tap the proverbial Windows Phone 7 vein. After all, with Microsoft behind the OS, little software development has to be done by Sony Ericsson. That means no bloated skins slowing down a handset, no skins getting in the way of those ever important software updates, and most importantly, they can get back to what they did best… making killer hardware.
