The HCB-100 is a Bluetooth car speaker that clips onto the visor of a car, but can also be used as a desk stand, with 20 hours of talk time and 600 of standby, said Steve Walker, director of global product marketing for the Japanese/Swedish joint venture.
The launch of the speaker came as the company, which has joint HQ in Stockholm and Tokyo, rolled out a new raft of phones, most of them for the consumer market. Having filled out its Walkman phone portfolio at the recent 3GSM event in Barcelona, the latest announcements saw Sony Ericsson bring its Japanese parent’s Cyber-shot digital camera brand to the mobile phone market.
At least one of the new phones, the K510, has potential in the business market, Walker argued, because it has some push email capabilities, in that it can receive email alerts using the standard push IMAP function within the GSM spec. The phone is GPRS only, however, and is not running an extensible operating system, and so is essentially a high-end feature phone rather than a smart phone.
Sony Ericsson’s smart phone offerings presently comprise three models, all running the Symbian OS with the UIQ user interface: the full-spec P990 launched just before 3GSM, with 3G and WiFi connectivity and the mail-specific M600 launched at that event, both of which support seven different flavours of push email technology, and the W950, which combines both smart phone capabilities with a Walkman for the prosumer.
