Sony Ericsson Excitement: W950i, K610i, and J100

There's big news from Sony at the 3GSM trade show in Barcelona.

Sony has so far unleashed three new phones this week. Let’s start with the smallest and work our way up.

Sony Ericsson J100

The J100 is a low end candy-bar phone with a small 96x64 pixel screen that displays in 65,000 colors. This phone is aimed at the entry level market—as it’s a fairly basic, but stylish. There’s not much to write home about with regard to features. There’s the usual polyphonic ringtones, wallpapers, and games. As for applications, the J100 sports a vibrating alert (is that an application?), an alarm clock, and a calculator. The phone should be available the second quarter of 2006, in two colors, “Polar White” and “Twilight Blue.”

Sony Ericsson K610i

Think of the K610i as a sportier 3G version of the K750i, but with a lower 2.0 megapixel camera. Its screen displays 262K colors on its 176x220 pixels. Also on the front display is a VGA camera that enables 2-way video calls. Although the phone is 3G, it won’t be of much use to us in the U.S. as it runs UTMS on the 2100Mhz band, not the 1900MHz that Cingular uses.

Like the newly intro’d M600, this phone can store on and play-back Mp3s, AACs, and E-AAC+ files from a Memory Stick Micro, with support up to 1GB. Expect the usual compliment of applications on the K610i, including a WAP 2.0 browser, Java MIDP 2.0, a media player, and email that supports the M-IMAP push standard. The K650i will start shipping during the second quarter of 2006.

Sony Ericsson W950i

The most interesting phone of this trio is the W950i phone. At first glimpse, you might think it’s a Walkman branded version of the M600—but without the full keyboard. Instead the W950i appears to have smooth numberpad—external number keys be-gone!

What’s also interesting is how much Sony Ericsson has focussed on making this phone a Walkman phone, only. There’s no camera! Instead you have a very music centric interface displayed on a 240x320 pixel touch screen, which allows you to browse songs by album art. This is a smart phone running Symbian v9.1 and UIQ 3.0.

The phone comes equipped with 4GB of internal memory to which you can add music via USB 2.0 or Bluetooth 1.2 and playback in stereo over bluetooth (which is odd, because I thought stereo bluetooth was only available with bluetooth 2.0, huh?!). Like the K610i above, the media player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC, WAV, and m4a, and the battery reportedly lasts 10 hours when only listening to music. If downloaded music isn’t your thing, you can listen to the built-in FM radio, which will display channel info through RDS. The media player can also stream audio and video over its high-speed UMTS connection. Again, we in the US are left out because the UMTS is in 2100Mhz, instead of 1900Mhz for Cingular.

If you want to get online with the W950i, it comes not only with Opera 8.0 but also an RSS reader.

No specific word on whether the phone will be iSync compatible, but if history is any guide, Sony Ericcsons are usually well supported.