Esato blog

Sony Ericsson Satio and Vivaz does not have an equalizer built in and some users have missed the opportunity to modify the sound in these phones. 

Sony Ericsson are now providing a free equalizer application for owners of those models. The available settings are Classical, Jazz, Dance, Party, Pop, Rock, Spoken Word, Loudness, Mega Bass and Trable Boost. The Equalizer applicatoin is available free of charge at the Sony Ericsson web site www.playnow-arena.com

Sony Ericsson has repeatedly stated that the Android device Xperia X10 will be available in 1st quarter this year. We won’t know if this is true until we have reached April. Telenor Sweden will have the X10 for sale in week 14. April 5 is the first day in that week. Expansys UK are said to have it in stock on March 29th.

The Opera Mini is one of the most popular third party browser available for mobile phones. Opera Mini was previously only available as a Java applet. Today Opera announced a native version for mobile phones running Windows Mobile.

One of the advantages with running Opera Mini is that web pages are compressed up to 90% . When requesting a page, the browser is not going to the source, but actually instruct a centralized Opera server to fetch the page, compress the content and return the contect to the Opera Mini browser. Opera Mini is available for free.

If you read this on your mobile phone go to m.opera.com/next to download the browser

Another week, another lawsuit. This time, Apple thinks HTC has infringed 20! of Apple patents related to the iPhone user interface.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

It is interesting to see that Apple very seldom communicate information to the press. It only happens on product announcements and new lawsuits. Questions about naked skin in their App Store are never answered.

Who is next?

Sorry for the illustration image reuse, but we do not have enough man power to create a new image for every lawsuit

At the Engadget Show earlier this week, Aaron Woodman from Microsoft demonstrated the upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system on a LG phone. The surprice was not WP7, but the unannounced LG device. This is a prototype, and no official information about the phone is known. Except that it is running on Windows Phone 7 and has a full QWERTY keyboard.

Source

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK received a complain from a UK television viewer regarding a Satio mobile phone. The commercial showed a woman using the phone to take a picture of a hoper and share it using third-party software. The ad said “Packed with applications and more available to download” while the phone’s screen was shown displaying icons of several applications including Facebook. The complainer challenged wheter the ad was misleading because the phone did not come with the Facebook app pre-installed and he understood that it was not compatible with the Facebook application.

Sony Ericsson defended them self saying access to Facebook was integrated via links. They did not claim the level of functionality these links would allow. Because of software problem, the Facebook app had initially not been available for Satio. The problem was later resolved and a Facebook app could now be downloaded from their website.

Verdict
ASA acknowledged that installed links on the phone allowed user to access Facebook website. However, ASA understood that this was not the same as having a dedicated Facebook application. This would have offered better functionality and faster user experience.

The commercial with a Facebook logo and voice-over saying “Packed with applications and more available to download” was most likely to be understood by viewers to mean that the phone either had a Facebook app pre-installed or available for download. We noted that a software problem initially prevented the app being available and that this now have been solved. However, because the ad implied the application was either preloaded on the phone or would be available to download, and because this was not the case at the time the ad was broadcast, ASA concluded that the ad was misleading.

ASA has notified Sony Ericsson to ensure that product functionality depicted in ads was accurate at the time the ad was broadcasted.

It wasn’t given much attention during the press event yesterday, but CEO of Sony Ericsson, Mr Bert Nordberg said entire portfolio would be Green as in GreenHeart by 2011. GreenHeart is Sony Ericsson ’s name on more environmently products. Some of the steps taken to achieve this are:

• Use of recyled Platic in products (phones and accessories)
• Waterborne Paint
• E-manual. No printed manual being shipped with the product. Only electronic versions in phone and downloadable for phones and accessories.
• Reduced packaging. As a result of the point above
• Green charger where charger uses less power in standby mode.

We tested the Naite GreenHart a little while ago. You can read the Norwegian review here or a computer translated English version here.

I have not been able to find this commitment in print anywhere, but I do think we should trust the words of the Sony Ericsson CEO.

I didn’t manage to publish much in the blog yesterday. It was said that over 500 people attended press conference. 250 of them trying to blog via the poor local WLAN router. Didn’t work very well. The presentation was opened by Sony Ericsson president Bert Norgerg, followed by head of Sony. Sir Howard Stringer and Rikko Sakaguchi, the Executive Vice President and Chief Creation Officer.  But what most attendees were waiting for was of course the product announcements. The fun started when Head of Marketing Lennard Hoornik entered the stage. Firs, the Vivaz Pro was announced. Ok. Fine. Thank.

Then the X10 Mini showed up on stage. Even better. Nice. Finally X10 Mini Pro were presented. A big applause from the audience. I haven’t been to an Apple release party, so this was the first time experience for me. Applaud for hardware release. We tech guys are a strang species.

After the stage performance it is time to touch and feel the handsets. Just wait in line with the rest of the hundreds bloggers and journalists.

Samsung had a press conference at the same time in another part of the city. You had to choose which event you wanted to cover. Seems like most bloggers and journalists chose Sony Ericsson this evening. Maybe Samsung didn’t serve free drinks

It is packed with bloggers and journalists here today. most of them hangong in the bar. free bar. seem like we are starting now

Samsung announced the Samsung Monte a couple of days ago and they announced this via a press release on the samsung.com web site. At the bottom of the press release there is a link to Samsungs Mobile World Congress web site. The address is http://samsungmwc2010.com/ If you click this link you won’t find any Samsung content. You are asked to download the page. The page is a web server code for redirection to another site. This is the code:

<% response.sendRedirect(
"http://europe.samsungmobile.com/pmgmvst.jsp
?page=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.millimetresmatter.com%2Findex.html&
visitgbn=10618101&coflag=0"); %>

It does not work, but from the source you can see that the intention was to redirect you to www_dot_millimetresmatter_dot_com. And what is that? A Russian (surprised?) video sharing site. Is this a dummy code installed by samsungmwc2010 developers, or has someone been able to change the web server files without samsungs knowledge?