Esato blog

I arrived back from the Sony Ericsson press event earlier this evening and had a little chat with the reseptionist at the hotel. It is not wise to wear a camera visible to everyone in Barcelona by night she said. She proceeded by saying that I had such a large camera and told me she had bought a new one from a thief the other day. Last time my girlfriend was on a trip to Barcelona, her camera was pulled out from her neck by a quick thief I told the receptionist. Maybe she had bought my girlfriends stolen camera I said. Naah. The one I bought was not brand new, so I could not have been your girlfriends camera she said.

It’s not strange that the local government are issuing a waring to all MWC attendees to protect valuables at all times

Update: One of my journalist colleagues from Norway got mugged on La Rambla two days ago. He was distracted by a group of young men and lost his wallet and camera when they picked his wallet out of  his pocket and run away with the camera which was attached to a strap around his neck.

I am usually writing about mobile phone related stuff. And so are many other web sites. We often have narrow view on the world. The talk of today is whether the iPhone will be available in white. Engadget has written an entire article around the rumor that the iPhone 4 probably will be available in white. And this is only a rumor. I am mentioning this here too, so I am one of them of course.

Is this news for nerds? I think so.

Did your favourite car blog publish a headline that the new Ford Focus soon could be available in Yellow soon? I don’t think so.

Why does mobile blogs write about available colours then? Well, it generates clicks and advertising revenue of course. iPhone related articles draw tech savvy like bees to the honey. Are you one of those that are interested in the available colours of a mobile phone? Sure you are. You wouldn’t have read this far if you weren’t. As my Adsense revenue account tells me from time to time: No alerts found. You can go play outside!

Ericsson (not Sony Ericsson) today told 120 of it’s employees at the main office in Asker, Norway that it will shut down the office in 2011. In total 200 people are working for Ericsson in Norway. This is a sidenote in the big telecom picture, but it is nevertheless a sad day for the people involved. Ericsson will minimize it’s branches and are limiting it’s development to Sweden, Italy, Hungary and China.

Norway was Ericsson’s first foreign customer back in 1881. A Swede started a telephone association in Norway and bught telephone equipment, primary telephones for a total amount of SEK 7000,- (USD 1019) from Ericss. Probably a lot of money back then. To strengthen its position on Norway, Ericsson purchased shares in Elektrisk Bureau in 1928 and took over the telecom operations and established its own Norwegian company in 1989. Elektrisk Bureau was manufacturing telecom equipment, radio and electirc elements. In 1981, Ericsson received the contract to supply Norway’s first mobile telephone network for NMT but the first contract for digitalization of the fixed network went to Ericssons main competitor Alcatel in 1982 and because of this Ericsson changed its strategy in the country. Ericsson was choosen to buil the first GSM network for Telenor in 1995. Ericsson is the market leader of telecom products in Norway today.

Sony Ericsson Norway are sharing office with Ericsson and will probably have to relocate before 3rd quarter when the closure is completed.

At Sony’s press conference at the CES some images of the X10 running Android 2.2 Froyo was shown. Will the X10 get one more operating system update after all? The X10 was origianly shipped with Android 1.6 which were later updated to 2.1 back in December.

Update
Seems like this was a bad joke. We have no reason to believe that the X10 will get 2.2 Froyo anytime soon.

This one is a good one. It shows us that the patent regulation is the U.S. are out of control. How could a U.S patent office grant this patent in the first place? According to AppleInsider, a patent lawsuit will occupy the time of several attorneys in the few next months. A US company named Hopewell Culture & Design has filled a lawsuit against 12 large companies claiming they all breach the patent related to selecting interactive content with a double-click or double-tab.

Double-clicking has been a feature of computers for some time, but it “has not been used to effect user input to a Web browser that uniquely corresponds to the double-click input”.

The companies in question are: Adobe, Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Opera, Palm, QuickOffice, Samsung Electronics USA and Samsung Telecommunications.

via

10 millions to be exactly. Not bad for a high-end phone that has been available for only 7 months. To sell 10 million of the Samsung Galaxy S was also the goal for the Korean company aiming to be the number one mobile phone manufacture withing 3 year, or at least to overtake Nokia as the leading manufacture.

The latest rumors from Korea tells us that the Samsung Galaxy Tab will end it’s update path on Android 2.3. It seems like the requrements to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb is a device with dual-core CPU. Galaxy Tab is a single-core tablet. All tablets announced at the CES fair in a couple of days are running Android 3.0 according to sources. The reason why Android 3.0 are so popular is that it adds better support for tablet features.

Did you wake up late today? Maybe one hour too late? And do you own an iPhone? Well, it seems like the iPhone has a bug that prevent the iPhone alarm to work correctly. This affected those who don’t have a recurrent alarm set. So if you just wanted to wake up early on 1/1/2011 and set the alarm on early Saturday morning, then you probably arrived too late to your appointment. Let’s hope it wasn’t last flight back home from your Christmas vacation.

It is not the first time iPhone owner are having trouble with the phones time. In October, owners living in locatoins where Daylight Savings Time took place as most Europeans do, the alarm clock did not ajust as it should when the time was adjusted, so those affected waked up one hour late.

via Twitter

Sony has revealed information to developers that a new device that combines the function of a mobile phone and handheld games could be released in Europe next spring. If we would guess, this new device is the Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone. The official name might be Sony Ericsson Play. Or Zeuz. Or Z1. We’ll see. Based on the number of recent leaked images the announcement will take place very soon. Either during CES in the beginning of January, or at the Mobile World Congress in middle of February next year.

The Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone will be based on the PSP go model by Sony. The operating system on the new device is Android and based on photos we have seen it’s probably v2.3 Gingerbread.

Sony Ericsson PlayStation Phone Zeuz Z1 (official name not revealed)

The original Sony PSP go:

Source: Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun

A couple of images captured by an unknown device named MT15i emerged on Picasa photo site. By reading the image EXIF information we can see that the images are captured by a Sony Ericsson LT15i, at ISO 160, flash (could be LED light) and focal lenght 4.1. The photo is 8 megapixel large but this could of course be a reduced size.

But that is not all. The photo captured is also of an unkown device. This could be the same MT15i, or maybe the LT15i. Another set of images uploaded to Picasa by the same user.

We have never heard of either of these devices before but one of the could be the rumored Sony Ericsson Hallon. The photos was captured in the middle of December. The photographed phone is running Android OS. And it has a front facing camera. The first version of Android supporting video calls are v2.3 Gingerbread so that is the most likely OS

Source

Another Hallon photo posted in our forum

Android 2.1 became officially available for Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 six weeks ago. Rollout of the new OS has been done in steps depending on market and operator.

Another update was released yesterday. It is for the entire Xperia family of phones. X8, X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro and Xperia X10. Sony Ericsson is comitted to improve the software for up til 2 years after launch. So we have one year left with updates for the X10

This update is minor and the firmware version is still the same: 2.1-update1. You will need to use SEUS (Sony Ericsson Update Service) application from a PC. It is not available over the air (OTA) yet so your phone will still report that you are having the lateste update even though you don’t.

According to user reports the update will change In-call volume, give a keyboard facelift, Mediascape and Timescape is a little faster and probably some more changes. You will not be able to root the X10 with currently known tools after the update.