Sony Ericsson launches new mobile phone

P>STOCKHOLM: Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications has launched a range of new products including a T100 mobile phone designed to capture a slice of the lucrative and mass-volume youth market.

The latest product is an attempt by the loss-making joint venture, struggling to compete in a stagnant market, to fight back with a high-volume, low-priced mobile phone.

The company also announced a Bluetooth hands-free HBH-60 headset, which can be used with all Bluetooth mobile phones and a stereo FM-radio hands-free HPR-20, through which consumers can listen to the radio and handle mobile calls.

Sony Ericsson, created last year from the handset units of Swedish telecoms equipment maker Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson and Japan's consumer electronics giant Sony Corp, said it would start shipping the T100 in the fourth quarter of 2002. The phone features enhanced messaging capabilities, is light and small and will be competitively priced. The other new products would be available during the fourth quarter, Sony Ericsson said in a statement.

Last week Sony Ericsson announced its flagship P800 camera-phone would only be on sale before Christmas rather than by the end of this month, declining to explain why.

The success of both the T100 and the P800 is seen as important for the joint venture to keep open funding lines for its parents. Both Sony and Ericsson are committed to invest 500 million euros each in the joint venture until October 2003.

Despite the success of its T68 and T68i colour-screen mobile handsets, Sony Ericsson has been losing market share over the last 12 months, falling to 5.4 percent of global sales in the second quarter from a pro forma 7.7 percent a year earlier.

The handset maker's parent company Ericsson on Tuesday also announced the first live hand over of calls between the GSM and WCDMA third-generation mobile telephony standards on Tuesday, using test units.



This meant that a person talking on a cell phone from a car would automatically have the call transferred from a 3G network covering only a city area to a GSM network when driving into the countryside. "From the operator's point of view you can offer customers complete coverage from the very beginning, and you don't need to have full 3G coverage in a country," Ericsson spokesman Peter Olofsson said.

"It has been debated and questioned whether this can be done. We don't know what our competitors are doing, but as far as we know they haven't shown it yet."

GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) is the world's dominant second-generation wireless technology, currently used by most European operators.

WCDMA is a new standard, which enables fast data rate transfers, particularly useful for data-heavy multimedia services such as picture and video messaging.

The 3G rollout has been plagued by delays in Europe with cash-strapped telecom operators choosing instead to focus on repairing their battered balance sheets after spending billions of euros on 3G licences in 2000.

© Reuters Ltd.,