LAS VEGAS—Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB on Monday unveiled its latest high-end smartphone.
The P900 is smaller than its predecessor, the P800, and better equipped for multimedia applications.
Based on Version 7.0 of the Symbian operating system, the P900 supports 65,536 colors, compared with 4,096 colors in the P800, and 48MB of RAM, compared with 32MB in the previous model, officials said. The phone also comes with a 32MB Memory Stick Duo and will support Memory Sticks with up to 128MB capacity.
The new phone includes a still camera/video recorder, which can film as long as memory will allow; a video clip takes up about 1MB per minute, officials said. The clips can be attached to MMS (multimedia messaging service) messages.
“I personally have a very strong belief in this product,” Katsumi Ihara, president of Sony Ericsson, said at a launch party for the phone here Monday night. Ihara cited figures from Strategy Analytics, showing that camera phones outsold still digital cameras in the first half of 2003.
Images on the P900 can be viewed across the entire screen and in wide-screen mode, officials said.
The phone also includes an MP3 player and the ability to create ring tones from MP3 files. It comes bundled with the Opera browser and supports HTML, cHTML and WAP content, officials said.
In addition, Sony Ericsson has teamed up with several companies to ensure that the phone supports various push-based e-mail solutions, although Research In Motion Ltd.s BlackBerry platform is not among them. Partners include IBM, Extended Systems Inc., Visto Corp. and Synchrologic Inc.
“Weve made the product suitable for the enterprise,” said Steve Walker, vice president of marketing at Sony Ericsson in London, who said the corporate audience is a target audience for the high-end device. The company has yet to announce pricing, but Walker said it will be comparable to the price of the P800, which sells for $649.99.
The P900 will ship in Europe and Asia next month and in the United States in the first quarter of next year. A similar model, the P908, will ship in China in the first quarter.