Sony Ericsson, long the purveyor of its bespoke operating system, has teamed up with Microsoft and will start selling Windows Mobile phones sometime later this year, the company announced. Sony Ericsson also own the UIQ, a deriviative of the Symbian OS.
As part of its deal with Microsoft, SE will introduce a new brand, XPERIA, and will launch X1, an arc slider phone that has a 3-inch clear wide VGA display and a full QWERTY keyboard. Microsoft is likely to ship 20 million phones in fiscal year ending June 2008, and now has partnerships with SE, LG, Motorola, Samsung and HTC for its Windows Mobile OS. It has been trying to convince Nokia to join the party.
The Mobile OS market is going to go through some major upheaveals in next 24 months or so as Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, LiMo and Symbian all jostle for pole position in the high end phone market.
8 comments so far
12:22 PM PT
I don’t think we are going to see any manufacturer come out with an Apple OS. Apple is pretty much going to stick with their current model on the “computing” side of their business where it will design the hardware and the software and keep it closed. The fight for the mobile OS will be between MS, Android and a couple (maybe more) Linux based systems. Oh and I forgot Symbian!
1:30 PM PT
In case you’ve missed it, the OS war is already over. The browser (and java) won.
3:47 AM PT
[...] related news, Sony Ericsson has just announced a partnership with Microsoft. Gigaom reports that Sony Ericsson will start selling Windows Mobile phones sometime later this year (also see [...]
8:25 AM PT
[...] Sony Ericsson has announced a partnership with Microsoft to carry the Windows Mobile platfrom on some of its handsets sometime later this [...]
9:56 AM PT
Dude, drop your fascination with the word “bespoke”. You’re not using it correctly and its driving me insane… or it could just be mondayness.
10:25 AM PT
Just as interesting as SE’s choice of OS, is the fact that this is a HTC product with a Qualcomm chipset inside. It looks like EMP wasnt going to be ready with a chipset this year that could power a rival to the iPhone. Still, it is amazing that SE showed the flexibilty to use options from two of their largest rivals. Very nice win for the teams in Redmond and SD.
9:34 AM PT
[...] related news, Sony Ericsson has just announced a partnership with Microsoft. Gigaom reports that Sony Ericsson will start selling Windows Mobile phones sometime later this year (also see [...]
10:04 PM PT
[...] will announce plans for the company’s new line of smartphones using Windows Mobile. The new line of phones, called XPERIA, will be shipped later this year with the first device featuring a full QWERTY slideout keyboard [...]
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