Sony Ericsson Adds Apps To PlayNow; Partners With GetJar To Beef Up Catalog By About 45,000

imageSony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), the fifth-largest mobile-phone maker in the world, is revealing its plans today for a mobile application store and says it will be outsourcing much of the work to GetJar, an independent Lithuania-based company.

While it’s early days for most mobile app stores, Sony Ericsson is the first major handset maker to look for help in managing and stocking what can otherwise be an unwieldy and massive digital warehouse. So far, many of the major handset makers, including Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), BlackBerry and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), have chosen to manage stores on their own, which means everything from sourcing the content to testing and approving it. The joint announcement is being made today at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, however, mocoNews was able to talk to Ullrika Svenburg, Sony Ericsson’s Head of Content and Services Communications, and Chris Dury, GetJar’s vp of product, in advance.

As expected, Sony Ericsson said the new app store will be accessed from its PlayNow Arena content platform that launched ten months ago. PlayNow offers everything from wallpapers to full-track music downloads and a just-announced movie rental service. Sony Ericsson will focus on sourcing premium branded content for the PlayNow store, while linking to GetJar, so customers will have access to what Dury refers to “as the long-tail of applications,” including 45,000 applications. GetJar will also provide back-end technology to Sony Ericsson to help manage the application process for developers. Svenburg: “We

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