Smartphones call on sharp developers
Loss-making Sony Ericsson, created last October, has the ambitious goal of challenging Finland's Nokia for the world leadership in handsets in five years.
But its market share has been dwindling. By promoting unique new services, the company aims to boost the attractiveness of its high-end multimedia phones and distinguish them from rival devices coming to market.
"Sony Ericsson is offering developers an opportunity to have their applications featured as part of the P800 Smartphone launch activities and distributed to the marketplace at no cost," the company said in a statement.
The handset maker said it would promote the top 50 applications to mobile operators, who would have access to another way of making money by offering applications to P800 customers on their Web sites.
The P800, which the company plans to start selling in October, is a combination of a PDA (personal digital assistant), mobile phone and digital camera and stands to compete with Nokia's similarly featured 7650 model.
Sony Ericsson's market share dropped to around 5.5 percent in the second quarter, or about a seventh of Nokia's market share, from 6.5 percent in the first, with handset sales down 800,000 to five million phones.
Many hands make handset apps
Sony Ericsson spokesman Peter Bodor said the company had its own programmers working on applications for the new phone, but pooling resources from developers all over the world would boost the handset's possibilities.
The company said it wants these services written for the Symbian operating system and in the open Java application programming language. "The most important thing for us is to emphasize the open character of the P800 phone," Bodor said.
"The mobile phone industry is moving in the same way as the personal computer industry, where many people are writing the applications. In the end, the more and the better the applications, the higher the sales of phones," Bodor said.
Industry analysts said Sony Ericsson's development plan underlined that there are still very few developers writing applications for new smartphones such as the P800.
"Companies like Sony Ericsson depend on small software developers to write applications for their new devices, but there are very few ideas and plans," said Michelle de Lussanet, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Ben Wood at Gartner Dataquest added: "This announcement emphasizes that the whole mobile industry is lacking applications. A lot of software developers got badly burned by WAP, for which they wrote applications that did not sell."
Five years ago WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) was launched as the first multifunctional software protocol to bring data services to mobile phones, but WAP services have generated only tiny revenues.
The industry needs to prove it can develop a market for data applications, such as mobile games, or risk writing off investments in new and fast data networks, such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Network). Even more expensive are 3G (third generation) networks, which have already cost operators billions of dollars in radio licenses.
Some European operators are pulling out of 3G launches or freezing plans for them.
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