Day: September 28, 2010

“Similar to a bluetooth watch, Sony Ericsson has announced its new LiveView Micro Display for its Xperia X10 series Android smartphones as well as HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S. The LiveView Micro Display is only 3.5 x 3.5 cm in size, it has a 1.3-inch OLED display, micro USB port, two hardkeys, four softkeys and able to give you 4 days usage with a single charge. The LiveView Micro Display works by connecting to your phone via the wireless Bluetooth connection. It allows you to read your SMS, check incoming caller ID, read Facebook / Twitter updates and control your music player. Available in Q4 this year, the retail package will include a clip and a wristband accessory. You can either clip it to your bag or wear it like a watch. A new Sony Ericsson LiveWare manager will also be available in the Android Market. It can be used to search Sony Ericsson LiveView enabled softwares developed by Sony Ericsson or other software developers.

London, September 28th 2010 – Today sees the announcement of the Sony Ericsson LiveView™. This innovative accessory is another step in Sony Ericsson’s commitment to help consumers get the very best mobile phone experience through the open Android platform. The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ is part of the Sony Ericsson Extras portfolio – a division which offers a total product experience and enhanced mobile possibilities.

The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ uses Bluetooth™ connectivity to wirelessly pair up to a compatible handset and allows consumers to control the phone without taking it out of their pocket or handbag. Read text messages, see incoming calls and keep up to date with the latest news on Facebook™ and Twitter™.

The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ allows the user to control the Sony Ericsson music features of the handset from the micro display, selecting tracks and controlling volume. The product also serves as a calendar reminder, displaying calendar events and other phone applications.

Whether on the go, in a meeting or out for dinner, the convenient Sony Ericsson LiveView™ can be clipped anywhere. Attached in a watch strap, on a keychain or clipped to a laptop, the micro display allows the user to incorporate the product into their lifestyle and always stay connected.

Mikael Henriksson, Head of creation and offering planning at Sony Ericsson Extras, said: “It is our ambition to be THE Communication Entertainment brand and this includes being the most open mobile phone brand on the market. We believe in openness and offering consumers a wide range of applications to choose from. We will continue to develop accessories to ensure we play a major and groundbreaking role in the market and design innovative and exciting accessories for all platforms, including Android.”

Mikael Henriksson continued: “The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ is the first Sony Ericsson accessory to be compatible with the open Android™ platform which gives developers an opportunity to be creative and develop the next must-have innovative application.”

Your window to your world with Sony Ericsson LiveView™

* Micro display device that mirrors the phone
* Tunes on the go – control music
* Don’t miss out – Get instant notification and readtexts, Tweets and Facebook™ updates
* Incoming calls – see who is calling
* Make it mine – open platform for developers to add to the large collection of applications for a unique experience

To find Sony Ericsson LiveView™ enabled applications, Sony Ericsson has developed the Sony Ericsson LiveWare™ Manager application. It will scan Android™ Market for Sony Ericsson LiveView™ enabled applications and present them to the user. The Sony Ericsson LiveWare™ manager will be available from Android™ Market, or come preinstalled in phone bundles.

The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ will be available in stores from Q4, 2010.

The Sony Ericsson LiveView™ is also available in one of the Sony Ericsson Experience Packs. An ‘Experience Pack‘ is a package of several related components that together create a great user experience in a certain area. The packages include mobile phone applications, accessories, services and much more. The “Sony Ericsson Fitness Pack” is aimed at sports and fitness enthusiasts. It contains a sport application for the Sony Ericsson LiveView™ – The SportyPal™ Pro – and a carrying case for your mobile phone – ideal for exercising.

The first ‘Sony Ericsson Experience Pack” will be available in selected markets in Q4.

To see more about Sony Ericsson Extras visit: www.sonyericsson.com/LiveView

For more developer information visit: http//developer.sonyericsson.com

Sony Ericsson LiveView™ – at a glance

Music player control

* Play, pause, next, previous track and volume adjustment
* Track title display

Social Networking Services

* Display Facebook™ updates
* Display Twitter™ updates

Messaging

* Display incoming texts
* Display RSS feeds

Calls

* Show phone number for incoming calls
* Mute ringer for incoming phone calls
* List of missed calls

Other

* Calendar reminders
* Find your phone
* Display time and date

Connectivity

* Bluetooth™ technology
* Micro USB connector
* USB High Speed 2.0 support

Screen

* 1,3”colour OLED display, 128×128 pixels

Compatibility

* Compatible with the Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10, Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10 mini and Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10 mini pro and most other brands on Android 2.0 and above.
* For full compatibility list please visit www.sonyericsson.com
* Bluetooth™ range approximately 10m

Facts

* Size:3.5 x 3.5×1.1cm
* Typical consumer battery usage time: 4 days

Availability and versions

* Available in selected markets from Q4 2010

Colour

* Black

Kit content

* Sony Ericsson LiveView™
* Clip
* Wristband
* MicroUSB charger
* User guide

“The Nokia E5’s screen does what it needs to do, without any frills. At 2.4 inches and with a resolution of 320×240, it provides adequate size and sharpness for most tasks such as messaging and editing short documents, though it is less than ideal for web browsing and watching movies on. Viewing angles on the phone are great and the screen is also very bright. Both these factors help make the screen more usable for long periods, and the landscape orientation lends itself to business oriented tasks (such as text entry, Bloomberg and sorting through emails). While the Nokia E5 displays less colours than the E72 (256,000 instead of 16,700,000), when considering the E5’s business oriented end-use, this is a logical sacrifice that won’t hamper usability.
The QWERTY keyboard is perhaps the Nokia E5’s key selling point. Being a four tiered layout, it is comprehensive enough in terms of what it offers, however is small and a little cramped. The keys are rubberised and feel tactile enough to facilitate decent typing speeds. The biggest detractor surrounding the keyboard’s usability isn’t so much its size however, but the shape of the QWERTY keys. Being raised only in the centre, pressure needs to be applied to a very specific point in order to click each key. While this is something that can be gotten used to, it doesn’t provide as intuitive a typing experience as we had hoped it would, and simply isn’t comfortable if you have larger fingers.” Read more here:

“The tablet market got a little more crowded, and a lot more exciting, today as RIM unveiled its tablet device after months of speculation. The device will be called the PlayBook, defying all previous attempts at guessing its name and it’s packing a fair old punch beneath the hood. Specs include a dual-core 1 GHz chip and RIM seem to be keen to position it not just to professionals, but also to gamers.
Mike Lazaridis called it ‘the first professional tablet’, an obvious dig at Apple’s seemingly more frivolous iPad, but at the same time RIM are saying “This is going to be an incredible gaming platfom for publishers and the players.” If it can fulfill both criteria then this could be a real winner.
One possible drawback for some is the lack of 3G connectivity, but RIM are promising a 3G version (and even a 4G version) in the future.

• 7-inch LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
• BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB RAM
• Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
• Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
• HDMI video output
• Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
• Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
• 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA–(Marketwire – 09/27/10) – BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 –

Editors Note: There is a video and two photos available with this Press Release.

Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM – News)(TSX:RIM – News) today redefined the possibilities for mobile computing with the unveiling of its new professional-grade BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and BlackBerry® Tablet OS.

Perfect for either large organizations or an “army of one”, the BlackBerry PlayBook is designed to give users what they want, including uncompromised web browsing, true multitasking and high performance multimedia, while also providing advanced security features, out-of-the-box enterprise support and a breakthrough development platform for IT departments and developers. The incredibly powerful and innovative BlackBerry PlayBook is truly a game-changing product in the growing tablet marketplace.

“RIM set out to engineer the best professional-grade tablet in the industry with cutting-edge hardware features and one of the world’s most robust and flexible operating systems,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. “The BlackBerry PlayBook solidly hits the mark with industry leading power, true multitasking, uncompromised web browsing and high performance multimedia.”

The Tablet You’ll Want to Take Everywhere

This beautifully designed and incredibly powerful tablet is ultra portable, ultra thin and super convenient for both work and play. Measuring less than half an inch thick and weighing less than a pound, the BlackBerry PlayBook features a vivid 7″ high resolution display that looks and feels great in your hand. With such a unique mix of utility, performance and portability, you’ll want to take it everywhere.

The New Benchmark in Tablet Performance

At its heart, the BlackBerry PlayBook is a multitasking powerhouse. Its groundbreaking performance is jointly fueled by a 1 GHz dual-core processor and the new BlackBerry Tablet OS which supports true symmetric multiprocessing. Together, the abundant processing power and highly sophisticated OS enable the BlackBerry PlayBook to provide users with true multitasking and a highly-responsive and fluid touch screen experience for apps and content services.

Uncompromised Web Browsing

With support for Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1, Adobe® Mobile AIR® and HTML-5, the BlackBerry PlayBook provides customers with an uncompromised, high-fidelity web experience and offers them the ability to enjoy all of the sites, games and media on the web. For more than a decade, the mobile industry has worked to bridge the gap between the “real web” and mobile devices through various apps and technologies and, in fact, a significant number of mobile apps today still simply serve as a proxy for web content that already exists on the web. The BlackBerry PlayBook closes that gap and brings the real, full web experience to mobile users while also opening new and more exciting opportunities for developers and content publishers.

High Performance Multimedia

The BlackBerry PlayBook features premium multimedia features to support high-quality mobile experiences. It includes dual HD cameras for video capture and video conferencing that can both record HD video at the same time, and an HDMI-out port for presenting one’s creations on external displays. The BlackBerry PlayBook also offers rich stereo sound and a media player that rivals the best in the industry.

BlackBerry Integration

For those BlackBerry PlayBook users who carry a BlackBerry smartphone(i), it will also be possible to pair their tablet and smartphone using a secure Bluetooth® connection. This means they can opt to use the larger tablet display to seamlessly and securely view any of the email, BBM™, calendar, tasks, documents and other content that resides on (or is accessible through) their smartphone. They can also use their tablet and smartphone interchangeably without worrying about syncing or duplicating data. This secure integration of BlackBerry tablets and smartphones is a particularly useful feature for those business users who want to leave their laptop behind.

Enterprise Ready

Thanks to the seamless and secure Bluetooth pairing experience and the highly secure underlying OS architecture, the BlackBerry PlayBook is enterprise ready and compatible (out-of-the-box) with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server. When connected over Bluetooth, the smartphone content is viewable on the tablet, but the content actually remains stored on the BlackBerry smartphone and is only temporarily cached on the tablet (and subject to IT policy controls). With this approach to information security, IT departments can deploy the BlackBerry PlayBook to employees out-of-the-box without worrying about all the security and manageability issues that arise when corporate data is stored on yet another device.

QNX Neutrino Reliability

The BlackBerry Tablet OS is built upon the QNX® Neutrino® microkernel architecture, one of the most reliable, secure and robust operating system architectures in the world. Neutrino has been field hardened for years and is being used to support mission-critical applications in everything from planes, trains and automobiles to medical equipment and the largest core routers that run the Internet. The new BlackBerry Tablet OS leverages and builds upon the many proven strengths of this QNX Neutrino architecture to support a professional grade tablet experience and to redefine the possibilities for mobile computing.

An OS Built for Developers

The Neutrino based microkernel architecture in the BlackBerry Tablet OS delivers exceptional performance, high scalability, Common Criteria EAL 4+ security, and support for industry standard tools that are already familiar to hundreds of thousands of developers. The OS is fully POSIX compliant enabling easy portability of C-based code, supports Open GL for 2D and 3D graphics intensive applications like gaming, and will run applications built in Adobe Mobile AIR as well as the new BlackBerry® WebWorks™ app platform announced today (which will allow apps to be written to run on BlackBerry PlayBook tablets as well as BlackBerry smartphones with BlackBerry® 6). The BlackBerry Tablet OS will also support Java enabling developers to easily bring their existing BlackBerry 6 Java applications to the BlackBerry Tablet OS environment.

Key features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook include:

— 7″ LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch
and gesture support
— BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
— 1 GHz dual-core processor
— 1 GB RAM
— Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD
video recording
— Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
— Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
— HDMI video output
— Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
— Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
— Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
— Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5,
Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL,
Java
— Ultra thin and portable:
— Measures 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
— Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)
— Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will
be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail
outlets.
— RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future.

Availability

The BlackBerry PlayBook is expected to be available in retail outlets and other channels in the United States in early 2011 with rollouts in other international markets beginning in (calendar) Q2.

RIM will begin working with developers and select corporate customers next month to begin development and early testing efforts.