Sony Ericsson and Google have introduced a phone aimed at a rapidly growing segment of Internet users — bloggers.
The phones will integrate Google’s Blogger and Web search features on Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones. The blog application will be tightly integrated to the camera and provide automatic set-up for users who don’t already have a blog.
The first Sony Ericsson products to offer the new service are the recently announced K610 UMTS phone and two new flagship imaging handsets — the K800 and K790, which were announced on Tuesday along with the new relationship with Google. They will be available in Q2 2006.
Monetizing New Trends
The K800 and K790 mobile phones offer an integrated 3.2 megapixel digital camera with Autofocus, Xenon flash and BestPic, along with HTML browsing with RSS feeds and Google Search.
Sony Ericsson is attempting to monetize new mobile phone usage trends, IDC analyst Dana Thorat told TechNewsWorld. “Camera phones are widely accepted — people use them all the time — but the carriers have not been able to make money off of someone taking a picture for personal use.”
Facilitating photography for use on Web sites that draw interaction from many people may be a different story, she said. The partnership with Google is a natural extension of blogging and other Internet and computing trends.
“There is so much activity around blogging and social networking and Web sites such as MySpace.com,” Thorat noted. “At the same time, there is a movement away from the desktop — or at least a movement not to be completely tied to the desktop.”
Moving these activities into the mobile environment may capitalize on these trends, she suggested.
75,000 Blogs a Day
The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was just three years ago, according to Technorati, a firm that tracks the 27.2 millon or so blogs that comprise it. In its report, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006,” the firm found that 75,000 new blogs are created every day — and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs are created.
“Blogs are about what is happening to the blogger right now,” Thorat said, “not what happened yesterday.” A mobile phone with camera and blogging software is the ideal tool for this mindset, she said.
Sony Ericsson’s and Google’s collaboration in this space might be the most high profile thus far — but it is not the first. Another provider in Europe, NewBay Software, offers a similar product called FoneBlog, Thorat said.
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