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Georgina Lee

When it comes to designing mobile phones, Sony Ericsson believes functions - not fancy form factors - are the way to win customers.

In the third-generation era, this means producing handsets capable of downloading and playing back rich-sounding music.

'With 3G, you can quickly download hi-fi quality music,' said Jan Wareby,  executive vice-president   of Sony Ericsson, which was created by the coming together of the Japanese and Swedish giants.

'We've worked closely with Sony to introduce our PlayNow  service, which makes it easy to download MP3 ring tones with just three clicks.'

The service is accessible on Sony Ericsson handsets through a pre-installed hypertext link.

The company, however, has yet to make a significant impact on the 3G market. It primarily focuses on the W-CDMA standard, selling the bulky Z1010  model in Hong Kong while distributing the V800  exclusively to Vodafone in Europe.

Mr Wareby said additional models were expected by the second half of next year, when global handset vendors begin making 3G handsets in volume.

In the third quarter, Sony Ericsson shipped 10.68 million mobile phones, commanding 6.4 per cent of the global market and ranking sixth after South Korea's LG.

The company planned to focus on three key themes for 3G in the coming years: imaging, entertainment and smartphone features for business users.

'We are very much focused on phone functionality,' Mr Wareby said, adding that form should be built around a phone's functions, not the other way around. 'We are not locking ourselves up with the form factor.'

But there are plenty of reasons to believe consumers care about form just as much as they do function. Nokia, the world's No1 mobile handset vendor with a 30.9 per cent global market share in the third quarter,  lost sales to competitors  because of its reluctance to produce a flip-phone, preferring the 'candy bar' form factor instead. The Finnish mobile giant has redoubled its efforts, and aims to derive 50 per cent of revenue from flip-phones and slider models next year.

Sony Ericsson said it did not focus on functionality while forsaking design details.

The company pointed to its S700  camera swivel camera phone, a form factor that the company has dubbed the 'jackknife'.

In February, Sony Ericsson's T610  won the best handset award at the 3GSM conference in Cannes for its slick look and easy-to-use picture messaging system.

Mr Wareby said the company's smart designs were a direct benefit of the tie-up with Sony in 2001. 'Sony's strength in design, user interface and content has been highly acknowledged,' he said.

'The merger with Sony has brought a more consumer electronics flavour to our company.'

Sony Ericsson was planning to release two new handsets, the J200i  and the T290i,  targeting the price-sensitive consumer.  The phones are designed for users who want simple voice functions but not much else.

The company has launched 33 handset models this year.



Sony Ericsson favours function over form for 3G handsets