Thanks to Sony Ericsson’s product innovation, mobile phones today will never be the same again. It used to be bland, boring and pretty much useless outside of being confined to what a bare communications device on the road is. Now, it’s a mobile gadget many people are entertained with while on the road. It has become quite useful as an MP3 player and a camera phone.
These features inherited the Sony expertise in consumer electronics market with its Walkman and Cybershot products in the music and imaging departments, respectively. You have the W and K products that have cemented the two features the market has come to expect and taken for granted in mobile phones.
A Short History
But it didn’t start out rosy for the company. As a merged company from a joint venture between the world’s leading consumer electronics powerhouse fro Japan, Sony and the Swedish telecommunications leader Ericsson, it struggled to compete with the formidable Nokia and Motorola between 2001 when it started and 2003 before making a profit in 2004.
But even prior to the merger, Sony had been a marginal maker of mobile phones that had a negligible following in the market and wanted to diversify despite suffering massive commercial loses in the mobile phone business. Ericsson had a partnership with General Electric to make its presence felt in the US markets and had a much better mobile phone making reputation as the world’s third largest phone maker after Nokia and Motorola.
But as fate would have it, a fire that gutted its Philips supplier in 2000 basically brought it to its knees that almost got them to abandon the mobile phone business. Enter Sony with a mission not only to save Ericsson, but to form a business alliance that would create better synergies in taking advantage of Sony’s consumer electronics muscle and Ericsson’s technical savvy in the telecommunication’s industry.
To observers, this was the right strategic marriage that could unseat Nokia and Motorola from their perch notwithstanding the fact that an earlier merger between Sony’s rival compatriot Toshiba and the German telecommunications giant Siemens fizzled out at around the time Sony and Ericsson made its pact.
The fusion between the two giants was best showcased in the highly successful P800 introduced in 2002 and was the successor to the Ericsson R380. It had been designed and produced by Ericsson but was marketed under the new Sony Ericsson merger and was considered the world’s first touchscreen smartphone with the largest color display.
The P800 was a landmark smartphone that defined the path and genre for succeeding mobile phones. It also created the flagship P series of handsets that segmented the market of mobile phones to cater to the upscale end of the demographic spectra.
With PDA function, a camera and touchscreen, the P800 would prove to be seminal in the evolution of the mobile phone form the bland basic communications tool on the road into a business phone with entertainment features that we now take for granted as de rigueur features on a mobile. The rest, as they say, is history.
