It looks like Sony Ericsson prepares (or already prepared?) a new naming scheme for its future handsets. At the moment there's nothing official, but the Swedish-Japanese joint venture might come up with new names and also new phone series. For example, there will be a G-series - Generation Web (two handsets were already announced, G700 and G900), a Radio series - sub-division of the Walkman series (R300 and R306 have been announced) and a Snapshot series, part of the bigger Cyber-shot family.

Now, about the new naming scheme: there will still be the "letter and three numbers" format, and, of course, a name starting with C will be from a Cyber-shot phone, a name starting with R will be from a Radio phone and so on. The first number in the name will represent the range of the handset: 9 stands for a high-end device, while 1 for a low-end one. The second number will be the phone's "version", while the third number will stand for the handset's form factor: 0-2 is for candybar, 3-5 for slider, 6-8 for clamshell and 9 for "other form". See the the image from the left for more details.

For example, a future Sony Ericsson handset named C631 would be the fourth from a mid-end candybar Cyber-shot mini-series (C601 would be the first), while a SE named W925 would be the third from a high-end Walkman mini-series (W905 would be the first).

There are about twenty naming possibilities for any new phone in any series (Cyber-shot, Snapshot, Walkman or any other), so it will be a long time until SE has to come with another naming scheme. This being said, let's wait for official details from Sony Ericsson and see what the company will bring in the future - maybe a P3 or a P5 handset, maybe the PSP phone, or the successor of the unreleased yet Xperia X1.

For those who don't know, the joint venture between Ericsson and Sony was established in 2001, in order to combine the Swedish company's technological leadership in the communications industry with the Japanese company's consumer electronics expertise. Of course, both companies have stopped producing their own handsets, which turned out to be a good thing. I can't help thinking how funny the old Ericsson and Sony phones looked like. Ericsson R310s, for example, when viewed from the front looks kind of like an... erotic toy (you can view the phone here). Sure, those were other times and, somehow, it's amazing what Sony Ericsson creates now, compared to the phones from a decade ago. No wonder it's one of the world's most loved mobile phone brands.