14 DAY TRIAL // Japanese-Swedish mobile phone phone maker Sony Ericsson did not perform well at all during the last year, but the company is confident that the new year would offer it the possibility to put things in order.
After launching the Xperia X10 family of devices last year, the handset vendor is set to bring new, more appealing phones to shelves this year, and it already unveiled one of them, the Xperia arc.
“The first generation of handsets in our portfolio was about getting the capability out there”, Steve Walker (Acting) global head of marketing for Sony Ericsson said in an interview with Pocket-lint at CES in Las Vegas.
“As we do every year, we’ve taken those learnings and applied them to the new products in the new portfolio. We do think we’ve taken a big step forward for 2011”.
Sony Ericsson sees 2010 as the first year of mass-market Android devices, and says that, while it started to build it's Android smartphones sometime in 2008, “nobody really knew the dynamics of the Android smartphone market or even what the smartphone market was going to be.”
However, the company learned its lesson, and the next generation mobile phones it plans to bring to the market should reflect that.
Apparently, 2011 is seen as the year when customers would look more at hardware than before, and that they would take this aspect into consideration the same as they do with the software on their devices.
2011 should bring to shelves many products from Sony Ericsson, Walker said, adding that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc was only the first of them.
The Xperia X10 smartphone was a pretty popular handset last year, but the fact that Sony Ericsson was late with providing updates for it was not seen with good eyes by end-users, especially since the company confirmed officially that no OS upgrades past Android 2.1 will become available for the device.