This past year has been a very good year for Sony Ericsson. We introduced a number of successful products to the global market and established the first complete portfolio of our own. We started off the year strongly with the roll-out of the first true smartphone, the P800. The P800 brought a new level of interaction to the consumers and opportunities for the developer community thanks to its openness. In October, we followed up the P800 with the P900, and we have managed to establish a strong presence in the smartphone space with great-performing, solid products. Sony Ericsson has shown its commitment to Symbian OS and UIQ by arranging and participating in a number of events this year, among others as main sponsor, speaker an exhibitor at a series of Symbian Developer Days during the fall. Sony Ericsson has also introduced its first full range of Java-enabled phones this year; the T610 along with its North American version T616 and Asian version T618, the Z600 and now, most recently the T630. The 3G phone Z1010 was announced already at 3GSM World Congress in Cannes back in February, and will be rolled out in Q1 2004 with full J2ME MIDP 2.0 support. Sony Ericsson's Developer Program has undergone a lot of changes to facilitate information sharing and tools availability as well as support for this exciting range of phones. In the beginning of the year we, together with Metrowerks, brought a complete P800 development kit to market in order to make development for the P800 as easy and accessible as possible. We have had a great success with this tools bundle, and will continue to create this kind of "Ready-2-Develop" solutions. We have already launched a new CodeWarrior Wireless Development Kit for the P900.

As an extra push for the P800 and in order to give you a better channel to market for your applications, we went live with the Sony Ericsson Application Shop in cooperation with Handango in March this year. This has proven a tremendous success for many of our Developer World members, and to build on that success we launched the on-device Application Shop client with OTA download capability for the P800/P900 earlier this fall. We are very excited about the ability to support you getting your applications closer to the consumer and we will put even more efforts into this area in 2004.

At JavaOne back in June, we announced on-device debugging support for J2ME applications, as well as a partnership with tools vendor Borland to offer an end-to-end integrated solution for Java development. This partnership will also bring improved development tools for Symbian developers to the market in 2004.

In October, we launched a new developer web portal, the Sony Ericsson Developer World (the one you are visiting right now). Our goal is to make this your first stop for the latest information, tools, support, and other developer services in the year to come. We will continue to improve and add benefits to this program in the hope and ambition of giving you a high perceived value of being a member of Sony Ericsson Developer World.

When looking back on the past year, one should probably also acknowledge some of the challenges we have been facing. One of the low-points from 2003 was when we started to receive some complaints about the performance of the T610 JVM. One of the critical actions we took was to turn this into an opportunity to interact with the developer community. We worked with a number of Java developers to improve the performance. We got access to actual Java source code and our R&D department was able to improve the performance 3-fold, bringing the performance up to par with the rest of the Java phones out in the market. With the active contributions of willing 3rd party development partners, we enabled the 2nd generation of T610 to run the full range of Java games in the market. This work has benefited also the new products Z600 and T630, and is a good example of the kind of relation we want to build and maintain with experienced developers targeting our phones, making sure that what we bring to market is competitive and inspiring consumers to download more applications and content.

With the current positive momentum for Sony Ericsson in the market, the advent of J2ME MIDP 2.0, and the exciting new products we will be bringing to market in 2004, I feel confident to invite all existing and new Sony Ericsson Developer World members to contribute to continued success and a rewarding year to come.

From the whole Developer Program team here at Sony Ericsson I wish you a relaxing holiday season with family and friends. We look forward to working with you in the new year!

Mikael Nerde
Head of Sony Ericsson Developer Program

(By the way - feel free to download and use the Sony Ericsson Developer World Themes that we have created for the T610 and Z600, using the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator tool. Click here, to download>>)