Sony Ericsson W960: New UIQ 3-based Walkman phone

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June 15, 2007

Sony Ericsson W960: New UIQ 3-based Walkman® phone

Announced on June 14, 2007, the new Sony Ericsson W960 Walkman phone offers a rich feature list for both entertainment and business including a 3.2 Megapixel camera, QVGA touchscreen, 8GB memory for user storage, WiFi, VoIP support and secure push email. The W960 takes the number of Sony Ericsson phones based on Symbian OS v9.1 and UIQ 3.0 to five, increasing the potential market for UIQ 3-based applications and demonstrating the flexibility of the Symbian OS platform to deliver end-users an advanced music and entertainment offering while providing an open and secure platform for business and productivity applications.

Those you who have downloaded the latest firmware for the P990 will know that previous bugs and stability issues are now fixed and that we have a stable UIQ 3.0 platform environment. As with the recently announced P1 smartphone, this stability has been a crucial component on which to build the new W960, and lessons learned from the P990, M600 and W950 phones have contributed to the W960 in a positive way by improving the new UIQ 3-based Walkman phone's performance.

W960's entertainment and multimedia capabilities

Walkman player
The Walkman player can be controlled by the keypad, dedicated hardware buttons and the transreflective QVGA touch screen. The W960 comes with new Media Manager PC software which supports the extraction of music tracks from legacy CDs, compression and transfer to the phone using high-speed USB (1GB of data can be transferred in about three minutes) in addition to optimizing photos and videos to be used on the phone. The TrackID music recognition service has been taken to the next level with new search options including artist, title, album and lyrics, and once the track is identified, background information on the artist and album is also received.

Multimedia and business
The 3G W960 boosts multimedia and business connectivity by offering integrated WLAN, VoIP-enabled client support, secure push email, Opera 8 web browser, 3.2 megapixel camera with a business card scanner, RSS feed support and Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel document management.

As the W960 includes integrated WLAN, developers can use the WLAN API to create applications using WiFi connectivity. Gaming is strengthened with hardware accelerated 3D graphics, supported natively (C++) using OpenGL ES and by JSR 184.

W960 Walkman phone.

RAM and memory
When compared to the W950 phone, RAM size is doubled from 64MB to 128MB, which significantly improves multitasking performance and application behavior. Storage capacity is also doubled as the W960 has 256MB Flash memory (W950 has 128MB) and 8GB memory for user storage (W950 has 4GB).

The Sony Ericsson W960 will be available in selected markets from Q4 2007.

More W960 information and specifications here>>

C++ and Java ME development
The W960 is a Symbian OS v9.1, UIQ 3.0-based phone and offers great opportunities for both C++ and Java ME developers.

UIQ 3 open platform
Sony Ericsson believes in the benefits of developing in a rich, open architecture and is fully committed to Symbian OS and UIQ. The UIQ 3 platform is based on Symbian OS and provides great freedom of choice for end-users to personalize their W960 Walkman, increasing ARPU opportunity for operators and expanding business opportunities for developers and content creators.

The addition of the W960 expands Sony Ericsson's UIQ 3-based phone family to five and increases this addressable UIQ 3 application market for developers. The UIQ 3 platform allows developers to potentially target all UIQ 3-based phones using one single codeline. Applications will automatically receive the look and feel of the device they run on without the need to write extra code for it. For example, the W960 has the same APIs as the P1 and P990 so all applications created for the P1and P990 using WLAN or the camera will run on the W960.

To inspire the creation of business and productivity UIQ 3 apps, Sony Ericsson Developer World has gathered all UIQ 3-related development resources in one convenient location: www.sonyericsson.com/developer/productivemobility

Here you'll find the latest UIQ 3-related docs, tools, tutorials, phones specifications, code samples and news articles. Our new getting started tutorial series for the UIQ 3 Platform is available for download and the latest chapter, part 5, guides you through releasing your UIQ-based app. Read more here>>

Java ME CLDC
The Java ME CLDC 1.1 environment is supported by the W960. The IDEs from Borland JBuilder 2006, NetBeans 4.1 + Mobility Pack (Sun Microsystems) and Eclipse 3.1 + Eclipse ME can be used for Java-based applications. On-device debugging of Java ME CLDC applications is supported through JDWP (Java Debug Wire Protocol) which allows most Java aware IDEs to be used out-of-the box for debugging.

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