Sony Ericsson Thinks Different about Cell Phones

FC: What prompted the launch of Sony Ericsson Developer World?

Olsson: Sony Ericsson Developer World was created to make sure that Sony Ericsson, a 50:50 joint venture between Sony Corporation and Ericsson AB, had attractive content and applications to support a more personalized user experience. We have seen an evolution over the past few years from just being a hardware company that talks about product features to actually talking about the user experience, asking, "What can you do with your phone apart from just making phone calls and sending text messages?" Working with the global developer community and with content creators is very important to make sure that that happens.

FC: Sony Ericsson offered the first open software platform UIQ-enabled phone back in 2002, before Developer World was even created. How long has Sony Ericsson been promoting open development? (Note: UIQ Technology was established in 1999 and is based on the Symbian operating system. It is one of the primary platforms used in the development and licensing of open software applications for mobile phones.)

Olsson: When we talk about open platforms, we mean that the phones are able to download content and software from the third party developer community. Sony Ericsson has been focusing on two major technologies to enable this. One is UIQ, which we first implemented with the P800 smartphone back in 2002, and the other technology is Java. We now have 3 phones based on Java Platform 8, which offers a lot of new features -- applications that handle payment transactions, location-based applications, applications that use an accelerometer or a sensor. We have two phones that come preloaded with a game called Marble Madness so when you tilt the phone the game feels your movement and the marble goes in the direction that you want. That all came from third party developers -- we seldom develop anything ourselves in terms of content that goes on the phones, we source it from other parties.

In addition to these two major programming technologies all of our phones also support other types of content download, like ringtones, themes, wallpapers, background images, that sort of entertainment and cool content that you can do.

FC: What is the process for working with third-party developers, how do they go about creating and submitting new applications?

Olsson: We have a free community membership, that you have to sign up for if you want to subscribe to our monthly developer newsletter. Membership is also required to post comments in our discussion forums or to use the Wikis, but other than that you're free to download docs and tools. We provide all of our resources for free -- anyone can use them, even hobby developers at university.

FC: If Sony Ericsson sees top-notch applications that are created by third-party developers, would it adopt these applications to then offer on the handsets?

Olsson: There are different approaches: sometimes we see content being popular on other platforms or competing phones and we approach developers to have them adapt their applications for our phones. But a lot of the time we try to find unique applications for our specific phones. For instance, we try to encourage game developers to let users pick their own background tracks from the MP3s on their phones or create their own sound effects to personalize the game playing experience.

We've also been very successful in the gaming area. We were the first to implement 3D graphics on mass-market phones in 2004. We took on the challenge of educating the global game developer community on what 3D can do to enhance the game-playing experience and created an entire Web section on Sony Ericsson Developer World that solely focused on 3D game development. It took a lot of missioning in the industry to ensure that we had the best technology implemented on our phones and also to make developers realize the business potential.

FC: Were developers hesitant at first?

Olsson: Developers are very keen at earning money out of their development, at least if they are professional developers, which we tend to focus on because those are the ones who create the highest quality content. So if they are going to jump on the bandwagon of new technology, they want to ensure that there is a business case for it: Are there enough handsets on the market? Is it easy to adapt my application for as many handsets as possible? We have implemented 3D gaming on over 55 phone models today and developers are telling us that Sony Ericsson has the leading game playing performance on our handsets.