SonyEricsson’s Bravia phone announced for Japan

I still own a SonyEricsson mobile phone (the old T610), but the newer models including the smartphones have not been impressing me much lately and it seemed to me as if they were doing what most mobile phone companies and telcoms are doing: targeting the teenager group.At first this seemed to have changed: SonyEriccson’s SO903iTV is going to be the first to include a 3″ Bravia display and offer some nice features, such as built in TV receiver with time-shifted recording options, a microSD for memory and a 2 megapixel camera. So this seems like a rich feature handset with a nice design by a decent company. But once again: the phone is to be released in Japan.
I have to wonder why it is that the Japanese market, a quite small one in fact, is so much more technologically advanced than for example our quite large European and American markets.

Carphone Warehouse bling your phone

I had to top-up my mobile phone credit yesterday and visited a local Carphone Warehouse in London. Sadly mobile phone shops in the UK seem to cater mainly towards 14-year old girls instead of gadget loving geeks or at least business people and their range of high-end mobile phones and smartphones was limited to a SonyEricsson P990 and a XDA mini. But, they do now offer to “bling” your phone - for the “little” amount of 100GBP. Once again, like with the Swarovski laptop, I have to ask myself: why? It does not look good, they aren’t even real diamonds or anything of value.