Sony Ericsson

» see sonyericsson.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

sony ericsson had its turkish moment around 2005 through 2008. the k750i was on every table at the cafe with the camera lens cover slid open. the w800i orange walkman phone showed up in every electronics shop window in kadıköy and tunalı. by the time i bought my first cyber-shot phone the brand had a green-and-silver logo that meant "premium asian phone, but not nokia."

before sony ericsson, sony made phones nobody outside japan bought, and ericsson made phones that looked like office equipment. the october 2001 joint venture combined sony's design and audio expertise with ericsson's radio engineering and operator relationships. for about five years the result was good enough to put them at fourth place worldwide.

then the iphone landed in 2007 and android in 2008. sony ericsson did not pivot fast enough. by 2010 they were losing money every quarter, and ericsson wanted out.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the line that mattered was walkman. starting with the w800i in 2005, sony ericsson built phones around music. an orange face and a dedicated media button, plus half a gigabyte of memory at a time when most phones could hold maybe twenty mp3 files. these were the first phones in turkey people actually used as their music player on the way to school.

the cyber-shot k series came next. the k750i had a 2-megapixel camera with autofocus and a sliding lens cover. for two years it was the phone you handed across the table when someone asked to take a photo. the k800i added xenon flash. then the k850i came and started losing the plot with too many buttons.

~ the slide ~

by 2008 every phone press release was about touchscreens, and sony ericsson kept shipping numeric-keypad phones with feature creep. they made a windows mobile attempt (the xperia x1) and an android attempt (the xperia x10), neither matched what htc and samsung were already doing on the same os. the symbian uiq variant they shared with motorola died in 2010 along with motorola's interest.

quarterly losses ran from 2008 into 2011. ericsson decided it was no longer a phone company. sony decided phones needed to be inside the sony brand directly.

~ what got buried with it ~

sony bought ericsson's 50% stake for €1.05 billion in october 2011. the deal closed on february 16 2012 and the company became sony mobile communications. the green sony ericsson logo got phased off the back of phones over the next year. xperia continued under the sony brand alone until sony mobile itself folded into the larger sony corporation in april 2021.

what got buried was the specific design language of the era. the candy-bar music phone with a real play-pause button. the camera-first phone before phone cameras stopped being a feature you could sell separately. the green-silver logo i still remember on the back of the first phone i could afford after university.

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