Don’t worry, they’re not backing out entirely, but Sony Ericsson wants you to know that their Android handset (or handsets) won’t be coming for quite some time. They want to make something, you know, different. They didn’t put any sort of date on it, unsurprisingly, but they do sound kind of sincere.
CEO Hideki Komiyama described the delay: “It does require a lot of evaluation, as well as a lot of testing, a lot of acceptance from a consumer viewpoint, and there is still some time to go.” That’s not really saying anything significant, but it’s far from the non-statement they could have made, something along the lines of “We are considering all options and market flizucuations.”
At the moment, they don’t have much to differentiate their product from, but by the time they get theirs out (let’s just arbitrarily say Winter), they’ll have a whole lot more competition to worry about.
Like i’ve said…companies don’t seem thrilled with Android really. It needs a lot of work as an OS to really compete with iPhone and the like.
The attraction of Android for phone buyers and users is the potential for it to be more open than other platforms. People who don’t want to be shackled to iTunes when their iPhone is 5,000 miles away from the PC they sync with are looking to Android to save them. On the flipside, telcos are ALL ABOUT locking people in. They see Android’s open aspect as a threat.
SONY isn’t famous for being open. They suffocated their beta video format by refusing to license it until far too late, while VHS was open to anyone to license and manufacture for. SONY computers only run Windows. I wouldn’t dare try to load Linux on a Vaio, for example.
SONY are already off my list of possible mobile phones as things are now, but without Android or some other more open equivalent, they won’t be getting back on it any time soon.
I have my iPod Touch for access to the Apple-verse. My cheapo 3G cell covers the rest of the field until something better comes along that offers the promise of both without trying to own my ass.