XPERIA X8 and Cedar Now Shipping

Two new products have now started to hit the shelves of stores around the world.

First out is the XPERIA X8 which is the new addition to our family of Android based phones. The key selling point of the X8 is of course it’s very nice form factor sitting right in between the X10 mini and the big X10 in size. It gives a bit bigger screen than X10 mini but does have a step-down in e.g. Camera (3.2MP Fix focus) which makes it the most affordable Sony Ericsson Android phone ever. This is of course a nice thing when it comes to even further broadening the target group for Android smartphones.
Even though XPERIA X8 will be our most affordable Android smartphone so far there’s no compromise compared to the X10 range when it comes to connectivity (still 3G and Wifi) or application access (actually more applications available than the minis because of the higher resolution screen). It also has GPS, Google maps etc and also the 4 corner UI from the mini products. It’s kind of like the Android smartphone made easy!
Since much of the discussions here are about the forthcoming Android update I’d also like to make clear that also X8 is Android 1.6 from launch and will get the planned Android 2.1 update later this year. Final timing is not fully set yet but I expect it to be a bit later than for the X10 family.

When it comes to Cedar™ it’s our latest addition to the GreenHeart family of phones.
Also Cedar goes onto the lines of being the most affordable alternative and really is for consumers looking for an easy way to stay connected at an affordable price. It’s built on our own operating system as used in most of our feature phones such as W995, Elm, Hazel etc. It has all those things that are essential to most people such as a very comfortable keypad, calendar, messaging, email and more. On top of that it also features a desktop widget with support for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc connectivity and also Exchange Active Sync for corporate email, calendar and contact access etc. So even though it is a very affordable phone it really has most of the functionality of its bigger siblings Elm and Hazel.