Nokia v Sony Ericsson: Handset wars in colour

Nokia and Sony Ericsson have released a raft of new mobile phone handsets with colour screens and enhanced entertainment features in a bid to bring the colour back to a fading mobile phone market.

The key feature of the new Nokia 6610 is a high-resolution 4096 colour, 128x128 pixel colour screen, positioning the phone directly against Ericsson's T68 and complementing the already announced 7210.

Wibe Wagemans, senior marketing manager at Club Nokia, told an internet conference: "The Nokia 7210 and the Nokia 6610 have been designed for two distinct user segments, namely a more extrovert fashion segment and more conservative classic users."

Both are due to come on sale in the third quarter of 2002, Nokia said.

The 6610 also offers polyphonic midi ringtones, built-in FM radio and MMS picture messaging services. MMS allows users to send pictures to each other in a similar way to the current, highly popular text message services.

It will support Java-based downloadable applications such as games using a special version of Java for mobile clients, J2ME.

When asked what he thought would make the 6610 competitive, Wagemans replied: "The Nokia brand, the colour screen, MMS and Java."

The order is surely indicative of Nokia's own view of priorities. Nokia's brand is still very strong, as a recent survey from Forrester research highlights - the mighty Finn still leads its rivals in terms of brand recognition and trust among end users in Europe.

However, the announcement leaves Nokia without a mid-tier phone that can take pictures - of currently announced models only the high-end 7650 smartphone has a built-in camera.

Today rivals Sony Ericsson launched two phones with multimedia messaging capabilities: the T200 and T300 which can take pictures using a plug-in phone module.

Gartner analyst Ben Wood does not believe this leaves a hole in the Nokia product range.

He said: "We believe the second half of 2002 will be about colour for the sake of colour. We don't see MMS taking off beyond the early adopters until 2003."

Nokia has also left Bluetooth wireless connections out of the 6610, opting instead for its own proprietary USB-compatible wireline connector, Pop Port.

Gartner's Wood doesn't see this as a sign that Nokia is dumping Bluetooth, though.

"At the point they planned this platform, they must have decided that the additional cost of putting Bluetooth on the phone was just too rich.

"They may lose a couple of customers by leaving out Bluetooth, but they will have decided that it was better focus their energy on getting really good Java support, which the T68 doesn't have."

Sony Ericsson can add Bluetooth to its phones more cheaply, said Wood, as it already has Bluetooth integrated into the chips that handle radio connections for voice and data calls.

Today Sony Ericsson also launched the ultra-lightweight 60g T600, a GPRS modem and the first Sony Ericsson phone for TDMA networks, the T61d.

It also saw some of the first benefits of the Sony Ericsson tie-up - An extension for the P800 multimedia phone that allows 16Mb memory extensions using Sony's memory stick format.