Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB announced several new phones on Tuesday, including two that carry Sony Corp.'s Cyber-shot brand and come with 3.2-megapixel cameras that are integrated with Google Inc.'s Blogger application.
Users of the new K800 and K790 phones that don't already have a blog can set one up over the phone. They'll be able to take photos with the camera and then easily add them to their blogs, according to Sony Ericsson. Blogger is an online tool hosted by Google that lets people create and manage blogs for free.
The camera features include autofocus, red-eye reduction, digital zoom and a flash. When users turn the handsets horizontally and slide open the lens cover, a user interface similar to the one on Sony's Cyber-shot cameras appears on the screen.
The phones also include BestPic, a new feature from Sony Ericsson that takes nine photos with one press of the shutter. Users then scroll through the photos to save the best ones. They can also connect the phones directly to a printer via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable to print photos. The phones also come with Adobe software for help managing photos on the PC.
Expected to be available worldwide in the second quarter, the camera phones won't come cheap -- they'll carry a retail price of about Euro 350 euros (US$450), according to a Sony Ericsson spokeswoman. But they also pack a host of other features, including a music player, video player, FM radio, push e-mail, Bluetooth, a memory stick slot and 64M bytes of internal memory.
Sony Ericsson also announced three more affordable phones for taking and sharing pictures, and a new addition to its Walkman phone line, the W300, aimed at the low-end market. It's the seventh Walkman phone and can play MP3 and AAC files and comes with 20M bytes of internal memory, plus a removable 256M-byte memory stick. The other phones will all retail for about Euro 150.
Google is being made the standard search engine on all Sony Ericsson phones with Internet access, the phone maker said. The Google search bar will appear on every page users view so they can search without launching a new page.
Google has made many similar agreements recently with operators and phone makers, including Vodafone Group PLC and Motorola Co.