By Cristina Porter
15th August 2011.
10:05
Category Archives: Greenheart
We are very happy and proud today! EISA (European Imaging and Sound Association) has announced their annual awards and two of our phones have been selected as winners this year!
Xperia arc was selected as European Camera Phone of the Year 2011-2012, while Xperia mini won the European Green Smartphone 2011-2012.
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.
On top of that it is a GreenHeart phone and in the case of Cedar the GreenHeart attributes applied are:
- High efficiency charger with minimal standby loss.
- Minimized box size and packaging material
- Made out of recycled plastics
- Painted with waterborne paint
- E-manual to minimize the amount of paper in the box
- “Eco-inspiring” applications such as EcoMate and GreenCalculator
- PC software included automically on the phone instead of supplied on CD
More information on our GreenHeart initiative can be found on our GreenHeart Blog!
Finally here’s a short video that Albin and Amalia made on the XPERIA X8!
The subjects on this blog are often technical but sometimes it can be quite refreshing that there’s more to mobile devices than just the techie stuff 
Just recently O2 in the UK launched an initiative to build awareness and improve on sustainability called Think big (not all pages are accessible outside the UK, sorry). One part of this initiative is something they call Eco rating which is very well described in this document for those who want to learn more. In this Eco rating they have ranked 65 mobile phones from 6 different manufacturers and I’m really glad to see the Sony Ericsson Elm at the very top with a rating of 4.3 out of 5! It’s of course also very nice to see that 4 out of the top 10 models are Sony Ericsson phones with X10 mini, X10 mini pro and Zylo getting the second highest rating of 4.0.
As you might know we at Sony Ericsson have a long history around sustainability and substance control for our portfolio and have since quite a while decided to offer some products under the GreenHeart brand.
This brand is used for those of our products that carry the torch in including the latest “features” when it comes to minimizing the negative impact on our environment.
Some of the things included under the Greenheart proposition so far are:
- High efficiency chargers with minimal standby loss.
- Minimized box sizes and packaging material
- Recycled plastics
- Waterborne paint
- E-manual to minimize the amount of paper in the box
- “Eco-inspiring” applications
- PC software in the phone instead of a CD
Our goal is that after introducing these features in the GreenHeart phones make them spread into other parts of our portfolio. A recent example is that all X10 mini and X10 mini pro sold in the world have the new GreenHeart charger included in the box. The plan is for this to continue so that the core of our next-year portfolio meets the GreenHeart requirements.
Read more about this at our GreenHeart blog dedicated to these subjects, thanks to Maria, Mats and Daniel in our Sustainability Team!
Feel free to ask any kind of questions you might have around sustainability – either here or at the dedicated GreenHeart blog - they really know a lot about these things and I’ve learnt a lot from them!
Sony Ericsson Hazel Sony Ericsson Elm
As we have communicated earlier this blog is about putting light on newly announced products or products that have recently launched to market. Today Sony Ericsson has announced the Sony Ericsson Elm And Sony Ericsson Hazel. These are our latest editions to our industry leading environmental programme GreenHeart. Please read more here http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/corporate/press/pressreleases/pressreleasedetails/elmhazelpafinal-20091214.
These are two solid classic Sony Ericsson phones packed with organization tools and fun features for social media networking such as the new Widget Manager. There has also been much focus on the voice quality and something we call Noise Shield. Please also notice the nice design language that we refer to internally as “human curvature”.
