By Rikard Skogberg
25th February 2011.
13:08
Category Archives: questions
Now when I’m back home I’ve had some time to go through all of the comments we’ve got during the week.
First of all – thanks for your engagement! That’s what I’m here for and your feedback is very important to us.
As I’ve said many times before I assure you that your feedback from here, even when I don’t have straight out answers for you, is always forwarded and does have an impact on our development!
So here are some of the most frequently asked questions during the week. (there are some more questions I saw where I don’t have full answers yet but I’ll keep chasing!)
Q: Why is my comment not showing up? Are you censoring the comments section?
A: There’s two different things at play here. First of all because of the traffic load on this blog we have had to add a caching scheme also for the comments section. This means that it might take up to 10 minutes until your comment is visible. Secondly we have a spam filter. (you wouldn’t believe the amount of spam that hits popular word press based blogs these days) The spam filter usually does a very good job in removing “true” spam generated by bots etc. However it also from time to time unfortunately blocks out legit comments. I do try to keep up with the spam folder but sometimes because of the huge amount of spam I miss some comments. We also are on the corporate .com domain of our company so sometimes we also need to actively remove some comments due to bad language, personal attacks or similar. We don’t ever actively remove comments just for being negative or ciritical.
Q: Are you working on Android 2.2 or Android 2.3 for the 2010 products.
A: No – as explained earlier we currently don’t plan to upgrade the 2010 products to Android versions beyond 2.1
Q: Why hasn’t my “kit” gotten the 2.1 update yet? When will it come?
A: We still have a few kits (currently 13 for e.g. the X10) where we still are working with our operator partner on getting the software ready and approved. I don’t have the details on the ongoing work for them but I assure you that we are working on it. The reason for this is as explained earlier that different operators and markets have different customizations and therefore needs to be worked on until we agree with our partner that it’s ready for release.
Q: Wasn’t DLNA supposed to be in the latest update for Xperia X10?
A: That was our plan, as stated here back in May last year. However lots of things has changed since then like splitting the update into two parts, changes to timing, adding Pinch Zoom touch etc. One of the consequences of all those changes was unfortunately that DLNA had to be de-scoped. I know that there are 3rd party apps available that enables DLNA though so hopefully you can enjoy one of those.
Q: When will these new products be available?
A: Availability will vary between markets but as a global general statement the Xperia™ arc, Xperia™ neo and Xperia™ PLAY are planned to hit the first shelves before March is over and the Xperia™ pro is planned to launch during Q2 this year.
Q: I’ve seen YouTube videos where your new phones seem to suffer in performance and some sample pictures that don’t seem to have the quality they should, are those final?
A: No – in preparing for the launch of our phones we have frequent releases of new internal test software and there are also different hardware revisions on the way up until launch. Lots of optimization is done late in the process and the release version will be optimized in many aspects.
Q: Do your new products have an included office document editor?
A: Our plan is the following: One of them does – the Xperia™ pro has OfficeSuite pro which enables creation and editing of common office document formats. The Xperia™ arc, Xperia™ neo and Xperia™ PLAY are planned to have OfficeSuite in a lighter version that enables opening and viewing documents but not creation or editing. The pre-loaded applications can however differ between markets and operator customizations. So this is the planned standard content but the phone you buy might be different!
Q: Do any of your newly announced phones have MHL?
A: No – The Xperia™ arc, Xperia™ neo and Xperia™ pro do have a micro-HDMI connector though.
Q: What Android version will these new producs launch on? There are rumors of Android 2.4 already!
A: The Xperia™ arc, Xperia™ neo and Xperia™ PLAY will launch on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the latest version of Android for smartphones. Going into detailed sub-versions they will launch on Android 2.3.2 and our current plan is to update them 2.3.3 quite shortly after launch. The differences between 2.3.2 and 2.3.3 really are minor though and mostly tied to NFC functionality which these products does not have the chipsets for. Therefore it shouldn’t represent any big feature step-ups in our products. There is no such thing as Android 2.4 announced by Google yet so we can’t really comment on those rumors.
Q: Why do you lock the boot loader of your devices? Isn’t Android supposed to be open source?
A: Yes, Android is an open source platform. Anyone can download it, modify it to their liking and install it on hardware they have designed. A mobile device is much more than the operating system. In our phones there are functionality that have to be secure such as SIM-lock and DRM. We currently don’t have a solution in place to secure that while opening the bootloader and therefore it would break legal agreements with many of our partners if we do.”
Q: I’ve seen that some of the new products have a second microphone on the back. What is it used for?
A: It is used for noise suppression during phone calls. I’ve seen your questions about stereo recording for video recording and have forwarded your request for potential future updates.
Q:Why doesn’t Xperia™ PLAY have HDMI out while the other new products do?
A: Designing a smartphone is all about focus and balance. We have prioritized a truly immersive gaming experience in Xperia™ PLAY. In order to deliver this we had to make some priorities, particularly regarding the HDMI connector the physical design would have had to change which would have had an impact on the gaming experience.
Q: Which of your new phones have a front facing camera?
A: Xperia™ neo, Xperia™ pro and Xperia™ PLAY have a front facing camera while the The Xperia™ arc does not. For the Xperia™ arc we chose to not accept any compromise regarding design and slimness to really create an iconic product. Fitting a front facing camera within those targets just wasn’t possible.
So that were some of the questions I found – keep ‘em coming!
As most of you already know the main purpose of this blog is to get in touch with you out there. This of course to try to answer any questions you may have but also to gather your feedback on our products to be able to improve our products going forward. You really give great feedback and also in amounts big enough to make me have hard to keep up at all times.
As I said many times this is really appreciated and I assure you that your voices are important and fed back into our development and planning organizations.
The focus on this blog is around our products and what you think of them but now I would also like to take the opportunity to learn a bit on what you think about the blog itself.
As some may know we also have other blogs, The Sony Ericsson Developer Blog and the GreenHeart blog. Now there’s an initiative ongoing to create kind of a front window shared between the blogs. This work is ongoing and will most probably be used to improve the look and feel and design of the specific blogs as well, including this one.
Now when we’re evaluating different design ideas for such a “Blog Portal” I really think we should let you the readers have a say on which way the development should go.
Please if you have the time and interest feel free to take a short survey (around 10 min) with design proposals and interaction investigations to help us make the right choices.
If that sounds interesting – Click here to take the survey
Besides that I’m also curious to how you think the content of the blog should develop – I take care of most of the content here and really would like to hear what you want more or less of or if you have other ideas on how we should change going forward! Any ideas are welcome – just hit the comments section.
Even though this post isn’t really about our products you are of course still welcome to continue asking questions or engage in discussions around the products among the comments even on this post..
Finally – Have a great weekend all!
My colleague and friend, as well as the global product marketing manager for the Satio, Fredrik Månsson, recorded a video tutorial of some basic functions of the Satio. I have edited the video into three shorter clips, and will start by posting a video on the home screen and the five panel navigation.
Soon I’ll be able to post tutorials when I go through more features of the phone, such as camera- and video-features and how to upload to web services such as Flickr and Picasa. Please post your thoughts in the comments on what features you want me to make more video tutorials on.
Here are some sample photos that I’ve shot during the summer.. the oldest ones are actually from late april (so please consider early HW and SW at that time!)
I’ve tried to put together a mix of different pictures from daylight landscape to late sunsets and macros. I also threw in a daily life portrait of my daughter.
As you’ll see they are all in 16:9 format, mainly because I like it better from an esthetic point of view – I’ll post some full 12 MP 4:3 samples later!
Comments, feedback or requests for other types of photos is of course highly appreciated!
Hi and welcome to the Satio Launch Blog.
My name is Rikard Skogberg and I work as the product marketing manager for the Sony Ericsson Satio in the Nordic region. Starting from today I will through this blog try to keep you updated on information regarding Satio and all of its applications.
Until the launch of Satio I will be dedicated to giving you information about all the features of the phone, shooting photos and videos to give you an understanding of the camera capabilities, interviewing interesting people involved with the development and design of Satio, and much more.
But most of all – I’m here to engage with you! I will try to answer your questions posted in the comments section (yes, that is the only way to ask me questions since I find it the most practical way to handle them) and also find out what you think through polls.
I also need your feedback on what to write about so please start off by giving me ideas of what you’d like to know more about! I hope there are lots of things you want me to test, specific camera test cases etc etc.
To start things: here’s a picture of myself that I shot last night using the Satio.
I know it’s not the best example picture to really show off the camera capabilities (low lighting, tired model, shaky hand) but I thought I would start off showing you a little bit of who I am and also make sure to have the real star of the blog (Satio) in the picture!
(And for the really observant readers – yes I didn’t want to show our logo mirrored so I needed to flip it, I made sure to use a lossless JPG-operation though so I don’t think it should have affected the picture quality more than just the horizontal flip.)
