This morning I had a casual meeting with Sony Ericsson Canada where they discussed some preliminary details on their next three cellphones; the Xperia X1 smartphone, C905 cameraphone, and W705 walkman phone. All three phones are due out within the next thirty days and as with past Sony Ericsson phones will certainly launch with Rogers. All the details will fall into place within the next week or so and I’ll wait until then to really offer some depth on them, but in the meantime, here’s a quick summary.

Xperia X1

Launching within the first two weeks of June, Rogers will become the first North American carrier to offer the Xperia X1, a very stylish smartphone with a unique slide-out keyboard design and a touchscreen interface that uses a fun system of panels to give Windows Mobile 6.1 a more visual system for accessing apps and expressing information. The panels allow users to easily flick through menu screens, but also to customize the way apps are displayed, allowing the phone to change its organization, so you can have it focus on business apps by day and switch over to social networking and multimedia apps at night. Included are a number of fun modes to help express selected apps in different ways. A Facebook app I was shown today displays your contacts as bubbles floating across the screen, with each bubble containing the profile picture of one of your friends. The bubbles closest to the centre are the profiles with the most recent updates.

The Xperia X1 has suffered a difficult launch here in North America, with an original launch date set for the end of 2008. Carriers in the US chose not to pick up the handset and instead it was offered as a standalone product through SonyStyle retail stores. The delay in Canada is now over with the advantage that we can pick it up through a proper carrier for a lower price. 

I’ve had a few chances to play around with the X1 since it was first announced and I like it’s interface and design a great deal. The only hitch is that Sony Ericsson is clear that there will be no upgrade for the X1 to take it from Windows Mobile 6.1 to 6.5. The other disadvantage it faces is the lack of an apps store, Microsoft is working on one, but not in time to help the X1 compete against the iPhone, Blackberry Bold, Palm Pre, HTC Dream, and HTC Magic, which all have app stores ready to go. Still, it’s exceptional feature set and design will help make up for that.

C905 Cameraphone

The C905 is an 8.1 Megapixel cameraphone with some hard core dedicated photography features. It offers both 3G and Wi-Fi connections and is the first to allow for direct uploads of videos to YouTube. It offers a dedicated key just to switch the camera between scenes modes, which includes face and smile detection. It uses Sony’s XMB navigation, the same as in the PS3, PSP, and their new televisions to move through features including GPS navigation and media playback. A slider phone, a like the way they chose the thinnest part of the phone to slide-out, instead of the keypad.

Walkman W705

The W705 has an aluminum casing that gives it an industrial design that I really like. Compared to past Walkman phones, the focus here is on improved audio playback and offering more creative ways to explore social networking apps.

Their feedback from consumers has shown a hesitancy to buying an MP3-specific phone over concerns that the audio quality won’t be as good as standard, music-only MP3 player, the perception is that there’s a sacrifice in the process of combing an MP3 player with a cellphone. Perhaps these are consumers who have been burned in the past from VCR/Television combos, but the issue is real and so to assure this demographic, the new W705 offers “Clear Base”, “Clear Stereo”, and will be packaged with premium headphones. It also features shake control, so you can merely shake the phone to have it skip tracks, etc.

The real twist is an exclusive Facebook app (sorry, no MySpace)that displays your contacts as a carousel. You can easily slide through a revolving strip of profile photos, each displaying the latest status updates. It includes both 3G and Wi-fi connections so you can always get the latest messages.