The New Hybrid – Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

I’ve been following the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play with a lot interest this week for several reasons. First of all, this is the first ‘hybrid’ handset we’ve seen in some time. Before BlackBerry and the iPhone became common place, the term ‘hybrid phone’ mostly referred to what we would now consider the modern smartphone – something part PDA, part mobile phone and back in 2005, probably equipped with a stylus.

However, between the spread of wireless and 3G networks, cheaper data download costs, GPS, large colour screens and increased battery and processor power, it’s a natural assumption now that mobile phones can take on multiple tasks and do them well.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is the first phone in some time to explicitly promote multiple functions. Half phone, half portable game console, it’s a good example of Sony Ericsson’s unique ability to incorporate technology from other areas of its business into successful mobile phones.

In the mid-2000s, this strategy produced excellent camera phones with the company using Sony’s popular and successful Cyber Shot technology and brand name. The first Cyber Shot camera phones, the K800 and K790, integrated high quality imaging with 3.2 megapixel digital cameras as well as autofocus, Xenon flash and dedicated imaging technology. By 2008, the Cyber Shot mobile phone series carried an 8 megapixel camera with the C905.

At the same time, Sony Ericsson was also putting out digital music player phones using the Walkman marque. Launched in 2005 the W800 was the first mobile phone to also incorporate a high quality digital music player with supportive battery life and 2 megapixel camera. With excellent sound quality and the benefit of Sony’s impeccable heritage in the mobile music market the handset was a great success; it also partly revived the Walkman brand which had lost much of the market in mobile music players to the iPod and similar gadgets.

In 2010, the company continued to put out phones with both the Cyber Shot and Walkman marques. In particular, the Walkman series has evolved into a strong pay as you go proposition, fitting both the youth market associated with mobile music and those that like the appeal of a reliable, straight-out-of-the-box handset. Nevertheless Sony Ericsson also announced last year that it was planning to streamline its range down to 26 handsets and explicitly target the smartphone market as music players & camera phones have become standard propositions in the mobile phone market.

The result has been the new Xperia range of phones. These have so far been successful, with the Xperia X10 in particular receiving strong enough reviews to make it a real contender in the high-end market against the Samsung Galaxy S, iPhone 4 and HTC Desire. It has also been helped out by an important switch to the Android operating system.  But even with the weight of Android behind it, in reputation Sony Ericsson is still lagging behind the biggest players – and even these guys have a hard enough time effectively challenging the big Apple.

This is no doubt where the Xperia Play comes in. Sony Ericsson was canny enough before with the Cyber Shot and Walkman phones to distinguish its brand with unique features that it could deliver effectively with technology from its parent Sony. The Xperia Play does exactly this, using Sony’s reputation in the gaming market to create and support a gaming phone with dedicated playing controls. As discussed in this Gizmodo article in 2010 on the return of Sony, the PlayStation brand stands completely apart from Sony’s stable of products. By aligning its mobile phones with this reputation, Sony Ericsson is creating stand out from a crowd of competitors – and even if the phone doesn’t end up a commercial success, the noise around it will go some way into reviving the mobile phone brand.

The next question then is whether this tried-and-tested strategy is still as relevant now as it was in mid-2000s. As mentioned earlier, the ‘feature phone’ has become obsolete as mobile phones have turned into all-purpose gadgets that happen to make phone calls. The conversation has shifted from what ‘features’ a phone has – music player, camera, push email – to apps and operating systems. The Xperia Play is certainly an interesting phone but perhaps the hybrid is more a distracting novelty than a standout handset that Sony Ericsson can rely on to support its reputation.