Sony Ericsson Maria - iPhone killer?

According to the latest rumor Sony Ericsson's iPhone competitor is codenamed Maria. Since the iPhone was announced in the beginning of 2007 there have been a lot of speculation about Sony Ericsson's iPhone alike device. We have heard codenames, such as MOOI, which was the codename for W960i and now Maria. I'm quite surprised that there's still nothing official out from Sony Ericsson, because other manufactures have already showed what they got. LG got Prada and Nokia recently released the new S60 UI, which looks very much iPhone's UI. Let's hope Sony Ericsson has something new, not just an iPhone copy. Why should people buy the copy if they can have the real deal?

It's not all about the UI

Apple's iPhone has a great UI and that's what made it so popular. However, we need more than a decent user interface. Sony Ericsson made a big mistake with M600i and P990i. Both phones have Symbian UIQ 3 operating system. When P990i came out the OS was very buggy and after many updates it became usable, but there was one problem they could not fix with updates, the hardware. In the end Sony Ericsson admitted that P990i/M600i has too small memory and that's why the OS is slow and there's nothing they can do about. So, to create a decent user experience, we need a great UI and good hardware that can run it. I hope Sony Ericsson has learnt its mistakes.

Is this the Maria's user interface?

The photo above is claimed to the first real photo of Maria's UI. I'm quite sure it's real, because the photo was taken at some UIQ conference.

We know that Motorola just bought 50 % of UIQ, so we can expect to see this kind of UI in Motorola's devices too. I think it's not a good thing, because like iPhone has showed us, unique UI is a very important thing. It can be the main reason to buy the phone. In the other hand, it can be a good thing if Motorola and Sony Ericsson are using the same OS, it means more devices, which means more applications.

What else Maria should have?

Well, of course a decent camera and a quite big internal memory. I hope Sony Ericsson would release to different versions. The cheaper version could have 1,3 megapixel camera, 2GB internal memory + M2 slot, UMTS, Bluetooth and 3 inch 262 K screen. The "pro" version could have 3,2 megapixel camera, 8 GB internal memory + M2 slot, UMTS, Bluetooth, GPS and 3.5 inch 16 million screen. I'm sure Apple is planning to release iPhone nano soon and that's why Sony Ericsson should have two versions and of course it's always good to have options.

Conclusion

Anyways, if it's an iPhone copy or not, I really hope that Sony Ericsson will soon release a full touch screen device. I'm getting bored with my M600i and I might buy iPhone if Sony Ericsson can't offer anything similar or even better!

31.10.2007. 15:22