Big news, now, for people who are eagerly waiting to get their hands on the Sony Ericsson Idou (a group of people that definitely includes me). We’ve had not just a rumour, not just speculation, but a confirmation from Sony Ericsson themselves that the Idou will go on sale in October (or November, at the latest). The news comes courtesy of the Esato Forums (scroll down a bit to see it), where the source is not your average joe on the street, or some inside leaker, but German product manager for Sony Ericsson, Steffen Grosch.
However, reading a bit more on those forums yields some tantalising extra glimpses of what we can expect from the Sony Ericsson Idou…
First up, as has already been said countless times before, it’s the first of their new ‘Entertainment Unlimited’ phones, meaning it’ll meld together the Cyber-Shot and Walkman technologies under one badge. But it goes further than that, bringing video services, top-flight games and social networking into the mix. All of that is going to be made super-good (my new, made up word of the day), by the ct the Sony Ericsson Idou is built, like the Nokia N97, around Symbian S60 Touch.
Ah, yes, except, it’s not quite, because the rumour is that while the N97 runs on v5.0, the Idou will run on v5.1. And you know what v5.1 is, don’t you? Basically, if I’ve done my homework right, the first build of the Symbian Foundation OS…
That’s not all, though, because as we all well know by now, it has a separate interface stuck on top, and it looks like, we now know what that interface is based.
Remember how I predicted, way back when, that although Symbian UIQ was dead in its as-then form, it would live on in other ways? Compare that with Steffen Grosch’s words about the Idou:
“Sony Ericsson Idou will have Symbian’s new operating system, which among other things is based on Nokia’s Series 60 and Sony Ericsson’s UIQ. The system will according to Symbian be complete around the summer.”
Ah, smug mode…
Come to think of it, anyone remember those UIQ concepts that were floating around? I knew that interface layer looked familiar…
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