There are two things inspired Sony Ericsson to launch this model: the developing idea of slim devices and the real opportunities to create this kind of phones. And the most important reason was that the system board had been already designed, and it was a matter of time to implement it. While in 2007 the company was eager to enrich the bar form-factor, this year will bring about many interesting clamshell solutions. As, you may agree with us, with two dozens of bar-phones the company does well, but three slider phones and one clamshell is insignificant range for this company. And these two form-factors will be introduced by the engineers and marketers of Sony Ericsson in the near future.
The bet on bar-phones prevented the introduction of interesting clamshells in 2007, as this form-factor is accepted differently by consumers and has different priorities according to their opinion. They sometimes can take no notice to the thought-out design and ergonomics, only because a handset lags behind modern trends or has a price incompatible with the multimedia characteristics. Besides the A100 couldn’t bring about broader functions. Considering the phone division into simple phones and Cyber Shot and Walkman series, the users have to sacrifice something. If the vendor had combined the program characteristics of these lines into one model, they eventually would have had a substantial decline in demand on other handsets only because of one very functional clamshell. The company has already had experience in creating these “all in one” solutions, but nowadays when devices for different purposes have good sales, the launch of an ultimate-solution is unlikely in the near future. To a certain exchange the program platform A200 stimulated the development of the clamshell segment, as since now all merits of the previous generation of phones were concentrated in one device; moreover they added the powerful application to view the multimedia content. So as there were neither hardware nor software hurdles to create rather slim and functional clamshell phone, they had no reasons to delay the presentation of the new phone. So they did it: six month later after the presentation of the A200 implemented for the first time in the K850i, in Barcelona Sony Ericsson introduced its compact clamshell Z770i, which our review is about.
