On June 3 mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson used the occasion of the annual JavaOne software developers’ conference in San Francisco to announce that it, too, will launch an online software applications store. By August, Sony Ericsson customers will be able to personalize their phones with a range of downloadable programs such as utilities, tools, and games.
In announcing its own virtual software mall, Sony Ericsson — a joint venture of Japan’s Sony and Sweden’s Ericsson — joins an increasingly crowded field of rivals jostling to replicate the huge success of the Apple iTunes App Store, which offers thousands of programs for the popular iPhone. In recent weeks, both Nokia, the world’s No. 1 handset maker, and Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile operator by revenue, have jumped into the fray, following the path of other handset makers and carriers such as BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and France Telecom’s Orange unit.
One way Sony Ericsson hopes to stand out is by supporting a wide range of software environments in its phones — including not just internally developed platforms but also the Symbian operating system, the mobile version of Microsoft Windows, and the new open-source Android system backed by Google. To help independent developers get around the complexity of supporting so many options, Sony Ericsson is putting a heavy emphasis on mobile Java, an intermediary layer from Sun Microsystems — soon to be owned by Oracle — that lets authors write a program once and run it on many different platforms.
Aiming for Affordability
Sony Ericsson’s new app store will initially lean toward programs written for Java or directly for Symbian, but the company says it will expand support to other platforms later this year. Starting on July 1, developers will be able to submit programs to Sony Ericsson for testing and approval, and if the…