Sony Ericsson is having the best year of any handset maker nobody argues about, and the reason is a naming decision rather than an engineering one.
The company puts Walkman on the phones built around music and Cyber-shot on the phones built around the camera, and it means both things. A Walkman phone has dedicated transport keys, a decent headphone arrangement and software that treats a music library as something you browse rather than a folder you navigate. A Cyber-shot phone has a lens cover, a xenon flash and a shutter button in the place a thumb expects one.
That sounds trivially obvious and almost nobody else does it. Nokia’s answer to segmentation is a model number and a letter, which requires the customer to already know that N means multimedia and E means business. Motorola’s answer is to sell the same shape in five variations and hope one appeals. Sony Ericsson borrows two brands its parent spent decades building and lets a customer in a shop understand the entire range in four seconds.
The engineering follows the branding rather than the other way round, which is the part I find genuinely smart. Committing publicly to Cyber-shot means somebody has to defend the decision to fit a worse camera, and the xenon flash survives the cost review because the badge on the front makes it indefensible to remove. Constraints imposed by marketing sound like a bad way to build products and here they are producing better ones than the alternative.
Where the company remains exposed is the same place everybody in this industry is exposed. There is no software platform. The interfaces are pleasant, the phones do what they say, and there is no developer story and no reason anybody would build for a Sony Ericsson specifically. The P-series runs Symbian with a different interface layer on top and sells in numbers that suggest a niche rather than a strategy.
That has not mattered yet, because the market still scores this the way it always has: how good is the camera, how long does the battery last, how does it feel in a hand. Sony Ericsson is excellent at all three and is being rewarded properly for it.
The question I keep returning to across all of these companies is what happens when the score changes. If a phone becomes a thing you put software on, then a company with two great sub-brands and no platform is holding a strong position in a game that has stopped being played. Sony Ericsson has more time than Motorola does, because its products are actually good and its margins are healthy. Time is not the same as a plan.
For now, if somebody asks me which phone to buy for photographs, the answer is a Cyber-shot one, and it has been for two years. That is a better place to be than most of this industry currently occupies.