Sony Ericsson, the company that’s now known as just plain Sony, can’t keep their prototypes from escaping their labs apparently. A device that’s codenamed “Julie” has not only been snuck out of Sony’s offices, but someone was actually dumb enough to put it on eBay. The auction has already been pulled, of course, but it does give some insight into what the company was planning. Now before you get all excited and think that “Julie” is going to come out in the next few months, we should mention that this isn’t the first time “Julie” has posed in front of the camera. In fact, we saw her over a year ago. What sort of specs does she bring to the table? Your typical run of the mill Qualcomm Snapdragon clocked at either 1 GHz or 1.4 GHz, an 8.1 megapixel camera that may or may not be a cut above that inside the Nokia Lumia 800, and most impressively a slide out QWERTY keyboard.
The bigger question here is what will Sony do with their newly acquired mobile division? There have been rumors floating around that the operating system powering the new PlayStation Vita will be ported to smartphones and tablets. There’s also word on the street that Sony might become an Android only camp. But as for Windows Phone? We wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Sony thinks Windows Phone isn’t worth playing with because the OS has less than 2% market share. Christ, there are more smartphones running Samsung’s home brewed Bada operating system!
And that would be a damn shame too since we’ve been hearing Windows Phone 8 will do a lot to make the platform competitive with the likes of Android and iOS. Mango may be a bit incomplete right now, but Apollo, which is due to come out in Q4, should address much of that.
[Via: The Verge]