February 11, 2008 at 3:21 am · Authored by Julia · Filed under Devices, Mobile Development

Sony Ericsson has decided it’s time to flirt with another mobile operating system and has leapt into bed with Windows Mobile. The first device resulting from the union will be due in the second half of f this year and comes with a whole host of goodies: wi-fi, qwerty keypad, touch navigation, 3.2 megapixel camera plus all the Windows Mobile standards: Outlook, IE, Word, Excel and a load more.

The handset, known as the X1, will be the first in Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line of devices, all sporting a qwerty keyboard and gunning for converged, mulitmedia-phone-hungry users.

And it’s a good looking device to boot. So with Sony Ericsson on board, Microsoft has now got four out of the five of the biggest phone makers with at least one Windows Mobile device on their books. Good news for Microsoft then, but what does it mean for Symbian? Sony Ericsson has no plans to drop Symbian, as far as I know, but I’d be interested to see what proportion of its smartphone line up will be Windows Mobile in the next year or two.