Sony Ericsson to focus on Android smartphones this year

The two new Android handsets are reworkings of Sony Ericsson's X10, an Android-based smartphone the company launched last November. The new smartphones, the X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are smaller than the X10.

Sony's other new smartphone, the Vivaz Pro, is essentially a reworked Vivaz with a QWERTY keyboard added, and it runs Symbian.

In the past Sony Ericsson has generally preferred the Symbian OS for its smartphones, but going forward the company said it will offer handsets running three mobile OSes: Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone, and Google's Android.

'This year everyone is talking about Android,' said Sony Ericsson CEO, Bert Nordberg. 'We've been working closely with Google, and we expect the majority of our releases this year will be Android.'

'Two and a half years ago it was all Symbian OS. And now Android is everywhere. I don't want to guess what will happen in the next few years, so we are hedging our bets,' he said.

However Sony Ericsson said it will customise each mobile operating system to differentiate its offerings from competitors.

'The goal eventually is to be OS agnostic,' Nordberg said. 'It should be the Sony Ericsson experience that users recognize. So it won't matter which OS we use.'

However the biggest challenge to Sony Ericsson and everyone else in the smartphone industry is to create a challenger to Apple's App Store for the iPhone, which dominates the market for mobile applications.