Sony Ericsson is on fire today, responding to calls from industry analysts to fill out their smartphone lineup. The new Yari (due in the 4Q of 2009) is a rather interesting offering, which touts “gesture gaming,” a term we really haven’t heard before. Apparently gesture gaming means you make moves in front of the screen for action. The Yari will come preloaded with several motion-based games, including tennis, boxing, and other standard offerings. Games will be easily accessible via a “games carousel” on the phone’s desktop similar to flicking through cover art in iTunes. Further downloadable content will be available through PlayNow, which is set to offer free and premium items.
“Yari is the industry’s first mobile phone with gesture gaming outside the Japanese market,” said Catherine Cherry, Market Business Manager at Sony Ericsson.
What is unusual here is Sony Ericsson’s adoption of the Micro SD format for Yari, and the inclusion of a 1GB Micro SD card. Very nice – adopting open standards is pretty much the only path to success at this point.
Color options seem exotic with Sony Ericsson’s unusual nomenclature – options include Achromatic Black and Cranberry White. The 2.4 inch screen is a 262k color TFT LCD at 240×320 QVGA. Built-in memory rounds out at about 60MB. Talk time for GSM/GPRS (aka EDGE) is 10 hours, while standby is 450 hours. UMTS (aka 3G) talk time is figured to be about 4.5 hours, while standby is the same at 450 hours.
The Yari has a five megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom. The camera is actually pretty decent, and makes me wish my iPhone had some of this stuff. Some interesting camera features include face detection, GPS based geo-tagging, smile detection, and video recording. Music playback is also well-rounded, and consumers will enjoy the built-in FM radio (with RDS), A2DP stereo Bluetooth and access to the PlayNow music store. Users will be able to set MP3 and AAC files as ringtones as well.
Other software features worth mentioning is support for motion gaming, DLNA support, Youtube access, GPS, and Google Maps. Yari also includes retro A and B buttons for gaming. Another interesting feature is “music call,” which allows you to press a button and share music while you talk to someone on the phone. The web browser is NetFront, found in most other Sony Ericsson phones.
