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Hello everyone,

Today, we bring you some exciting news! As planned, we’re now starting our software rollout for Xperia S including, Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0 upgrade and new unique media applications.

First off, we’re excited to introduce a completely new way to experience your media – your music, images, videos, movies and films – with our new “WALKMAN”, “Album” and “Movies” applications:

• The “WALKMAN” application blends the best of signature Sony audio technology with social features; to discover the music your friends like and share personal favorites. Facebook integration gives you a visual way to interact with content – accessing album art, artist images and information, directly from Gracenote®
• The “Album” application brings new intuitive ways to sort and browse high quality photos and videos in blazing speed, as well as providing instant viewing, commenting and sharing of photos on Facebook and other online albums, leveraging the great camera capabilities of Xperia S
• The “Movies” application streamlines the playback and viewing of movies in high quality audio and video, whilst using intelligent database search to grab movie posters and information for a richer experience

And now for the software upgrade to Android version 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich– some of the cool features you can look forward to are:

• Lock screen with improved functionality
• Resizable widgets (improved personalization)
• Improved control of your mobile data consumption
• Recent Apps button for clear overview of your applications

Be sure to check out our video above for a look at some of this new functionality!

The update will be directly accessible in your phone over mobile networks and WiFi, but also with the option of upgrading using a computer – either with our web-based Xperia Update, PC Companion or Bridge for Mac.

If you’d like or need help on installing the software, we’ve pulled together a step-by-step run through video on our Xperia support YouTube channel.

All Xperia S users will get a notification when the upgrade is ready, but direct availability in the phone may vary across different carriers.

It’s also worth noting that the software package required for download is around 200MB, so you might want to consider using WiFi, if directly upgrading from your Xperia S.

The rollout will continue over the next few weeks* and as usual, we will continue to keep you up-to-date with our progress, handling as much of your feedback along the way as possible.

Just as before, you’ll also be able to see the released software kits (customized software specific to your operator) on our support community; http://talk.sonymobile.com – please continue to check in if yours is not yet listed, as it’ll be updated when new kits become available.

I’ve enjoyed getting to grips with my Xperia S over the past few weeks and I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to taste this sweet software treat

Talk soon,

Ant.

*The availability and scheduling of this software upgrade will vary by market and carrier requirements

Starting today, we’re introducing App Promo’s developer 101 tutorial series, where we’ve asked our friends at App Promo, a leading app marketing and strategy firm, to share some of their best hints and tips for developers. We’ll be sharing their tutorials as a summer series of blog posts that will be published weekly for the next 10 weeks. App Promo’s first tip focuses on the importance of understanding your product. In order to create a truly successful product, you must take a step back and look at your app from outside-in. What is the purpose of the app and why would a user in your target group use it? Have you defined a target group? If you spread too thin when defining your target group, you might not get any pickup in any demographic groups. If you instead target a well-defined group, you’re improving your chances a lot of getting successful with this group. From there, you can widen your scope. This concept and much more is explained in this article. Learn more…

When you take into consideration that over a million applications are available in app stores today, what’s the best way to navigate the marketplace in order to ensure your app has the best visibility possible? This is where App Promo comes in. As leaders in app marketing and strategy, App Promo’s goal is to assist developers and app owners in succeeding in the business of applications. We recently collaborated with them to bring you a series of tutorials – tips and tricks to guide you and help take your app to the next level. Our first developer success tip is to concentrate on your product.

No matter what marketing efforts you put behind your app, the success of any campaign will come down to your product. Being a product owner, it is extremely important for you to understand your app’s purpose and demographic and translate these ideas into a working product that has the utmost quality for your user.

Define your app’s purpose

Regardless if you are building a game, utility or a communication tool, the key to app success is to understand what you are building and why it will benefit your user. Your app’s purpose should be extremely focused. Don’t try to accomplish too many things at once or you risk confusing, overwhelming and losing your user. Look to your competition to help you define things. What are they doing well, what are they missing at and what can you do better?

A great exercise to help you fine tune your objective is to explain your app in six words or 140 characters (like a tweet) or less. This is not only a great way to clarify your concept but the output can also be used to create your marketing messaging in your upcoming campaigns or your unique selling proposition (USP).

We also spoke to an experienced Android developer, Pallavi Kalyanam, who has created close to 40 apps on Google play. She agrees that defining an app’s purpose is important in her development, even down to the app description.

- I always strive to make my app description clear and concise, stating the exact purpose for which my app has been created. I keep my description keyword-rich as well, and always include screenshots and video previews of my app. This gives potential users a good idea about what the app can do for them.”

Pallavi Kalyanam, Android developer

Put yourself in the user’s shoes

Once you have determined WHAT you are building take yourself through the remaining 4 Ws to help understand your demographic.

Ask yourself:

• Who are you building this app for?
• Why will they use it?
• When will they use it?
• Where will they use it?

It is extremely important to know who your user or users are and to continue to think like them throughout the idea, design, development and especially testing phases of your app project.

Keep this demographic in mind when it comes to your marketing. Target your paid media to this audience. Cater and create your marketing messaging using the answers to the questions above. Maintain a consistent vision of who your user is to be sure that you end up with a product that your users want.

Don’t cheap out on quality

Marketing is there to bring visibility and traffic to your application. But it can backfire if your application is not ready for the spotlight. Be sure that when you kick-off your marketing efforts your product is available and working. Your project timeline should have a strong emphasis on testing – both from a code and user perspective, to flush out bugs that will cause the app to crash and give a poor user experience.

It is often wise to schedule a marketing launch a time after the actual production launch of your app (or general release). This will give you time to see traffic and usage of your application from real users in a manageable volume. The feedback you gain during this time will help determine how ready you are to continue promoting your app.

Use your product roadmap as a marketing tool

The app ecosystem is an active one. Users expect to see updates to their apps and look forward to fixes, design changes and new features when it comes to their favourite applications. These updates act as a form of marketing to your current users as the notification they will receive will keep your product top of mind and will spike usage. Be sure to spread out your updates to allow for usage to drop before you release another version to maximise its impact.

Keep on top of new operating system software updates and update your product with features that utilise them if it makes sense. Updates to your app are also a great reason to establish a marketing campaign outside of launch so start to view them as more than just code releases. Also remember to incorporate your users’ feedback and comments, as this can improve your app or service.

About App Promo

App Promo is a leading app marketing and strategy firm whose goal is to assist developers and app owners in succeeding in the business of applications. App Promo provides services geared towards increasing discovery, optimizing revenue and ensuring better positioning of applications to set them up for success.

Feature image courtesy of maena @ Morguefile.

More information

• Learn more about App Promo services for app developers and app owners.
• Follow @Apppromo on Twitter.
• Check out our other helpful tutorials for mobile developers.

Do you have an Xperia™ smartphone that comes with Mobile BRAVIA® Engine? Are you curious to find out more about what this Sony technology actually does? Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is a high quality image engine that utilises technologies that have been successfully proven in Sony BRAVIA® TVs for a number of years. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine combines contrast enhancement technologies used in Sony BRAVIA TVs with colour management, and adds sharpness filters and noise reduction to display vivid beautiful images and videos on your Xperia™ smartphone. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is included in most Xperia™ smartphones, and its effects apply to image and video viewing. Go on reading after the jump where we describe the technology in more detail!

To go a bit into detail, the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is a set of Sony-specific image processing algorithms which are applied to the rendering process when drawing an image or video on the screen of your smartphone. It’s on by default, in those Xperia™ smartphones where it’s applicable, but it can be turned off in the settings menu of your phone. The benefit of using Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is that the viewing experience is improved in a way that is optimised to fit the human eye, with more details, enhanced colours and less noise.

When the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine is running, a software layer is applied to the decoding step for images and video, where the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine processing is done in real-time. This means that it does not alter the image or video file, but only the way it is represented on the screen. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine works intelligently and applies the effects depending on input, which means that the effects are applied in a way that is individually calculated for each picture. In addition, all of the algorithms in Mobile BRAVIA® Engine are calibrated for each Xperia™ product to improve image quality on the specific display. Below, we will describe the different effects along with images illustrating these effects.

Contrast enhancement brings out the details
With the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, the contrast in images and video is enhanced by making the darkest parts slightly darker, which results in a perceived higher contrast that brings out details in the picture. This contrast enhancement is adapted to each individual image to avoid further reduction of brightness on images that are already dark, and to strengthen the contrast enhancement on vivid and bright images. As seen in the illustration below, this will give your images and videos more dynamics and better perceived details.

Illustration showing the contrast enhancement effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.

Colour Management gives deep and vivid colours
Colour saturation is also increased for specified colour ranges when you are running the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, which will make the colours deeper and more vivid. In general, the human eye prefers deeper colours on photo and video. This is especially true for natural scenes. As you can see in the illustration below, the enhancement level and the enhanced colour ranges are calibrated to suit human eyes when running Mobile BRAVIA® Engine. This makes sure that colours on photo and video are represented in a way that is pleasant for the eye.

Illustration showing the colour management effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.

Noise reduction for clear video viewing
Another use case where Mobile BRAVIA® Engine comes in useful is when you are streaming low-quality video from online sources, as the compression algorithms usually used by common web services such as YouTube, often cause distortions and many artefacts in the image. For videos stored locally on your smartphone, there might also be a risk of noise depending on the video quality of your clip. The noise artefacts that most commonly occur when using such compression algorithms are block noise, and mosquito noise.

Now by using Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, all of these disturbances are greatly reduced as it reduces temporal and spatial noise caused by these artefacts in low-resolution video. Spatial noise reduction means that image noise reduction is applied to each individual frame, and temporal noise reduction means that noise between frames is reduced. The Mobile BRAVIA® Engine combines these two methods to get an improved user experience when watching videos.

Illustration showing the effect of the noise reduction done by the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.

Sharpness filter increases detail level
As a final step in the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine, a sharpness filter is applied to increase the overall detail level in the image. This is done by enhancing the edges, as seen below, and the enhancement is calibrated to increase contrast between different image areas, but still avoid an increase of the amount of noise present in the image.

Illustration showing the effect of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine sharpness filter.

As you can see, the effects of the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine enhance the image viewing experience drastically. And the best thing is that you basically only have to pick up a fairly modern Sony Xperia™ smartphone to enjoy it, as this Sony imaging technology is included in most Xperia™ smartphones.

Do you find the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine useful for viewing your images? Check out the links below for more information, and drop us a comment if you have any questions!

More information

• Check out the Mobile BRAVIA® Engine explained video.
• Read about colour saturation.
• Read about block noise.
• Learn what mosquito noise is.
• Learn more about image noise reduction.
• Check out the Xperia go and Xperia acro s product announcement blog post.
• Read about the Xperia SX and Xperia GX in the product announcement blog post (for the Japanese market).
• Read the Xperia sola in the product announcement blog post.
• Check out the Xperia P product announcement blog post.
• Check out the Xperia U product announcement blog post.
• Have a look at the Xperia acro HD and Xperia NX product announcement blog post (for the Japanese market).
• Read about the Xperia S in the product announcement blog post.
• Check out the Xperia ion product announcement blog post.

W ciągu najbliższych tygodni użytkownicy Xperii S otrzymają najnowszą wersję Androida 4.0 zwaną Ice Cream Sandwich. W porównaniu do modeli z 2011 roku, posiadacze owego modelu otrzymają nowe aplikacje do przeglądania multimediów.

Walkman – aplikacja nie służy tylko i wyłącznie w celu odtwarzania utworów audio, ale pełni również funkcję społecznościową. Dzięki niej możemy jednym stuknięciem udostępnić aktualnie słuchany utwór naszym znajomym na Facebooku. Aplikacja sama pobierze okładkę albumu, zdjęcia wykonawców i wszelkie informacje o utworze za pośrednictwem Gracenote ®.

Album – aplikacja przynosi nowe intuicyjne sposoby sortowania i przeglądania zdjęć i filmów.  Zapewnia także natychmiastowy podgląd fotografii, a dzięki pełnej integracji z serwisem Facebook i Picasa, będziemy mogli udostępniać zdjęcia i komentować je bezpośrednio z telefonu.

Movies – aplikacja usprawnia odtwarzanie i wyświetlanie filmów o wysokiej jakości audio oraz wideo.Korzystając z bazy danych pobierze wszystkie informacje na temat filmu.

Oprócz wyżej wymienionych aplikacji, zostaną wprowadzone również zmiany znane nam już ze starszych Xperii posiadających ICS takie jak:

- odblokowanie ekranu (szybki dostęp do aparatu, dodana funkcja Face Unlock)
- lepsza kontrola zużycia danych
- wygodniejszy dostęp do ostatnio używanych aplikacji

Aktualizacji będzie można dokonać za pośrednictwem programów PC Companion i Bridge for Mac, ale również bezpośrednio z telefonu korzystając z sieci komórkowych lub Wi-Fi. Wybierając drugą opcję, warto zauważyć, że telefon będzie musiał pobrać około 200MB, dlatego polecamy użyć sieci Wi-Fi.

U nas nie będzie sztucznych kolejek, ale chcemy specjalnie uczcić rozpoczęcie sprzedaży. Dlatego też otwieramy 4 salony jutro w środku nocy. Tak wiem, że to nie jest  żadna premiera, ale my jesteśmy bardzo zadowoleni i dlatego warto to celebrować! W każdym salonie czekać będzie nagroda, dodatkowy iPhone 4S dla jednej z osób, która kupi tej [...]

Zobaczcie ceny telefonów w ofertach dedykowanych. Są już na naszej stronie więc wrzucam i ja Będziemy sprzedawać iPhone’y również w innych taryfach Play.

Zobaczcie ceny telefonów w ofertach dedykowanych. Są już na naszej stronie więc wrzucam i ja Będziemy sprzedawać iPhone’y również w innych taryfach Play.

WARSZAWA – 20 czerwca 2012 roku – PLAY ogłosił dzisiaj, że od piątku 22 czerwca iPhone 4S będzie dostępny w sprzedaży. Ceny wynoszą: złotówka na start plus miesięczna opłata w wysokości 179 zł za model 16GB, złotówka na start plus miesięczna opłata 199 zł za model 32 GB oraz złotówka na start plus miesięczna opłata 219 zł za model [...]