Sony Ericsson will soon crack the champagne bottle over its newly revamped online mobile service -PlayNow Arena. The latest line of Sony Ericsson handsets, including the K660 and the new Walkman phones - models W380 and W890, seemed to have arrived just in time.

PlayNow is a mobile online service originally launched by Sony Ericsson back in 2004 as a way to download ringtones. Little did we realize Sony Ericsson had much bigger plans for the service.

Sony Ericsson now hopes to open the new and improved PlayNow Arena to anyone who wants to develop for it so it can serve a wide variety of content from different publishers. They’re calling it an "open multimedia platform."

In the PlayNow Arena you’ll be able to download games, full music tracks, themes, wallpaper and take advantage of new multimedia services.  But the most interesting things it’ll offer are new ways to share content.

Online services are always looking for clever ways to expose users to new cool stuff we’ll want to buy. TrackID lets users quickly and easily find songs on the PlayNow Arena that you might have just heard on the radio. But it doesn’t stop there.

Using the new system, users will be able to rummage through TrackID Charts created by other users around the world, or in your own neighborhood. You can limit your TrackID Chart browsing to only those from your local market if you’re interested in seeing what’s hot in your area.

Sony Ericsson looks to launch the PlayNow Arena in Q2 2008, but only in select markets.

Tags: Video

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Portable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.