Sony Ericsson teams with Google

Bloggers on the go will soon have a new tool to help them keep their blogs up to date.

On Tuesday in the US, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications announced a deal with Google to integrate the search company's Blogger and Web search features into Sony Ericsson mobile phones.

Using software pre-loaded on the phones, subscribers of Blogger.com will be able to update their personal blogs from their mobile phones. Sony Ericsson claims it is the first company to offer an integrated blogging tool on its phones.

"We are seeing exponential growth in blogging, and consumers are turning more and more often to the Internet as a means of sharing information or images in personal blogs," Jan Wareby, corporate executive vice president for Sony Ericsson, said in a statement. "By working with Google, we're able to offer a quick and easy way for people to blog as they discover how convenient it is as a way to share words and pictures with friends, family and beyond."

The first phones to offer the new feature in Australia will be the K800i and K790i imaging phones, which were announced on Tuesday. These phones come with integrated 3.2-megapixel digital cameras with Autofocus, Xenon flash and a unique imaging technology developed by Sony Ericsson. The K800i is a dual-mode 3G/GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) phone, and the K790i is a tri-band EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) phone. Both will be available in the second quarter of 2006, the company said.

Sony Ericsson also announced that the Google search engine will become the standard search engine for all of its Internet phones. The search feature has been tightly integrated into the phones, so that consumers can directly activate a Google Web search option from whichever page they are viewing without launching a new Web page to complete a search. Other phone manufacturers, such as Vodafone and Motorola, also have announced that their phones will use Google's search tool.

Sony Ericsson made several other announcements on Tuesday. It announced three new Bluetooth headsets: the HBH-IV835, HBH-GV435 and HBH-PV705 and a Bluetooth Car Speakerphone, the HCB-100, which offers up to 20 hours of talk time and 600 hours of standby time.

In addition to the new K800i and K790i phones, Sony Ericsson announced three new camera phones, the K510i, Z530i Clamshell and the K310i, as well as a new Walkman phone, the W300i.