Sony Ericsson is doing a lot lately to get deeper into the smart phone game, with a new tool called Creations. Using crowd-sourced content, Creations lets you upload your own photo content from you phone for the purpose of sharing it with friends and crating personalized themes for your device. The Creations app itself lets you play around with your content and the content from other users in order to co-create something custom for your phone.
The Creations app itself is appealing to a certain aspect of smart phone use–the ability to personalize your phone with particular themes. This is something that iPhone users are still unable to do, and several new smart phones emerging on the market are attempting to leverage the custom capabilities of their devices to further differentiate themselves from the iPhone standards.
With Creations, you’re able to upload photos taken from your camera phone and share them with the app’s community. For each item you upload you can set the privacy standards, and even leverage the Creations app as extra storage space beyond that which comes with your phone. Creations uses the Creative Commons licensing agreement, giving users the option of sharing their content for the purpose of it being used by other community members if they so choose.
Dipping into a pool of user-generated content and combining it with your own creativity, you now have something unique and custom to use on your phone. You can use your complete creation to share back to the community as well, giving other users the opportunity to benefit from your own creativity. Whether or not Sony Ericsson plans on creating a self-sustained marketplace through this app remains to be seen, though I imagine it could be a useful opportunity for the manufacturer to benefit from the development of a platform app in this manner.
As Sony Ericsson looks to delve further into the smart phone market, the company is releasing a line of new products, including additions to the Xperia family this week. As the smart phone market heats up, several device manufacturers are working in cooperation with platform providers such as Android. They are also looking to control even more of the mobile market by launching apps to run on cooperative or their own platforms, launching apps in conjunction with some of those releases.
The benefit of doing so is the ability to control how the device, apps and platforms work together. The more seamless the experience is, the more convenient it becomes to its users. The expectations surrounding the mobile app market are reaching new heights in the coming months, leaving several businesses in the mobile industry fighting for bigger portions of the monetizable pie.
For Sony Ericsson in particular, it appears to be utilizing mobile apps such as Creations for the purpose of extending the capabilities of the mobile devices develops and manufactures. By creating peripheral options that already go along with your phone, Sony Ericsson is able to better retain its customers, and perhaps encourage a bit more brand loyalty as well.
We don’t often hear of apps such as Creations becoming killers in the mobile app space, but they often gain a decent amount of users by default and through direct marketing efforts to existing customers. Nevertheless, Sony Ericsson could see some benefits from this cross-promotional campaign, especially as it appeals to the non-iPhone user. Other companies using similar tactics include Samsung, which is looking to grow its app economy around the Samsung Wave, RIM, and Nokia.
Sony Ericsson works with Burson-Marsteller & Golin Harris for their North American PR needs.