a T68i a T68m The Ericsson T68m (often called simply T68) is a candy-bar style

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

Ericsson Mobile Communications Ericsson Mobile Communications AB was a subsidiary of Ericsson, entirely focused on development of mobile phones (handsets). The company formed in 1989 and existed until it was succeeded by Sony Ericsson, a joint venture between Ericsson and Sony, ...

. Launched in time for the 2001 Christmas season, the T68 was the first Ericsson mobile phone to have a colour screen, a passive LCD-STN with a resolution of 101×80 and 256 colours. Despite its diminute size (3.94×1.89×0.79 in or 100×48×20 mm, 2.96 oz or 84 g), it was one of the most

feature-rich A feature is "a prominent or distinctive user-visible aspect, quality, or characteristic of a software system or systems", as defined by Kang et al. At the implementation level, "it is a structure that extends and modifies the structure of a give ...

mobile phones at the time, with

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

IrDA port IrDA is a wireless standard designed for exchanging data using infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The in ...

, GPRS 3+1,

tri-band In telecommunications, a multi-band device (including (2) dual-band, (3) tri-band, (4) quad-band and (5) penta-band devices) is a communication device (especially a mobile phone) that supports multiple radio frequency bands. All devices which ha ...

compatibility (900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 1900 MHz),

SMS Short Message Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile phones exchange short text messages, t ...

with

T9 (predictive text) T9 is a predictive text technology for mobile phones (specifically those that contain a 3×4 numeric keypad), originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of Nuance Communications. T9 stands for ''Text on 9 keys.'' T9 was used on ph ...

EMS Ems or EMS may refer to: Places and rivers * Domat/Ems, a Swiss municipality in the canton of Grisons * Ems (river) (Eems), a river in northwestern Germany and northeastern Netherlands that discharges in the Dollart Bay * Ems (Eder), a river o ...

, WAP, and customizable monophonic

ring tone (The) Ring(s) may refer to: * Ring (jewellery), a round band, usually made of metal, worn as ornamental jewelry * To make a sound with a bell, and the sound made by a bell Arts, entertainment, and media Film and TV * ''The Ring'' (franchise), a ...

s. At its release, the phone cost around

€ The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by t ...

500, GBP299 in the UK, in either two-tone grey or all-gold.

Features

A simple bitmap image editor was provided, allowing the creation of monochrome pictures by guiding a cursor around the canvas and setting or unsetting individual pixels (several 'brush' sizes were selectable to make this easier). These images could be set as the phone's background image in standby mode, and sent to owners of EMS-compliant phones. With EMS soon to be succeeded by the superior MMS, few owners made much use of this feature. A camera was not present, which was sold as an add-on (MCA-25 CommuniCam) and, at the end of the model life cycle, was offered with the phone. Calendar items, wallpapers, screen savers, contact pictures and ringtones can be sent to the T68i through the Bluetooth protocol, or infrared. The T68i was the first Ericsson (Sony) free from

brominated flame retardant Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) are organobromine compounds that have an inhibitory effect on combustion chemistry and tend to reduce the flammability of products containing them. The brominated variety of commercialized chemical flame retarda ...

s (BFR).

Sony Ericsson T68i

In 2002, after a slight cosmetic redesign and a software upgrade, the T68m was re-released as the Sony Ericsson T68i, as by then Ericsson had created a joint venture with

Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (imaging and sensing), ...

to produce mobile phones as

Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Sony Mobile Communications Inc., originally Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, was a multinational consumer electronics and telecommunications company, best known for its mobile phone products. The company, originally a joint venture betw ...

. The upgrade, also available to owners of the T68, provided a built-in

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

client,

SyncML SyncML, or Synchronization Markup Language, was originally developed as a platform-independent standard for information synchronization. Established by the SyncML Initiative, this project has evolved to become a key component in data synchroniza ...

support, and, for the first time ever, two-way MMS with full

SMIL SMIL or Smil may refer to: *SMIL (computer), a Swedish first-generation computer *Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, a www-standard markup language for multimedia presentations, including playlists and animated SVGs *Vaclav Smil (born 194 ...

implementation. The underlying hardware remained unchanged. The T68i is known for being a highly effective example of

stealth marketing Guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service. It is a type of publicity. The term was popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson's 198 ...

: Before being released

Sony Ericsson Sony Mobile Communications Inc., originally Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, was a Multinational corporation, multinational consumer electronics and telecommunications company, best known for its Mobile phones, mobile phone products. The ...

paid actors to pretend to be tourists and asked people to take pictures of them with the T68i. The previously included

Tetris ''Tetris'' () is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. In ''Tetris'', falling tetromino shapes must be neatly sorted into a pile; once a horizontal line of the game board is filled in, it disa ...

game was not present in the firmware of the T68i. While the T68i is sometimes cited as the first ever "Sony Ericsson" branded handset, this feat actually belongs to the Sony Ericsson C1002S, a phone produced by Sony alone and released on the au/KDDI carrier in Japan in December 2001.

Variants

* T68m * T68i * T68ie * T68a

In popular culture

It was featured in the

James Bond The ''James Bond'' franchise focuses on James Bond (literary character), the titular character, a fictional Secret Intelligence Service, British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels ...

film ''

Die Another Day ''Die Another Day'' is a 2002 spy film and the twentieth film in the ''James Bond'' series produced by Eon Productions. It was directed by Lee Tamahori, produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, and written by Neal Purvis and Rober ...

''.

References

External links

Official T68i specifications on the Sony Ericsson website

The T68i as a James Bond movie gadget
{{Sony Ericsson phones T68i Mobile phones introduced in 2001 Mobile phones with infrared transmitter