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Sony In Talks To Buy Ericsson Out of Phone Venture
PolygamousRanchKid sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Sony Corp is in talks to buy out Ericsson's stake in their mobile phone joint venture, a source said, in a bid to catch up with rivals. The move could help Sony recoup ground in the battle against Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics, where it has been hampered by its disparate offerings of mobile gadgets and online content. The joint venture, formed in 2001, thrived after its breakthroughs with Walkman music phones and Cybershot cameraphones, both of which leveraged Sony's brands. But it lost out to bigger rivals Nokia and Samsung at the cheaper end of the market, and was late to react to Apple's entry into the high-end of the market. It has refocused its business to make smartphones using Google's Android platform, but has dropped to No. 9 in global cellphone rankings from No. 4 just a few years ago."
better late than never, I always have a soft spot for sony ericsson brand, because they're elegant, however lately they are a bit late in new ventures, if this brings better phone at faster date, then so be it
Sweet! More phones running 1.6 or 2.1 like the rest of Sony's we-won't-update-it garbage.
I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
It'll be interesting to see Sony-Ericsson return to the market. I remember when they were a big player alongside Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, but things are completely different in the post-iPhone (ie, Android) world. With Nokia out of the picture, and Motorola focusing almost entirely on the US market (even more than usual), it's really just Samsung and HTC. Both have done extremely well with Android. Sony-Ericsson, if they can move beyond the lackluster Xperia range, can bring a lot more diversity to the Android system.
I still won't buy one, you know, because it's Sony. But I welcome the competition.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Sony can burn in hell.
At some point, consumers have to develop the discipline to exercise their only leverage and let corporations know that there are certain things that will not be tolerated.
Sony is by no means the only one on the list, or even the worst, but they've earned their way onto my pay-no-mind list.
The Sony portable minidisc recorder I bought at a garage sale some years ago for $5 in order to cannibalize the AD/DA converters was the last Sony product I will ever buy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
After the rootkit issue I swore off all Sony products. It's a shame because they do make some decent hardware but they still need to embrace open standards and generate some trust by doing some good deeds before I buy any of their products again.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Google announced it is buying Motorola's mobile division in August and now Sony is going to swallow Ericsson mobile. I remember when "car" phones first came out those were about the only choices you had. How long until Microsoft buys Nokia?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
They'll have to do something pretty drastic. IME, quality hasn't dropped since Sony entered the joint venture - it's plummeted. Tacky nasty plastics are the order of the day across much of the range, yet I'm not convinced they have a huge price advantage except at the very low end.
Maybe then, Sony will cease its demise? Right now, they are probably the most hated consumer electronic company, and those that are hating are putting off potential customers when asked about what new gear to get.
The only outcome can be another segment of phones that are less developer-friendly.
Is Ericsson preventing Sony from making decent phones? Is Ericsson the reason why SE phones are so shitty? Looking at Sony's other offerings, I suspect Sony has itself to blame for SE losing out to Nokia, Samsung and Apple. Sony has a long and inglorious history of making proprietary crap. Consumers don't want your slow buggy custom Android crap. HTC, Samsung and Motorola have all gotten a chance to become Google partners via Nexus and Xoom, except for Sony.
Assume that Sony buys out the stake from Erricson. What becomes left of Erricson? Does Erricson make anything else?
You can forget about that now.
I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
All it would take to fix that is a series of good and popular products. Sony has a decent brand, good distribution and talented engineers so it's certainly possible. While I'm not optimistic about their prospects, I certainly think it is premature to count them out entirely.
My personal take on Sony is that they have good hardware engineers but are not so great at software. This has become a bigger problem over time. They also have a tendency to try to lock in people with proprietary technology even when they've clearly lost the battle (betamax v VHA, minidisc v CD, SD vs Memory Stick, etc) which I think bites them. They have too much of a Not Invented Here syndrome. Worst of all they also have a built in conflict of interest between their content division and their equipment divisions. They try to lock down the content WAY too much. This makes their engineers essentially unable to provide the products people actually want.
Sony has been completely out played by Apple on what really 10 years ago people would have thought was Sony's natural market.
In the 90's Sony was the premium portable music brand, built on the walkman and diversified through the discmans and introduction of the technology in the minidisc. They totally missed the boat on the introduction and portable harddisk and flash memory based media players. What is most ironic is they pretty much had developed the key technologies for the minidisc in the early 90's, mainly music file compression algorythms and hardware encoding and decoding in the music player. The only thing that was missing was to replace the magneto optical discs with a hard-drive. Instead other people did it and perfected it instead and Sony came late to the party.
Sony then started to fight back against the brand dominance of the Ipod, by pushing the walkman phone idea, where the flash media player is integrated into the phone. For the time they were good music player phones. And this is where Apple really excelled, they anticipated the shift away from separate ipod and phone to the combined item, and decided that their best strategy was to make their own phone, and managed to wipe the floor with Sony again.
They will drop the uncomfortable "Back" key inherited from Ericsson?
I loved my Ericsson phones. After Sony got involved, things got better in some regards, worse in others. Sony's insistence on pricey, proprietary memory when the world had moved to MicroSD. Sony's ongoing war against OS customizers, debranders, etc... made Apple look benevolent. Still, they made some lovely hardware here and there. I owned the K750i, which was the "best phone ever" for a few years. It was my first daily-carry cameraphone that performed like an acceptable point-n-shoot. They had the best Bluetooth stack. And when it came to U.S. customers... they completely dropped the ball. I blame the FCC for granting stupid, unique frequencies and preventing global competition, but Sony often planned to release new models to the U.S. and then usually pushed back those releases by a year or more. By the time the C905a was finally released, I had already left the brand for good.
Sony has conflicts of interest. Their "intellectual property" nonsense arm of the business has destroyed their consumer products division. Rootkits on audio CDs, Playstation fiascos every few months, harrassing Aibo software developers... The phone problems are more subtle, but annoy the enthusiastic customers. They have lacked vision and deliver a lot of "almost flagship" phones and very few "best of everything" models. The deal should be the other way around. I want to see Ericsson make phones without Sony mismanagement. Alternately, I want Sony to prove me wrong and get their house in order and release compelling new phones. How about a Qwerty slider, high resolution, Android phone with an amazing camera and well placed tactile media and camera controls? Nobody does that; SE phones used to have a unique corner on good interface; I'd love to see it happen again.
Just look at these threads and see how Sony is pissing off its customers:
http://talk.sonyericsson.com/thread/23778
http://talk.sonyericsson.com/thread/22121
I'm still pissed at Sony for all of their draconian crap of the last several decades. Making devices that are more proprietary than anything else, rootkits, disabling functionality in products, and last but certainly not least George Hotz. Sonys track record has been crap. Eriksson sells good stuff, and they don't screw with their customers. Sonys stuff doesn't plug into anything but sony, and they constantly screw with customers. If Eriksson bought sony, I wouldn't mind, but the other way? NO! I won't buy anything Sony ever again.
"and was late to react to Apple's entry into the high-end of the market"
The P800, P900, and P910 phones were all very solid in the high end market (the model number is how much they cost...) back in 2003-2004. However, the severely lagging SymbianOS held them back in terms of all the fancy stuff Apple did with the iPhone in 2007. You had to use a stylus with SonyEricsson or the interface would get confused.
For me, being an American, the biggest failure with the P900 was not having 850mhz support from the start. If they had had that and had pushed distribution to offer discounted, locked down versions with a data plan like Apple did, those things would've sold much better.
-l
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I used to own a Ericsson GH388. This phone came out in 1995. Those phones could be dropped 5 meters. You could hammer nails with them. The Sony Ericsson phones I have seen are all crappy plastic fantastic garbage that fails if you give them the wrong look. I really miss the _solid_ Ericsson phones, it is possible to make Android phones with metal not plastic.
Now, something different. A friend wanted me to configure SIP on a Sony Ericsson phone. The phone did support SIP, but ONLY "provider SIP". The phone was locked so you could NOT configure it to use a SIP provider. It had to be pre-configured by the SIM card provider. What a load of crap!! Sony==DRM, lock-down, garbage.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I have been a long time fan of Ericsson phones. The SonyEricsson merger was a good one, but a Sony phone was never even on the map of phones I would consider. I would probably become a Samsung or HTC phone owner if this happens.
Ericsson was the first company to introduce a great phonebook. I e a phonebook where you stored contacts instead of number-name pairs. Sony brought music features and when cameras became a hot item, SE had the best cameraphones. The only descent phones with a lenscover, you could slide out to go into camera mode.
And with the resent SE move to support the FreeXperia movement they suddenly did what Sony would never consider. Support the modding community.
How long till Cyanogen be prosecuted?