News - Sony to assume full control of the Sony Ericsson brand

[HEXUS]

Moves to better integrate with the rest of the company.

Read more.

[miniyazz]

Cool.

[Gunbuster]

Sony have been struggling with the SE contract lately. It's been roadblocking their path to joining up things like their Phones, Walkmans, eReaders, PSPs and Tablets.

[crossy]

Wonder if the focus on smartphones (Xperia) at the expense of the dumb ones will mean "better" models? The SE range - on the whole - looks good (e.g. an Arc S is a more stylish device than an iPhone4S), but not exactly "cutting edge" technologically. For example, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, etc all have dual core phones, SE don't.

What I'd like is a "Walkman" Xperia able to take SDXC cards and with a kick-backside sound capability multi-core processor, and an (AM)OLED screen - the SDXC slot so I can have large capacity cards and replace my current iPod (Classic). At present that's really the only kind of thing that'd persuade me to switch my current SE X10 for another Xperia when renewal time comes.

With development cycles being the length they are I guess we won't see the effects of Sony-only control for at least a year or two.

[Gunbuster]

Crossy: bare in mind if the issue they have now is treading on Sony's toes, that will disappear the moment they are bought. I assume even if the designs are SE originated they will be free to team up with Walkman for S-Master amps and so on.

I agree on the processor side and maybe Sony's odd love for low amounts of memory, but I think the Neo and Arc are rather nice.

[kopite]

I was a big SE fan back in the day and would still be using them now if HTC didnt make such damn nice android phones

What does this mean for eriksson though? WIll they start making their own phones again or are they going to be getting out of the handset market all together?

[Funkstar]

What does this mean for eriksson though? WIll they start making their own phones again or are they going to be getting out of the handset market all together?

I suspect they will just concentrate on their infrastructure business. This is something they have always done, and is really the core of their business. The Sony deal made a lot of sense at the time as Sony got Ericsson's component and radio technology which Ericsson got a boost from the Sony name and their industrial design team.

[crossy]

Crossy: bare in mind if the issue they have now is treading on Sony's toes, that will disappear the moment they are bought. I assume even if the designs are SE originated they will be free to team up with Walkman for S-Master amps and so on.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it like that - I'd assumed that SE would have the full run of the Sony "toybox" - but on reflection I guess you're right. They (SE) would have been possibly excluded from some tech that Sony wanted to keep "exclusive" - but of course that now goes away.

How long before we see the Xross bar on an Xperia then?