After rumours hinting at the deal, Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson is pulling out of the Sony Ericsson joint venture formed ten years ago with Sony. Sony is to acquire its 50% stake in the company in a deal worth EUR1.05 billion (US$1.47 billion/AU$1.40 billion).
According to one blog, Telstra is set to launch an onslaught of brand new phones – especially those from Mobile World Congress and CES – sometime in the middle of April and all through May. These phones include the new Motorola Atrix smartphone and the XOOM tablet.
This week saw Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the number of tablets have expanded with Samsung, LG and HTC getting in the mix; while publishers are angry with Apple and Telstra gains some love with us with its announcement over 4G.
Sony Ericsson has also announced at Mobile World Congress the release of two new smartphones to feature this year – the Xperia neo (above) and the Xperia pro – both focused on multimedia while also offering the new Android Gingerbread (Version 2.3) platform.
Sony Ericsson has confirmed the worst-kept secret of the year, with the company confirming during the Super Bowl in the United States the existence of the Xperia PLAY – or more commonly known by its other name, the PlayStation Phone.
In the lead up to the CES for mobile phones, the Mobile World Congress, images of a new Sony Ericsson Android-powered phone – dubbed the MT15i, or the “Vivaz 2″ – have appeared online after one Russian website managed to score the phone and has done a review.
As we near the end of the year, we also approach the galore of rumours ahead of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. This one, coming from the blog titled Blog of Mobile!! (and yes, it does come from Japan), is supposedly a new Sony Ericsson phone that has not been revealed.
It’s Halloween and we see the deaths of Limewire and the Walkman. The iPhone 4 White version is either dead or still kicking, and little hackers all over the place thanks to a little Firefox plugin. Yeah. It’s an absolute shambles episodes with only two hosts – with Terence and Stewart.
Today, Sony Ericsson, the company which brought you the X10 line, announced their new device, the LiveView, which despite it looks is not an iPod Nano competitor.
Instead the LiveView is a micro display for Android phones with the ability to be a remote control. This device is like many other concepts out there, allow you to read new text messages, see incoming calls and keep up with the latest Facebook and Twitter news plus more.
Turns out, to create a scandal, we don’t need to have a sexual relationship. However, we get a little bit sidetrack with the NBN to talk about that story. Yes, the NBN. We ranted about the NBN – that’s a first. We also talk about a new FaceTime video sex service and is Android getting a new gaming platform for Android?
RUMOUR MILL: A report has claimed that Sony Ericsson is working on creating a brand new Android phone that will feature a new gaming ecosystem based around the Playstation.
The report, from Engadget, claims that the Phone will be a cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go, and features the controls of the PSP Go instead of a QWERTY keyboard.
Thought the iPhone would be a predominant player on all the carriers? Telstra has announced that it will be having a second Android phone on its network with the release of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10, a phone which we covered back in November 2009. The phone features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, along with 1GB of onboard memory with a microSD card slot to expand that. It also features a 8.1 megapixel camera and Microsoft Exchange support.
While 2009 might not be a year to remember when consumer demand was very low – before increasing at the latter end of the year – Symbian still dominates the smartphone market, according to Gartner. However, it might need to do some more to increase its market share after it dipped from 52.4 percent in 2008 to 46.9 percent in 2009, despite an increase of units sold.
Twenty-four telecom operators – including Vodafone, SingTel, China Unicom, China Telecom, Telenor, TeleSonera, Sprint, T-Mobile, Orange , AT&T and Verizon Wireless – have announced that they will form together a group known as the Wholesale Applications Community. The group will have the backing of the GSMA consortium and will be backed by LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
Sony Ericsson has brought out their new phone with “green credentials at its core” – well according to them anyway. Called the Aspen, the phone is business focus and will feature a QWERTY keyboard, along with using Windows Mobile 6.5.3 as its OS (and it’s just a very, very, very small update to WinMo 6.5).