Back in October Sony announced that they were going to purchase Ericsson’s half of the decade old joint venture Sony Ericsson. We didn’t really get a lot of details about what the future of the company would be, other than that Sony would keep on making mobile phones. Now thanks to Kristian Tear, an executive VP at Sony Ericsson who spoke to The Times of India, we have a bit more clarity about the situation. With regards to the Sony Ericsson brand, Kristian says that it’ll be phased out by the middle of next year and that it’ll be simply known as Sony. And as for the devices, no more feature phones. It’s all smartphones going forward, and the platform of choice is Android. Kristian adds:
“A lot of planning goes into getting the branding right but we will be done by middle of next year. It will also mean that the marketing and advertising investments will go up. We haven’t been as fierce as we were a few years back but we will step it up, refocus and invest more in brand-building in select markets and India is one of those markets.”
So we can expect to see Sony push smartphones harder on TV, in print, and on the internet, but we still don’t know what they’re going to do differently compared to Sony Ericsson. The 2012 and 2013 portfolio of Sony Ericsson devices will likely not be scrapped, instead they’ll be tweaked to get the right logos in place, but again, that still doesn’t answer the question of what Sony plans to do in the mobile space.
Remember the S1 tablet that Sony announced back in April, then renamed in August, and finally shipped in September? It sucked. Horribly. From the build quality to the software, it was a steaming pile of shit. Will we be saying the same about their smartphones this time next year?