Sony ends flat panel venture with Samsung

After the original join venture between Sony and Samsung began in 2004, Japan’s biggest consumer electronics exporter has decided to throw in the towel, with the past 8 years of the TV division resulting in continuous losses.

As part of the dissolution of Sony’s share in the S-LCD Corp. venture, Samsung will pay Sony $935 million in cash. From January onwards, Sony will instead have a steady supply of LCD panels from Samsung at market prices; without the need to heavily invest in the manufacture of the panels themselves.

“It’s a step forward for Sony,” said Shiro Mikoshiba, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Tokyo to Business Week. “Canceling out the venture enables Sony to become more flexible in procuring panels. Still, Sony continues to face falling prices and heavy fixed costs.”

Sony may have been the third largest TV panel retailer in 2010, but with only a 12% global market share, trailing behind Samsung as the largest, and LG as the second largest TV manufacturer.

For their fourth quarter earnings, Sony has predicted their fourth consecutive year of loss. However, CEO Howard Stringer did say that the $8.4 billion of acquisitions this year will help improve their position in the smartphones and tablets market.

Reality check! Smartphones still in minority

Most of you reading this own a smartphone or two, or three. Having a smartphone, regardless of brand, has become almost like a human right in large parts of the world and no doubt, smartphone sales are booming. IDC expects 472 smartphones to be sold worldwide this year, with Android and iOS being the two dominating platforms.

But even with booming smartphone sales, let’s not forget that smartphones are still a small part of all mobile phones in the world. You could be forgiven to think otherwise reading the headlines in magazines and tech websites.

Almost 6 billion mobile phone subscribers

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) expects [PDF] 5.9 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide in 2011. I know it’s a bit of apples and oranges, but this means only about 8% of all mobile handsets in the world are smartphones.

No doubt, this share will just keep increasing. IDC expects smartphone sales to almost double to 982 million by end of 2015. That’s a lot of smartphones.

But some of the functionality of smartphones, like GPS, web browsing and email has trickled down to another type of mobile phone, usually called feature phone.  In fact, over 70% of mobile handsets that shipped this year were feature phones. This number is expected to at least remain stable if not increase.

So as much as us tech writers want to talk about smartphones, when you read some headlines about record smartphone sales, think again and remember that however smart they are, they are just a small portion of the market.

What is it that makes a smartphone so, well, smart? I would imagine that most of us are lured by the big and bright screens, the fast processors, large storage capacity, fast mobile data connections, and more. To me what makes the smartphone smart is the apps.

But more than anything, for most customers, we’re probably lured by the idea of having the latest and greatest. That’s the way it so often is with tech, wouldn’t you say?

Switching to feature phone?

I can admit that I’ve thought about dumping my smartphone at times, instead going for the week-long battery life that a feature phone can offer, and often better voice quality as well. But as much as those things appeal to me, whenever I’ve tried to live with a feature phone, there’s something I’ve missed from the smartphone and I ended up switching back.

Right now, I am still in love with my iPhone 4S. It fulfills a range of roles, and has in some ways taken over what I do with a computer as well as tablet.

But a feature phone will beat it on several key points. And for all its wonderful features, the iPhone 4S, as well as all other smartphones, are still a small percentage of all mobile phones sold in the world.

That’s a reality worth keeping in mind.

Photo credit re-ality.

Google signs three-year search deal with Firefox, reportedly paying $300 million a year

While Firefox might be losing some market share to Google Chrome in the past few months, it’s still an excellent browser that remains a favorite of many users around the world. But there was doubt on Google’s dealings with Mozilla once their search deal expired and whether they would renew it or not and that would drastically affect Mozilla’s annual revenue. Well worry not, because Google and Mozilla have announced that they’ve renewed their search deal for three years.

The two companies announced today that the deal will ensure that Google remains the default search engine for the browser for an undiscosed amount of money. Well, it was undisclosed officially but AllThingsD.com reports via unnamed sources that Google will be paying Mozilla a huge $300 million a year for that priviledge mainly beacuse both Microsoft and Yahoo were highly interested in the same thing. That’s a lot of money and should ensure smooth development of the brwoser for the next few years for sure.

What do you think?

Bee Mobile launches its first Android phone in UAE

Now, now, before you smirk, think of the names that companies currently carry: Blackberry, Apple, HTC Flyer. I mean who names their products after fruits and…flyers? So the name ‘Bee Mobile’ is almost acceptable in the current trend of things, and if you are willing to disregard their quick pun on the word ‘bee’, you will know that they have launched a Android smartphone called Bee 7100, apparently the cheapest one in the UAE for AED 399.

It features dual SIM capacity, 3.2MP camera, 4GB memory along with a 2GB card, WiFi, Bluetooth, MP3 and video player “facility”, stylus, e-book reader, and access to the Android Marketplace.

The smartphones is now available in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and comes with one year warranty from Axiom Telecom.

3R System T100 Valkyrie Case Review

Link: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/3R-System-T100-Valkyrie-Case-

Let’s take a look at the 3R System’s latest mid-tower case, the T100 Valkyrie, which has eight expansion slots and several other features.

Here is a snippet:
“Let’s take a look at the latest mid-tower case from the South Korean 3R System, the T100 Valkyrie, which comes with eight expansion slots and several other features.”

SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse and Headset Reviews

“After using the Diablo III mouse and headset for about a week, I am very happy with the results that SteelSeries and Blizzard put into this combo. The mouse is comfortable to use and is highly configurable for use with Diablo III or any other application for that matter. The LED slow pulse illumination, along with the graphic designs, makes this mouse look absolutely awesome…”

Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1794/1/

Squeaky Wheel: NVIDIA Driver Fixes GTX 560 Ti 2Win and X79 Issue

Sometimes we are surprised when big companies listen to the community
when they have a legitimate complaint about a product. Late last
night NVIDIA passed over a driver that finally fixes the issue we
discussed last Friday with the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win dual-GPU
graphics card and the new X79 chipset. The issue arose from the
inability to actually enable SLI on the card thus leaving one of your
GTX 560 Ti’s on the board sitting there limp. And for gamers that pay
$500+ for a graphics card, that is just unacceptable.

URL: http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Squeaky-Wheel-NVIDIA-Driver-Fixes-GTX-560-Ti-2Win-and-X79-Issue

Pantech Link II

Quote:
” Up for review today I have the Pantech Link II which is what you would call a feature phone, it’s not an amazingly high-tech assistant like other phones out there, but it gets the job done and sometimes that’s all you really need. The Link II is more of a social centric phone and it does feature a full qwerty keyboard and the capabilities we’ve come to expect from our phones like Bluetooth. The phone is very user friendly along with being thin and lightweight and best of all it’s very inexpensive.”

Main site link: http://www.testfreaks.com

Crucial RealSSD C400 256GB

Crucial’s latest m4 SSD is packed with the same controller as the first 6Gbps SSD. We put it against OCZ Vertex 3 (SandForce 2281) to see if it can the drive for you in this holiday.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/articles/Crucial_RealSSD_C400_256GB/2156.html

Building a BitTorrent Rig with the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Quote:

“The BitTorrent client we built was centered around the Zotac ZBOX Nano PC and we found this platform to be rock solid in everything that we did for this project. From the Windows 7-64-bit install, to the various software associated with security and torrenting, the VIA Nano X2 processor was more than enough to support this project. For those looking to buy a Home Theater PC that does more than just surf the net, you really should look at Zotac’s catalog of mini-PCs. Most of Zotac’s mini-PCs start around $240 for fully outfitted palm-PC which make it quite tempting – even for those who like to…”

Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1774/1/

« Previous Page — Next Page »