Sony Buys Ericsson Out For $1.47 Billion 64
First time accepted submitter Diggester writes with this snippet from PC World: "Sony took a page out of the playbooks of Microsoft and Apple, announcing it would buy out its smartphone partner, Ericsson, to more tightly integrate smartphones with Sony's laptops, tablets and televisions. The move gives Sony complete control over its smartphone business, while Ericsson will now focus more broadly on wireless connectivity for products beyond mobile handsets. Sony purchased Ericsson's share of the Sony Ericsson partnership for about $1.47 billion. Rumors about Sony's takeover of Sony Ericsson surfaced in early October."
Lock-down time... (Score:2)
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Judging from Sony's previous attempts [wikipedia.org] at "security" (actually, this "CAPTCHA" [sony.com] is even funnier), I don't think hackers have much to worry about.
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actually, this "CAPTCHA" [sony.com] is even funnier
SLBVR isn't funny!
[but document.getElementById('captchdiv').getElementsByTagName('b') is a start ...]
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Ok, I give up - how do you type HTML tags in comments? :(
Anyways, it's the LEFT_ARROW_BRACKET b RIGHT_ARROW_BRACKET tags
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Total security theater; probably worse than not having it at all, because with it in place, somebody at Sony thinks that they've got adequate protections in place when they don't.
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If you are in Chrome/Chromium, in the F12 console use:
document.getElementById('captchdiv').innerText.replace(/\s/gi, '')
Firefox/Firebug (also Chrome) you can to loop each item:
var o = ''; var r = document.querySelectorAll('#captchdiv b'); for(var i in r) { o += (r.hasOwnProperty(i) && r[i].innerHTML)?r[i].innerHTML:''; }; alert(o);
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That's hilarious. Generating a CAPTCHA using HTML tables. It's not like computers can't parse HTML (assuming you aren't using IE). Good thing they have (commented!) JavaScript to disable copy and paste. Must have been done by an intern as an inside joke or something.
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wget -qO - http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/jsp/forms/generateCaptcha.jsp |grep "</b></span></td>" |sed -e s/\<b\>//g |sed s/\</" "/g |awk '{print $1}'
(Yes its a bit messy but what do you want for 5 mins work.)
Anyone else want to have a go? (in perl maybe?)
Now make a proper PlayStation phone please (Score:1)
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What Sony should do is take the Xperia Play concept, put in the dual core processor (like modern Android phones like the Galaxy SII, HTC Sensation, Motorola Atrix, etc) and I think it could work.
On the other hand I dont own the Xperia Play due to lack of content, so I think content does matter.
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smart phone scene has been boring? Have you even looked at where we've gone in 3 years? we went from "you have phones" to "you have phones that can emulate SNES" to "you have phones that can emulate playstation games" to "you have phones that can almost rival the PS3". in 3 years. You can get RAGE on your smartphone.
If you think the scene is boring, you might want to actually look around first. It's entirely possible smartphones will have more processing power than next gen consoles by the time they come o
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Bzzzzzzt. Thanks for playing.
The improvements are tremendous, but the Cortex-A15 Processor [arm.com] almost certainly falls short of the original CoreDuo.
Trinity packaged in a quad-channel socket FM2 with integrated Radeon 7000 graphics core is about the level of performance I expect from the next generation consoles by the time they arrive.
Sony originally hoped to make Cell a one-chip solution. But
Probably a good move (Score:2)
Probably a good move. With a large portfolio of consumer products this was much more likely than Ericsson buying from Sony.
Indeed, the PSP could use some of the Sony Ericsson wizardry.
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Depends. (Score:2)
Erlang is an Ericsson product, and they've released or assisted on [ericsson.com] a number of other products. Sony - well, they're famous for closed products, rootkits and the walkman. I'm not overly convinced I trust those guys to honour prior license agreements (there are plenty of products that were GPL that have been made proprietary with the open source variant deleted from the catalogue completely). I am very concerned.
Well that's depressing... (Score:1)
P.S. By property rights I mean the constant fucking around with firmware to revoke features that were once specifically advertised (OtherOS in PS3, etc.) and other related sleazy behaviors. I could
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Sony is hard to think of as a monolithic company. the content generators (Trist
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They had to disable the hacks because again, people kept using them to pirate, and piracy is not something you have the right to do.
What pisses people off isn't that they can't pirate (as if), it's that they bought a product with a certain feature which was later disabled without their consent. Maybe they "had" to disable the otherOS feature, but if they were "just doing what's right" they would have offered a refund for anyone who chose to send back their PS3. It's clearly bait-and-switch.
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You didn't even read my comment.
TLDR version: It doesn't matter why they took linux away, it's bait-and-switch without refunds.
Sign of times changing? (Score:2)
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10 years ago Sony-Ericsson was #3.
Right now they are #10 @ 1.7% market share.
Great cooperation on Ericssons part .. Have they ever been #1? #2? Bigger than Nokia?
Regardless how much did Sony actually contribute in the first place? Designs? Walkman brand? How much market share did they had compare to Ericsson?
It's kinda sad.
And then there's everything Ericsson has "given away" to Huawei..
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And Huawei is almost as big instead of being more or less irrelevant, with Banverket as their first international prestige/referense customer ..
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But then Apple also does not make a phone either http://texyt.com/iphone+manufacturer+supplier+assembler+not+apple+00113 [texyt.com]. So what's your point, other than market leaders change really rapidly in consumer products, so winner now but dead in five years time. Apple is managing to do a pretty good job of mucking up it's brand at the moment, si yeah likely is in five years time, things will be the way they were five years ago.
I think that's still illegal in Alabama (Score:1)
No wait, that was something different.
Ericsson made some good phones in its time (Score:2)
But no more.
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My wife had a SE (don't know the model) from 2004, which she used for about 3 years. It is being used since then by my mother in law. That's 7 years of daily use!
I believe SE had better quality than Nokia in the early 2000's.
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True, both my Ericssons started having mechanical problems after about 4 years, although I was about to buy new ones anyway.
Having worked at Ericsson... (Score:1)
I can tell you that this comes as no big surprise. Both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson are incredibly slow moving companies with way to much bureaucracy. They have lots of engineers who are very skilled at implementing specifications to the letter, but not at adapting to change. Last I heard from them, they were still using a 10 year old version of ClearCase as the main VCS, which had to be restarted about twice a day because there were so many problems with it. Upgrading was completely out of the question. It
Did I miss something? (Score:2)
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But even if the circumstances aren't exactly the same there certainly is a general tren
Sony Ericsson... (Score:2)
Will this help or hinder US presence and support.. (Score:2)
I have to wonder if this will mean the North American presence for Sony(Ericsson) phones will increase, as well as end missed release dates and vaporware. What may happen to the Java Platform operating system present on the majority of SonyEricsson "feature" phones, like the WalkMan and CyberShot phones prior to Android. I am also hoping that making customizations will still be easily done and sites which provide services or support for customizations, unlocking, firmware flashing, ELF mods, and so on wil
Now your phone comes with a Rootkit! (Score:2)
Or, if you want to listen to music you've already purchased, you need to manually enter your DRM code...
Or, you'll need your phone to access Sony Online, and when they get hacked again, you'll have your phone number all over the world...
Or they promise a phone that runs linux, and halfway through your contract, they remove linux...
I mean, this is *SONY*... If there's a way to screw this up, they will find it.
In other words... (Score:2)
*puts on glasses*
Sony lost their Erection [aaanything.net].
YEAAAH!
No more Acronym (Score:2)
Summary is INCORRECT (Score:1)
Sony bought out Ericssons share in the SonyEricsson joint venture -
This is the portion of GIANT EQUIPMENT manufacturer Ericsson which made mobile handsets
Sony did *not* buy Ericsson itself.
see what else ericsson does here:
http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/products
Ericsson doesn't need the phones anymore (Score:1)
Ericsson has never been good at consumer electronics. The main reason for not quitting phone making 10 years ago was to secure supply of phones compatible with the mobile network standards they were advocating.