Let’s pour a little out for Sony Ericsson because if they’re not dead now they’re dying rapidly. The phone maker posted a loss of $300 million for Q2, it’s fourth consecutive quarter of lagging earnings.
What’s the problem? They’re not releasing anything anyone wants. The X1 was a dud and the rest of their new line hasn’t been announced yet. They’re basically sitting out the smartphone revolution.
“As expected, the second quarter was challenging and we still believe the remainder of the year will be difficult for Sony Ericsson,” said the company’s president Dick Komiyama in a statement. “Our focus remains on bringing the company back to profitability and growth as quickly as possible, and our performance is starting to improve due to our cost reduction activities.”
These “activities” include restructuring their handset division and firing 2,000 employees.
From the point of view of a mobile developer I can say that SE phones are probably the best J2ME platform on the market right now – very mature and in many aspects more advanced then even iPhone platform is (background applications, sms/mms send/receive, GPS, accelerometer etc etc). Now they are opening their application store for all third party developers. Hopefully this is going to be the move in a right direction.
Pilot: They have to do something, it appears…the phones themselves aren’t things people are clamoring after really. Beta players were superior in many ways to VHS as a technical platform, but no one wants a Beta machine either.
Drum roll:
Rumor has it that the future is in the software not the hardware. Wow! What a surprise!