Sony Cell Phones and Tablets Reviews & Information

Sony Cell Phones and Tablets. Reviews & Information - Best Specifications

Sony Mobile is a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001 as a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and wholly owned by Sony. It was originally incorporated as Sony Ericsson, but Sony acquired Ericsson's share in the venture on February 16, 2012.

Sony Mobile Communications has research and development facilities in Kenya, Africa; Chennai, India, Lund, Sweden; Beijing, China and Silicon Valley, USA. Sony Mobile was the fourth largest Smart Phone manufacturer by market share in the fourth quarter of 2012 with 9.8 million units shipped.

The current flagship device of Sony Mobile is the Sony Xperia XZ, an Android smart phone that is water and dust resistant with an IP68 rating, has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Chipset and a 23MP 4K camera with object tracking.

A brief history of Origins

In the United States, Ericsson partnered with General Electric in the early nineties as Ericsson Mobile Communications (ECS), primarily to establish a US presence and brand recognition.

Ericsson had decided to obtain chips for its phones from a single source a Philips facility in New Mexico. On March 17, 2000, a fire at the Philips factory contaminated the sterile facility. Philips assured Ericsson and Nokia (their other major customer) that production would be delayed for no more than a week. When it became clear that production would actually be compromised for months, Ericsson was faced with a serious shortage. Nokia had already begun to obtain parts from alternative sources, but Ericsson's position was much worse as production of current models and the launch of new ones was held up.

Ericsson, which had been in the mobile phone market for decades, and was the world's third largest cellular telephone handset maker, was struggling with huge losses. This was mainly due to this fire and its inability to produce cheaper phones like Nokia. To curtail the losses, it considered outsourcing production to Asian companies that could produce the handsets for lower costs.

Speculation began about a possible sale by Ericsson of its mobile phone division, but the company's president, Kurt Hailstorms, said it had no plans to do so. Hailstorms said, "Mobile phones are really a core business for Ericsson. We wouldn't be as successful (in networks) if we didn't have phones".

Sony was a marginal player in the worldwide mobile phone market with a share of less than 1 percent in 2000. By August 2001, the two companies had finalized the terms of the merger announced in April. Ericsson contributed a majority of the Ericsson Mobile Communications company, excluding a minor part spun off as Ericsson Mobile Platforms. Sony contributed its entire handset division. The company was to have an initial workforce of 3,500 employees.

Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo

Sony began in the wake of World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in a department store building in Tokyo. The company had $530 in capital and a total of eight employees. In the following year he was joined by his colleague, Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). The company built Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G. In 1958 the company changed its name to "Sony".


Name of Sony

When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a Romanized name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TTK. The company occasionally used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name that was tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words. One was the Latin word "sonus", which is the root of sonic and sound, and the other was "sonny", a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a boy. In the 1950s Japan "sonny boys", was a loan word into Japanese which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be.

The first Sony branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955 but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958.

At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji. The move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.


Globalization

According to Schrieffer, Sony's TR-63 radio "cracked open the U.S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5 million units by the end of 1968.