Sony Ericsson Q4 results: fourth consecutive quarter of profit

2010 was a good year for Sony Ericsson - they just released their Q4 financial report and it's their fourth consecutive report that has them in the black. Their focus on high-end Android devices seems to be paying off and they plan to continue down that path with the XPERIA Arc.

Sony Ericsson shipped 11.2 million units during Q4 for a total of €1.528 billion in sales. The gross margin stayed at 30% - for comparison, Apple had a 38.5% gross margin. Still, the operating margin was just 3% and the net income for the quarter was just 8 million, driving the net income for the year to 90 million.

The holidays helped drive sales up, but lack of new models proved problematic and limited the increase. The average selling price was €136 for the fourth quarter, compared to €154 for Q3, the result of price erosion.

2010 marked Sony Ericsson's return to profitability but there were heavy changes that took place in the company - it consolidated its facilities and reduced its workforce by about 4,000 people. The overall cost of the restructuring charges for the year was €381 million but they reduced operating expenses by over €880 million.

Sony Ericsson estimates their world-wide market share in Q4 2010 as 3% in terms of units shipped and 5% in value.

The refresh of their portfolio is coming with heavy reinforcements from the Android XPERIA line (which has over 9 million units shipped since launch). The XPERIA Arc is already official and there are a few others churning in the rumor mill (like the XPERIA Play). 2011 may turn out to be an even better year for Sony Ericsson. And it's also the year they'll celebrate the company's 10th birthday.

Dual-core Orion CPU and 1GB RAM for the Galaxy S2

A South Korean website has dug up some new info on the Samsung Galaxy S successor. The Galaxy S2 or whatever it's called, will have a dual-core CPU and an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p FullHD video recording.

Codenamed Seine (as the French river), the follow-up of the Galaxy S has been in the rumor-mill for some time, but as it's announcement is nearing, we get confirmation on some of the previously rumored specs.

By the way that image on the left is from an earlier leak and while we've seen other blurry photos of the S2 pop up as well, we still believe this one is closest to the real thing.

But back to the today's news, the Galaxy S2 will run the latest Android - 2.3 Gingerbread - and is reportedly based on the Samsung's customdual-core Orion SoC. The platform uses two ARM Cortex A9 cores both running at 1GHz much like in NVIDIA Tegra 2. We don't know what graphics chip it's using, but Samsung promises up to 5x improvement in the graphics performance compared to the current Hummingbird SoC so it might as well be the PowerVR SGX543.

The source confirms that the Galaxy S2 can record 1080p Full HD video through the 8MP camera on the back. Its RAM is pegged at 1GB - a match for the high-end droids that were announced at CES.

The Samsung Galaxy S2 should have a 4.3" WVGA screen that uses the next generation Super AMOLED plus technology. All this is packed into 9mm of thickness, which should make it one of the thinnest phones around.

Other features of the next-gen Galaxy include NFC integration (following the Google Nexus S trend) and "Personal Cloud Computing", which, we guess, are some sort of cloud services similar to what the competition has to offer.

On February 1, Samsung will release another teaser but we'll have to wait till the 13th for the official announcement at the MWC to see how much of these specs will turn out true.

Pictures and video of the WP7 Asus E600 leak

We were secretly hoping that the Asus E600 will make it in time for Christmas, but alas, we were in no luck. Now, we have a new leak, complete with live shots and a video, that suggests an MWC announcement is on the cards.

 
Asus E600

According to previous leaks the Asus E600 is supposed to pack a 4-inch WVGA display, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash plus a 720p capable camcorder and all-round connectivity. We guess it will be based on a 1GHz platform (probably Snapdragon) as is a part of the Microsoft WP7 requirements.

And here go the new photos:

   
Asus E600

We also have a very short demo video for you that demoes the E600 in action.

There is no information on the Asus E600 market availability or possible pricing just yet.