Sony Ericsson laying off 450 employees in Research Triangle Park, NC
By Darren Murph 
posted September 29th 2008 12:45PM
posted September 29th 2008 12:45PM
[Image courtesy of Flickr]
posted September 29th 2008 12:45PM
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Only 750 workers?
Thats about 740 more than I have.
Congratulations on finding 10 idiots who like to work for a guy that spends his workdays on Engadget.
When you work for yourself, you work when you want.
Hey! I need a job! Please!
Good news guys, I heard Motorola is looking for 350 workers...
We were forced to use their crap all those years.
Now Jesus phone came and finally we see the light. I mean they should go bankrupt for producing such a horrible products and releasing them upon us.
By that logic, they should be able to counter-suit you for being dumb enough to buy them.
tough day for NC, first Wachovia and now this....
Wachovia was bought, not excommunicated.
No matter whether Wachovia was bought. They're still talking massive layoffs. Regardless, it's still a tough day for NC financially.
Isn't Wachovia the first or second largest bank in Charlotte? :/
Well just take a look at the current world lineup of SE handsets... they look like crap, the only thing they have going for them is the X1, the market has changed, yet they pushed out "Walkman" phones...
Wakman was back in the 90's
Reasearching crap ideas will put you in this situation, even Motorola has some brains! to go for Android.
iPhone styled phones are now the "in thing", SE had more than a year to come up with something and get it out the door...
If anybody should be able to make a music phone that is !=TURD (Samsung upstage), it should be Sony...
It's indeed sad that they focked up. I mean they where fighting head to head Nokia 3-4 years ago, but they have focked up 2 brands in mobile phone world that would have been so easy to sell even if they would have made ok phones for this 3-4 years(talking about CyperShot and Walkman). First Samsung and Nokia destroyed SE in 5mpx phones and then SE haven't moved at all with their music phones... they don't even put a damn 3.5 jack to those Walkman phones. So again Samsung, Nokia(with the XpressMusic line and N series phones) have been sucking life out from SE in mid range that's SE strong point.
Still i think they can come back. SE's brand is still very strong in Europe and Asia so it wouldn't really need too much work from them.
Shame SE... Shame...
Since S/E is about to sell HTC handsets, as the Xperia X1, I guess it is now becomming clear that they will drop UIQ in favor of WindowsMobile and cease the development of their own phones in favor of HTC hardware...
UIQ started it's dead when Nokia bought Symbian and large part of people working for UIQ got fired(UIQ is based on Symbian). SE still got a problem with the fact that WM isn't exatly popular in Europe and Asia that are it's main markets so by Eldar(Mobile-review.com) SE will have it's first S60 5th edition phone out in the end of next year and it's work force is focused there getting ready for the Symbian foundation.
i live near RTP. that must've been all the commotion...
And I happened to read they will be in my school (close to RTP !) hiring more students at the job fair at the end of this month. Whats with this hiring and firing ?
College grads work for cheap. Pensioned 20+ year seniors don't.
Sad, but true.
They were probably planning to attend before the world exploded. The ECF gets planned several months in advance.
...be kinda funny if there's just an empty space where they're supposed to be, though.
I still have my SE T616. The software on that phone is ROCK SOLID. I have used it as a portable alarm clock for the last 5 years and only once in that entire time did the clock fail to go off as scheduled - and I may have simply overslept it that once. I can't say that about any other phone.
Are you still using the original battery in it?
I have one of those phones, not as reliable as yours though - it boots to a white screen occasionally.
Its a shitty time to be out of work, regardless...
BTW here's the proper photo credit instead of a link directly to the file http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/2215568146
Xperia was developed in San Fransisco, I believe. The RTP branch was working on some of the sliders that came out recently.
Well but still - UIQ is the better OS for mobile telephony, compared to either WM or to S60, as one does barely need the touchpen to handle the device. S60 does not even support a touchscreen. In my opinion, UIQ is more iphonish compared to other mobile OS (except for Android, for I did not yet test it).
At least S/E announced to reunite with Nokia in order to develop a Symbian S60/UIQ successor together. Maybe there is still a little chance that they will not let a great mobile OS like UIQ die.
Windows Mobile is nice on a PDA, but the telephony application is just crap. I prefer the UIQ-style telephony interface.
And, last but not least - regarding support of third party applications - is there anything one would need except for Opera, Fring and maybe some games on a mobile device? There is nothing elemental one couldn't get for UIQ.
im doing some design on their behalf...
now that the company is going down... i think i will be going back to malaysia for work
GOOD RIDDANCE!
Relative to the high expectations I have for every other type of SONY hardware product, the phones kinda sucked. Of course, they aren't as bad as the garbage that Motorola dumps in the channel, but thats not really saying much.
Of the SONY products our family owns and loves to use... several types of headphones, surround sound tuner/integrated amplifier, cdrom, dvdrom, combo dvd/cd burner, several sets of headphones, an mp3 discman, a regular discman, 40 inch 1080p HDTV, PS/2 game system, three digital cameras over the years, each better than the last, a super-8 handycam, a digital-8 handycam, ... AND A BUSTED SONY ERICSON PHONE.. you get the idea.
I was completely flabbergasted that the damned phone broke. It might as well have not been a Sony. "Ericsson" might as well mean "..BUT NOT REALLY!!!". The design of the power connector was HIDEOUS. It required substantial force to insert, and, internally was supported only with surface mount solder connections, basically meaning it was inevitable that this piece of junk was going to fall apart.
I had a Nokia 5100 series that survived being thrown 20 feet into a sheet of drywall - the wall took a dent. The Nokia was eventually replaced due to obsolescence, with another phone I've been pleased with - a Kyocera Energi that I've had over three and a half years. When my wife had been thru several pieces of junk Motorola phones due to repeated firmware issues and bad quality control, I felt sure that we could end our problems by simply going with Sony. After all, its not like any of the phones I was using myself (CDMA/1xRTT), were available on her plan (TDMA/GSM)
I felt a fool for recommending the Sony/Ericsson to my wife so strongly based on only the SONY nameplate, only to have it fall apart so quickly. Granted, it didn't do anything insanely weird on screen like the Motorola it replaced, but it still just plain broke.. it turns out its very little like any other SONY product. "Ericsson" = "Junk". Looks like SONY knows it too!