May 16th, 2009

Sony said the company recorded a loss of US$1 billion in the first quarter of 2009, which is the first in 14 years, and the company is still expected to book another loss even the company said the loss will climb at US$1.26 billion in full-year 2009 because sales of televisions, cameras and other electronics equipment continue to stumble.

Together with other companies selling consumer electronics, Sony has been beaten by the global economic slowdown. As demand stepped down in 2008, Sony cut prices of TVs, video players and cameras to avoid inventory pile-up. Yet the company strived to cut costs quickly enough to keep up with declining prices. Sony said on Thursday it would increase cost-cutting steps and close more plants in 2009.

Still, Sony has made a four-year mission to get the company back on track. Pending improvement on the product front, Sony is deepening its cost cuts. At the beginning of a slowdown in December, Sony announced plans to eradicate about 16,000 jobs from its electronics division and close about six plants in order to cut 250 billion yen (US$2.6 billion) in annual costs. Today it plans to close a total of about eight plants and make other new cuts.

Sony said Thursday four of the closed plants would be in Japan and that it would close or sell plants in the US, Mexico, Indonesia and France, with job cuts surpassing 16,000 workers.

Verizon Wireless, the largest wireless carrier in the US, will beginning May 17 sell a netbook model made by Hewlett-Packard, as laptops have wrinkled in size and price and cellphones have turned larger in size and capability, so they are more and more overlapping in function.

This netbook is an adequate light-duty computer, and the price is low for a PC with a hard disk running Windows XP. But Verizon’s charge for Internet service is high if we intend to depend on that service as our major online connection, since the data levels covered by the carrier’s plans aren’t unlimited, and cost extra after we exceed a certain amount. It makes much more sense if we travel extensively, stay within the data limits each month, and want to avoid hotel and airport Wi-Fi fees.

Still, the Verizon service is slower than many Wi-Fi connections, and it can be obtained for almost any laptop by buying a plug-in card that carries the same monthly fees. In my tests, at a typical Marriott hotel, the Verizon cellular service achieved download speeds of around 1.6 megabits per second, while the Wi-Fi modem in the same PC got over five mbps.

Besides, the hardware has some noteworthy downsides. The keyboard feels too flexible, and some symbols on the function keys are hard to read. The mouse buttons are awkwardly arrayed on the sides of the touch pad, not below it. And the speaker, while loud, is tinny. Also, the machine has a bunch of craplets, mostly links to H-P Web sites or to companies like eBay and Pandora.