Back in October, rumors began circulating about Sony being interested in buying out Ericsson's portion of the Sony Ericsson joint venture, a move that'd likely bring with it smartphones with branding that simply reads "Sony" rather than "Sony Ericsson." The deal was made official later in October, and today a Sony executive has revealed that the company plans to drop the Ericsson branding from its handsets by the middle of 2012. "A lot of planning goes into getting the branding right but we will be done by middle of next year," said Kristian Tear, Sony Ericsson's executive VP & head of sales & marketing. Expect Sony to begin pushing its smartphones harder once Ericsson's name is dropped, as well, as Tear explained that the name change "will also mean that the marketing and advertising investments will go up."

The Sony brand is pretty well-known around the globe, both with folks that are obsessed with technology and with the less tech-savvy crowd, so it's no surprise that the company would like to use that branding on its smartphones. Sony has said in the past that the move to buy Ericsson out of the Sony Ericsson joint venture will allow it to move away from producing feature phones and give it an opportunity to better integrate its smartphones with other connected devices, like tablets and TVs, so it should be interesting to see what Sony can come up with once it's on its own in the mobile space. Any of you think you'd be interested in checking out a straight up Sony-branded Android phone?

Via MobileBurn, Times of India