Like its predecessor, the new SmartWatch connects wirelessly to an Android phone for message notifications on the wrist. The wearable device can also be used for checking Facebook and Twitter or monitoring exercise activities.

After watching the video and checking out the device description — Sony says images are illustrative, so the final product could appear differently — it sounds great. But I bought the Sony Ericsson LiveView watch last year based on similar expectations, and for me, it was a dud. The watch wouldn’t keep a steady connection to my handset once I moved about a meter away. Even with phone in my pocket and the LiveView on my wrist, the connection was never stable.

Hopefully, Sony has addressed that problem with its upcoming SmartWatch. Bluetooth 3.0 is used in this version and Sony claims a range of 10 meters, so I’m a bit leery. By comparison, I reviewed several other smartwatches in the last year and the MetaWatch gave me a range of of 30+ meters; even if I put my phone down and walked away several rooms in my house, the connection never dropped.

The other factor with these devices is the user interface. A touchscreen is often used — and the Sony SmartWatch continues that tradition — but with such a little display, the interface must be effective and intuitive. You don’t want to fumble around through pages of menus on a screen that’s 36 millimeters square.

As far as I know, Sony hasn’t officially announced the SmartWatch with pricing and availability details; if I’m correct, expect news at the Mobile World Congress in a few weeks; we’ll be on-site covering the event live. Thanks to John Biggs’ tweet pointing out the new watch over on WristWatchReview.

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The news, first reported by 9to5Mac, appeared to be confirmed as much by what looks like Teixeira’s own LinkedIn profile. We have contacted Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to confirm the appointment.

If accurate, this would be the first time that Apple has hired a regional manager for Latin America in recent times, according to AppleInsider. And indeed, Apple, whose mobile devices and computers are priced at the higher end of market, has entered Latin America perhaps more slowly than it has other emerging economies like China.

Because Apple puts Latin America into the same category as the U.S. and Canada in its results, we don’t know exactly how much revenue the company generates there, but it’s clear that the figure is going up and represents a bit opportunity for the company. In October, during Apple’s Q3 conference call, CEO Tim Cook noted that revenues in Latin America’s biggest economy, Brazil, were up 118 percent over the year before.

But he also acknowledged that Apple has not been as aggressive in some developing markets as it has been in China — where it has several retail stores and counts Asia overall as its second-biggest market after the Americas. (China alone accounts or 16 percent of revenues.)

With Apple reporting its Q4 results later today, the company might reveal another update on how Latin America is progressing. The past quarter has seen a few events that might merit mention later today:

It was only in December 2011 that Apple launched its first local iTunes store for Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the same month that the iPhone 4S began to ship in Brazil and Chile, among a list of other emerging markets.

And Foxconn, a key iPhone and iPad manufacturer for Apple, reportedly started to produce devices in a factory in Brazil — although, again, these reports have never been confirmed by either company.

Teixeira helping to oversee a local manufacturing operation might prove to be useful for supplying Apple-hungry consumers north of the border, but it could also be used to feed demand closer to the plant as well.

That might mean cheaper prices for those devices, too: that iPhone 4S that launched in mid-December did so at a crazy price: almost $2,000, a premium of nearly $1,200 on the U.S. retail price.

Apple is not the only media company eyeing up Latin America for growth: Netflix also used it as the springboard for its first international launch, and just last week Telefonica beefed up its online video offerings in the region in a deal with Sony.

Teixeira is a Brazil native who had been with Sony Ericsson since the formation of the JV in 2001, overseeing first Latin America (which had been a big market for the JV); then Western Europe and finally North America. According to LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), he will be based around Miami and Ft Lauderdale in Florida.

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Not brilliant news for Motorola Mobility and its would-be buyer, Google: the handset maker today issued preliminary Q4 results that will fall short of market expectations, citing competition from other handset makers and costs related to patent litigation.

Motorola today said in a statement that it expects to post sales of $3.4 million billion with only “modest” profitability (the exact amount, slightly worryingly, was not specified). It estimates shipments of 10.5 million mobile devices, with 5.3 million of those smartphones. Its Home business, covering digital media technology, should bring in $900 million.

According to poll of analysts by Reuters, Moto was expected to report $3.88 million billion in revenues. The shipment numbers will be down on the 11.3 million posted for Q3, although smartphones are up compared to the 4.8 million reported for in that period.

In its release Motorola cites the “increased competitive environment” for some of the shortfall, and to be sure companies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Samsung are really killing it right now in smartphones, both in market share and, significantly, mindshare.

But turning this around, you could also argue that Moto has failed to deliver compelling enough handsets of its own. These have included the Droid Razr, the company’s first smartphone riff on its once-bestselling Razr line, a new version of its Atrix 4G device, the extended rollout of its Defy device. Motorola doesn’t specify any more on its IP litigation but it is fighting suits against Apple and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), among others, not just in the U.S. but in Europe as well.

Motorola, which makes smartphones based on Google’s Android platform, is not the only Android maker reporting bad news today. HTC also today said its profits declined in the face of ongoing competition in the smartphone market. Given that Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) (soon to be only Sony) and LG (SEO: 066570), two other major Android device makers, have also had some trouble in their device businesses, it seems that the only Android partner really winning right now is Samsung, which today also reported quarterly results with a growth in revenues and profits.

While this is not great news for Motorola, it is also potentially a bother for another major company: Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which is currently in the process of buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. If the phone business is proving a challenge, and the Moto patents that Google sorely needs are costing a fortune to defend, then where, exactly, will the value be in the deal?

We may get some more color on this news next week during CES, where Motorola Mobility will have a strong presence. The company will be releasing its full Q4 earnings on January 26.

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Androidland, which has been developed by Australian operator Telstra in cooperation with Google (NSDQ: GOOG), looks like it is the first Android-based retail setup in Australia and may be the most extensive Android-dedicated retail operation that we’ve seen anywhere yet — although if you have been to one of the big trade shows, like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, some of the installation concepts may look familiar to you.

The shop is actually a “zone” within Telstra’s flagship retail store in Melbourne, and its purpose is to educate and delight people with all things Android.

There is a section dedicated to games; a spaceship that lets people “Androidify” themselves and fly through Google Earth; and a giant touchscreen device to play with apps. All the major Android makers, including HTC, Samsung, LG (SEO: 066570) and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), are represented. It’s not clear whether any of the devices sold at the store are unlocked to use with carriers besides Telstra.

Although Australia is in the middle of its summer right now, that has not stopped Telstra and Google from riffing on the winter theme in the entrance way, as you can see from the illustration here. It will form a central part of the carriers’ holiday season promotions, a key time for all consumer tech companies to pick up business and longer-term customers.

One company that has had yet another setback in that marketing game, though, is Samsung, whose 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab tablet was most definitely not a part of the display at Androidland when it opened today.

Over in Sydney, an appeals court has granted Apple yet another week’s extension in its injunction against Samsung over alleged patent violations concerning that tablet. That injunction was due to be lifted this Friday afternoon, after a panel of appeals judges decided that Samsung had been treated unfairly and that it should be allowed to sell the device, despite the ongoing court case.

According to Reuters, the ban will now stay in place until at least December 9, when Apple is due to make its formal response to the appeals’ court decision. In all, Apple and Samsung are filing injunction requests against each other’s devices in some 20 separate cases, although the only other case where Apple has succeeded in blocking a Samsung tablet is in Germany.

But as we noted when the appeals judges thew Samsung a tablet lifeline on Wednesday, it may be too late in any case to do anything for the device, which has not exactly overtaken the iPad in markets where it is being sold.

If only Androidland had a time machine that let Samsung go back and review its tablet strategy afresh…

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LG’s Facebook page suggests an upgrade will first be available for the high-end handsets it launched this year: the Optimus 2X, Optimus Black, Optimus 3D, and the Optimus LTE. None of these specific models are available in the U.S. under these names; however, some exist as rebadged devices. The Optimus 2X, for example, is sold in the U.S. as T-Mobile’s G2X, which we showed on video in early May. It’s possible then, that the U.S. versions of LG’s Optimus line will see ICS.

In contrast to LG, Sony Ericsson hasn’t announced anything official on its Facebook page. However, the Italian-based XperiaBlog caught a clue by way of Sony Ericsson’s marketing manager replying on Facebook to a question about potential updates. In his response, Maurizio De Palma from SE said that the Xperia line of phones should see Android 4.0 in March and all Xperia models from 2011 will see the new software.

With prior Android updates, we’ve seen some handset makers and carriers follow through with new software, while others haven’t. Often, those that did push new software did so more than six months after the code was made available from Google. Between the decisions of hardware makers and carriers, the various versions of Android available on phones has created a bit of an issue with developers and consumers: Similar phones don’t have the same capabilities or sometimes can’t run the same applications because of the software variance.

I expect we’ll soon start hearing from other manufacturers on which existing phones will get Android 4.0 in the near future. At its annual developer conference in May, Google announced a new initiative to adopt guidelines that bring Android updates and support to all new devices for 18 months after launch. If Google and its hardware partners hold true to that promise, any Android handset introduced to market after May of this year should see Android 4.0. Partners at the time of that news include:  Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T.

There hasn’t been much news of late on this initiative, but Google hasn’t released a major software update since version 2.3, known as Gingerbread, arrived last December. Small updates to Gingerbread have launched this year, but it’s Android 4.0 that’s the next big version, and likely proving ground, for the partnership effort announced in May. The additional goal is to speed up the process to get updates to consumers, which is sorely needed.

Google has fought the software fragmentation issue for well over two years now — with some success — but Android 4.0 has the potential to nearly eliminate it. By “starting over” with a new major version and promising updates for all new handsets after a certain date, consumers buying Android phones should see more similarities than differences between handsets by this time next year, if not sooner.

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If there is one company that has a good idea on what is going on in the mobile markets around the world, it is Swedish telecom equipment maker, Ericsson In a conversation with analysts, its President and CEO Hans Vestberg is planning to share Ericsson’s outlook on the direction of mobile. Here are some of the stats the company executives are going to talk about with the investors.

• Only 35 percent of the world’s population has WCDMA/HSPA coverage, and this number is expected to grow to 80 percent in 2016.
• Population coverage of LTE will increase from today’s 2 percent in 2011 to 35 percent in 2016
• 60 percent of the mobile traffic growth up to 2016 will be generated in metro and urban areas.
• Ericsson has a 43 percent market share in cities. And the company claims it has increased its market share in mobile infrastructure from 32 percent in May 2011 to today’s estimated 36 percent.
• Ericsson expects the demand for CDMA radio access network and CDMA core network technologies to decline from $9 billion in 2010 to $4 billion in 2015.
• The microwave market in general is estimated to grow from $5 billion in 2010 to $6 billion by 2015. Microwave is used for backhaul and is benefitting from the demand for more and more bandwidth.

Ericsson notes that now that it is out of its marriage with Sony , the company can start to make money in a big way from its 27,000 patents and is expecting to see some major growth in that business as it starts to license some of its technologies.

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But that growth is even more striking when you compare it to other major platforms such as Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry: according to numbers from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android is the only platform that has grown over the last year in all the key markets surveyed by the research group. The rest saw their market shares either stay flat or decline in at least one geography.

The figures, which compile smartphone sales for the last 12 weeks ended October 2, paint a pretty stark picture showing which platform is benefiting most from the growth in smartphone usage by consumers.

Taking the markets of Australia, Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain and the U.S., the Android platform grew its share of smartphone sales anywhere between 19.3 percent and 50.4 percent (the full table for all countries is embedded below). Spain took the crown for the biggest amount of Android growth at 50.4 percent.

The only other platform that didn’t see any decline in any single market was Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 — although it saw zero percent growth in several markets, and its highest-recorded sales share was pretty small. In Germany, it accounted for 3.2 percent of all smartphone sales; a completely different story to Android’s dominance in the period.

Symbian, as we have seen before, is continuing its decline in market share, with its percentage of sales shrinking in every market — essentially the mirror opposite of Android. In many cases, Nokia’s now-legacy platform is now only accounting for single-digit sales of smartphones. (The one big exception is Brazil; see below for more detail.)

Somewhat surprisingly, given the amount of great press that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) gets, it also declined in terms of smartphone sales in almost every market surveyed, except for Spain, where it grew its share of sales by a mere 1.2 percent to 6.2 percent of sales. In other markets it variously accounted for between 2.3 percent of all smartphone sales (Brazil) to 30.1 percent (Australia).

RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), meanwhile, saw a mixed bag of results, growing a bit in every market except for the U.S. and Australia. Great Britain appears to currently be RIM’s strongest market in terms of percentage of smartphone sales: it accounted for 22.9 percent of all of them in the last 12-week period.

Kantar also broke out some specific numbers for the smartphone market in different regions.

U.S.: In Android’s strongest market (66.4 percent of all sales), HTC is currently the biggest Android brand, accounting for 39.8 percent of all sales (compared to 32.2 percent a year ago). But as we saw with Samsung’s own results last week, it has seen very strong growth over last year. It now ranks second with 24 percent of the Android market, a huge amount of growth if you compare to to the 5.8 percent share it had a year ago.

Motorola (NYSE: MMI) saw the biggest Android decline, accounting for 19.8 percent of sales in the last 12 weeks compared to a share of 49.3 percent a year ago. Will be interesting to see whether Google’s purchase of Motorola will help turn that around, or whether Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has picked up an OEM in permanent decline.

Dominic Sunnebo told paidContent that one of Samsung’s strongest points is that it already has a huge base of non-smartphone Samsung customers in the U.S. — some 44 million users. “These guys have already bought into the brand, so to get them to upgrade to a Samsung Smartphone is considerably easier than attracting new customers from other brands,” he said. Motorola, he points out, also has a large base of non-Smartphone customers which they can try to upgrade, but “demographics play a part”: more than half of Samsung’s non-Smartphone consumers are under 45, compared to 34 percent for Motorola.

Great Britain: Smartphones, it said, made up nearly 70 percent (69.1 percent) of all mobile sales in the last 12 weeks. It noted that now 43.8 percent of consumers in the region now own a smartphone, making it one of the highest-penetrated markets around.

What’s becoming more apparent is that within Android, there is an increasing amount of competition between OEMs. As with the U.S., in Great Brtain, HTC is currently the most popular Android maker, where it took 44.8 percent of all Android sales in the last 12 weeks. Samsung came in second with 37.9 percent of sales (a big rise compared to its share of 25.2 percent one year ago). Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) looked to be the biggest loser here: it only accounted for 8.5 percent of Android sales, compared to a more respectable 20.5 percent for the same period in 2010.

While Android dominance looks like it is set to continue for some time — some 62 percent of Android users tend to buy Android devices again, says analyst Dominic Sunnebo — the big challenges will be for individual Android vendors to create products that stand out from those of their fellow Android OEMs, in addition to attracting consumers completely new to the platform or to smartphones altogether.

Brazil: Here, the story is quite different. As with other developing markets, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is still playing a dominant role compared to its reduced market share in markets like the U.S. and Europe. In Brazil, Nokia took more than half (56.5 percent) of all smartphone sales in the last 12 weeks. Nokia now controls a 30.3 percent share of the smartphone market.

Android, in contrast, accounted for 19.3 percent of sales in the period, with the Samsung Galaxy 5 the most popular Android device.

There’s still a lot to play for, though: at the moment, smartphone account for six percent of all mobile ownership in Brazil, which has a population of 193 million. That means there is still time for all platforms to make an impression and grow.

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However, one of them survived: Ericsson. The Swedish telecom giant has managed to transform itself by betting big on one simple trend: the demand for wireless broadband is going to be huge. In doing so, the company kept building leading edge 3G+ products, bet heavily on LTE and pushed harder into emerging telecom markets such as India and China. Today, when it comes to mobile, they are one of the two major players, Huawei being the other. (Alcatel-Lucent is also a player, but it is mostly because it gets support from carriers in its home markets of the U.S. and France.)

Thursday, Ericsson announced it’s selling off its stake in the ill-fated Sony Ericsson phone handset venture to Sony for about $1.5 billion. It’s a great move by Ericsson; the company invested close to a billion dollars over the past 11 years and still made money on the money-losing venture. I’m even more impressed it was able to get money out of the Japanese giant (even if it’s for IP that is being licensed.)

Sony Side Up

The Sony Ericsson joint venture has always been a mess and hasn’t been able to realize its full potential. This unshackles Sony and allows it to leverage its brand and push more phones in places like India and parts of Latin America. It still has an immense retail presence, and with some focus it can start to compete with Samsung, HTC and Motorola. From the looks of it, this is the last chance for Sony. If Sony blows it, the company will be relegated to the status of a niche domestic Japanese handset maker.

On paper, the Sony Ericsson divorce may seem like a win-win for both companies, but Ericsson is the real winner because it will allow it to focus on its core strengths — broadband — as it competes with China’s Huawei, its biggest and scariest competitor. The next thing Ericsson needs to do is get rid of its joint venture with ST Microelectronics called ST Ericsson. And it needs to do it really fast.

In doing so, Ericsson becomes a pure play broadband company: selling wired broadband and wireless broadband hardware along with providing managed services. (See: Ericsson to manage Sprint’s network.) It’s also time for Ericsson to start thinking about the evolution of the mobile cloud and how it can build hardware for that shift. In doing so, Ericsson will remain the other viable option against Huawei, which has become the PacMan of telecom.

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“Our four-screen strategy is in place,” Sony CEO Howard Stringer says.

The rationale: “(It) gives Sony an opportunity to rapidly integrate smartphones into its broad array of network-connected consumer electronics devices – including tablets, televisions and personal computers,” according to the company.

Says Sony: “During the past ten years, the mobile market has shifted focus from simple mobile phones to rich smartphones that include access to internet services and content. The transaction is a logical strategic step that takes into account the nature of this evolution and its impact on the marketplace.”

Ten years too late? Sony has struggled to keep pace with rivals, notably Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), on hardware but also on content services. Whilst its PlayStation Network is popular, the company recently did a quick rebranding job on its curious Qriocity service for accessing music, movies and more content.

Now labeled “Music Unlimited” and “Video Unlimited“, Sony wants to offer it across its TVs, Blu-ray players, games consoles, tablets and mobile phones.

It’s not clear why it couldn’t have done this with Ericsson aboard, but, since the pair formed their JV in 2001, Ericsson has become more of a wireless transmissions infrastructure company, with less of an interest in either handset manufacture or content per se. The pair part with Sony getting an undetailed intellectual property cross-licensing agreement and five handset patents.

“We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions that seamlessly connect with one another and open up new worlds of online entertainment,” Stringer says. “This includes Sony’s own acclaimed network services, like the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network. We can help people enjoy all our content – from movies to music and games – through our many devices, in a way no one else can.”

Sony Ericsson claims 11 percent of the Anrdoid market by value.

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