CES: Sony shoots for in-home, out-of-home electronics

Sony has just thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what’ll stick. It’s launched new line-ups across a broad array of consumer electronics products. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers go for the company’s high-end brand at a time of economic austerity.

Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer of Sony’s U.S. electronics unit, said the economic malaise of the last few months was staggering. But he claims he’s stayed optimistic. Sony Electronics sales were down overall during the holidays, but he said sales were strong at Sony stores. Bravia TVs, Blu-ray players, and home audio products sold well, he said. And he said Sony is now managing the Internet TV business and the electronic book Sony Reader business in the U.S.

Sony is showcasing a bunch of new Walkman music player models and new phones from Sony Ericsson at the CES show in Las Vegas this week. The phones focus on taking photos and sharing them effortlessly. The company also has new cameras and camcorders and four new digital photo frames.

Among the cute products: colorful Webbie high-definition camcorders that let you upload video quickly to the web. The Webbies are available now for $199. Sony also has high-end camcorders that record data onto hard disks or flash memory in high-definition.

There are new Vaio computers, including the world’s smallest eight-inch screen laptop computer. The $900 laptop weighs 1.4 pounds and has 3G wireless broadband so you can pretty much use it anywhere, assuming you’ve got a data plan.

Like the other TV makers, Sony’s new Bravia TVs will have widgets, or Internet applications that run directly on the TV and deliver web-based information. Sony’s TVs will be able to access YouTube, Yahoo widgets, TV shows, sports, music and content from Amazon.com’s new service, Amazon Video on Demand.

Like the other TV makers, Sony has shifted to 240 Hertz technology that refreshes a TV screen 240 times a second and thereby eliminates motion blur, or blurring that occurs in fast-moving videos. Those TVs will be out this spring. Sony also has an eco-friendly TV, a 3-D glasses TV line, and a bunch of other stuff.

Sony will also have a new organic light-emitting diode TV, to be announced tomorrow at Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s keynote speech. The OLED TVs are ultra-thin, but in the past year the lone 11-inch model was expensive. Glasgow also said Sony would hold an interesting camera announcement for the show. I’ll keep you posted.