Sony will face a tough time turning around the fortunes of Sony Ericsson, which it will soon own outright, after the handset manufacturer posted a staggering net loss of €207m ($265m) for 4Q11. The loss is in contrast to the €8m profit the firm posted in the same quarter a year earlier.

Google has announced new hardware manufacturers that have joined it as partners for its IPTV service Google TV. LG is the biggest name to join the Google TV ecosystem this year and will unveil a new line of Google TV sets running on its own L9 chipset at CES in Las Vegas next week.

The owners of handset joint venture Sony Ericsson are to part company, with Japanese electronics firm Sony acquiring the 50 per cent share of the JV held by Sweden’s Ericsson for €1.05bn. The announcement comes ten years after the formation of Sony Ericsson, which saw two struggling handset units combined in the hope of marrying Sony’s consumer electronics expertise and Ericsson’s telecoms experience.

The bunfight for Nortel’s patent chest concluded yesterday, with Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel’s announcement that “following a very robust auction”, the winning bid came from a buyer too big for even Google to take on. Following months of speculation and a $900m kick-off bid from Mountain View, the booty has gone to a consortium that reads like a Who’s Who of the tech industry: Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony. Even with names like that in the mix, the $4.5bn price paid is still pretty eye-watering or, as Nortel’s Riedel preferred to put it, “unprecedented.”