Sony Ericsson is showing visitors to this year’s CES trade show what a Sony smartphone is expected to look like. Assuming, of course, all goes to plan with Sony’s plans to buy Ericsson out of the joint venture.

The Sony Xperia S is the first smartphone from the ‘next generation’ Xperia NXT series and is expected to go on sale worldwide in the next month or two.

The CES consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas opens to the public today following a media-only day yesterday.

Although next month’s Mobile World Congress takes away some of the focus on mobile devices, there’s still a lot of attention paid to handset announcements.

Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, SanDisk, Sony and Toshiba have agreed to work together on a new content protection technology for memory cards and storage devices.

It’s currently called the Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative (although this name may change later) and is designed to protect High Definition content with Digital Rights Management when it’s shared between devices such as tablets and smartphones.

Mark Bridge writes:

The really big news last week wasn’t good: 17,000 jobs worldwide are being lost at Nokia Siemens Networks (which, incidentally, is a separate company from both Nokia and Siemens). That’s not far short of a quarter of the total workforce. The company is going to focus on mobile network infrastructure and services, with a particular emphasis on mobile broadband, and is likely to sell off other parts of the business.

The forthcoming PlayStation Vita gaming device will be supplied with a Vodafone SIM card in selected countries when it launches next February.

A new partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe means that Vodafone will be the ‘preferred provider’ of 3G connectivity for the 3G+WiFi version of the PS Vita in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands.