The Electronic Frontier Foundation outlined in a blog post Thursday methods for consumers to disable Superfish software on their Lenovo laptops. Lenovo shipped tablets that included Superfish software between September and December, but the software has been disabled since January, the company said in a news release Thursday (see 1502190046). Superfish lets consumers view more advertisements, but some privacy advocates consider the software a security threat. “Research from EFF's Decentralized SSL Observatory has seen many thousands of Superfish certificates that have all been signed with the same root certificate, showing that HTTPS security for at least Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari for Windows, on all of these Lenovo laptops, is now broken,” EFF said. Lenovo said it won’t use the software again.
Lenovo shipped tablets that included Superfish software between September and December, but the software has been disabled since January, Lenovo said in a news release Thursday. Superfish lets consumers view more advertisements, but some privacy advocates consider the software a security threat. Superfish “tampers with Windows' cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user's browsing,” an Electronic Frontier Foundation blog post said Thursday. “This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don't want implemented in the most insecure possible way,” it said. “Superfish technology is purely based on contextual/image and not behavioral. It does not profile nor monitor user behavior,” Lenovo said. “It does not record user information. It does not know who the user is. Users are not tracked nor re-targeted. Every session is independent.” Lenovo said it won’t use the software again.
More than 400 million phablets will ship in 2019, up from 138 million forecast for this year, a Juniper Research report said. While the early success of the iPhone 6 has driven the category since its fall debut, budget phablets with 5.5- to 6.9-inch screens are expected to push the category into the mainstream market, the researcher said in a Wednesday news release. With smartphone screen sizes trending larger, many flagship smartphones are likely to be phablets by default within two to three years as consumers increasingly use smartphones for media consumption and gaming that benefit from the larger screens, Juniper said. The trend will have an impact on smaller-screen tablets that are closer to phablets in size and could affect sales of larger tablets, too, if consumers shun the larger, more expensive models, it said. The trend is likely to slow tablet adoption in markets where consumers already do most computing on smartphones, such as China, Juniper said. Stakeholders are likely to feel less of an impact from a shift away from tablets as the same chips are now powering the gamut of mobile devices ranging from smartphones to laptops, analyst James Moar said. "Hardware capabilities are blurring,” Moar said, adding that cellular-connected tablets, phablets and smartphones are all now including console-level graphics and sound systems. “This shifts device design parameters to budgets and use cases, rather than technological features." Among the report’s findings: Chinese vendors hoping to expand tablet and phablet offerings globally are likely to see slower growth due to “low-key marketing strategies” and online-only distribution. Juniper forecasts growing use of phablets at work, spurred by vendors offering productivity software standard with some devices.
Though there are no "tablets of stone" in today’s marketplace, big tablets are apt to be "far more breakable than smaller ones," SquareTrade, the global supplier of insurance protection plans for tech devices, said in a report Wednesday. SquareTrade subjected 10 of the most popular tablets on the market to a series of "drop and dunk" tests, and declared the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 the winner for robustness. On a 1-10 scale, with the highest values reflecting the highest risk of breakability, the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 scored a 3.3, while the most fragile of the lot, the Tmax 9 HD, scored an 8.2, the company said. "Overall, compact tablets performed above expectations, faring better in drop and dunk tests than larger models like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 or Tmax 9 HD." Moreover, "larger tablets proved to be far more breakable than smaller ones, as well as the least water resistant," it said.
Despite efforts to entice consumers with $50 and $100 discounts on the 7- and 10-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook tablets before Black Friday, early holiday season sales results “weren’t quite up to our expectations,” said Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby on an earnings call last week. But the companies aren’t pushing “a red alert” button “because we have the whole holiday, Christmas” and “just about” all of December left, Huseby said. Propping up the Nook brand with a Samsung Galaxy tablet at its core didn’t help Barnes & Noble’s troubled Nook segment in fiscal Q2, the first full quarter that the Nook-branded Samsung tablet was available for sale, but the company plans to continue selling the devices, Huseby said. Sales for Nook hardware, content and accessories tumbled 41 percent year over year, the company said. Nook device and accessories sales plummeted 64 percent to $19 million on lower sales volume, while digital content fell 21 percent to $45 million, the company said. The results surprised some analysts who had predicted the Samsung hardware would shore up sales of the struggling Nook brand. Janney Capital Markets had expected the Samsung-built devices to help “spur demand and drive new customer adoption,” but said in a research note that the Nook Galaxy tablets are “not performing as well as originally expected.” On the earnings call, Huseby cited “a lower demand for tablet devices in general” due to market saturation but believes the Nook tablets are priced “right.” Huseby expressed support for Samsung as its partner, calling the Galaxy Tab 4s “great devices” and said Barnes & Noble has no plans to discontinue Galaxy Nook tablet sales. “It's important that we can offer an e-reading experience” in a color tablet, in addition to its GlowLight e-reader, Huseby said. He said Barnes & Noble and Microsoft agreed to end their partnership in Nook Media.
Retailers continued to nibble away at iPad pricing this week, coming in $10-$20 below prices of models at the Apple store, we found in a scan of websites. B&H Photo showed a 16 GB iPad mini with Retina display for $289 Wednesday, $10 off the Apple price. The original 16 GB iPad mini with standard display was available for $219 at Walmart on Wednesday -- $30 off Apple’s price -- after being a 1-Hour Guarantee item on Thanksgiving night at Walmart for $199 with a $30 gift card. Re-commerce site Gazelle offered customers Wednesday an extra $20 for an iPad trade-in. Trade-in price for a 16 GB iPad mini in “good” condition was $90, while an iPad mini with Retina display had a trade-in price of $125.
Apple and Samsung combined for a 62 percent share of the nearly 36 million branded tablets shipped in 3Q, ABI Research said Wednesday in a report. Apple shipped 12.3 million iPads in Q3, 7.5 percent fewer than it shipped in Q2 and 12.8 percent fewer than in Q3 a year earlier, the report said, but Apple is expected to incur a jump in shipments for Q4 because its next-generation iPad Air and iPad mini models started shipping in October. "The pieces have been set for the end-of-year holiday 2014 tablet market chess match," said ABI. "The advanced mature markets will once again be where the Apple vs. Samsung duel occurs, while eyes are on Lenovo in the developing markets." While the 3 million tablets Lenovo shipped Q3 put it in third place with an 8.4 percent share, behind market leaders Apple (34.3 percent) and Samsung (27.5 percent), Lenovo’s star is clearly rising, the report said. Its Q3 shipments were 30.4 percent higher than in Q2, and also 30.4 percent higher than in Q3 a year earlier, said the industry research firm.
The Washington Post announced a tablet app exclusively for Amazon Kindle Fire customers, including unlimited free access to content for six months. After the free period, Kindle Fire owners can get six additional months of access for $1, with the subscription jumping to $3.99 per month at the end of that promotional period, a Post spokeswoman told us Thursday. The app was designed specifically for a national and international readership, said a news release. The app will expand to other platforms in 2015, the spokeswoman said. Similar deals for other devices aren’t currently in place, but the publication is “open to exploring that in the future,” she said. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post last year for $250 million (see 1308070032).
Barnes & Noble is cutting the price of Nook devices Friday-Sunday to jump-start the holiday shopping season, the company said Wednesday in a news release. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook will drop to $149 (from $199) with instant rebates for the 7-inch, and to $249 (from $349) for the 10-inch tablet, Barnes & Noble said. The Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight eReader is getting a $20 permanent shave to $99 beginning Friday, it said. The promotions are part of Barnes & Noble’s Discovery Weekend, during which consumers who visit a Nook Boutique in a Barnes & Noble store Friday-Sunday can enter a contest to win a shopping trip for two to New York, a $1,000 gift card and a meet-and-greet with singer Nick Jonas.
Tablets are adding accessibility features, while e-readers "are becoming even more distinct" from tablets, said Amazon, Kobo and Sony representatives and their lawyer in lobbying the FCC to grant their request for a longer waiver of accessibility rules. E-readers have "become even more specialized for digital reading, featuring a long battery life and decreased size, weight, and complexity," said the Coalition of E-Reader Manufacturers, which represents the three companies. "Tablets are increasing in functionality and continue to add accessibility features." In a recent one-week sample of more than 400,000 e-reader devices, 4.2 percent of users launched the product's browser, and no more than 2.5 percent used it for what might have been advanced communications services, said a filing recounting executives' lobbying of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's office and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau staffers. "It would be arbitrary and capricious for an agency to conclude that an activity (ACS) is a primary or coprimary use of a device" based on such evidence, said the coalition in an ex parte filing posted Tuesday to docket 10-213. Two library groups recently opposed the accessibility waiver that CEA and the Internet Association backed (see 1411120048).