AEye is working with Nvidia to bring adaptive sensing to Nvidia’s Drive autonomous vehicle platform, it said Friday. AEye’s iDAR keeps transmit and receive channels separate, enabling parallel processing and deterministic AI to be introduced into the sensing process at the point of object acquisition and detection, it said. The company's software developer kit and visualizer will allow developers to configure the sensor and view data sets on the platform, it said.
IPhone 12 models were 63% of Q2 U.S. iPhone sales, while customers traded in fewer older phones, reported Consumer Intelligence Research Partners Thursday. A survey of 500 Apple customers who bought an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch April-June showed the share of trade-in phones 3 years old or more decreased for the first time “in many quarters,” said the research firm. “Increased consumer spending correlated with consumers shifting to more expensive iPhone models as they retired older phones,” said analyst Mike Levin. Consumers shopped more at Apple’s retail locations for iPhones, with 27% of iPhones bought through Apple retail, a high, vs. 16% in Q2 2020, Levin said. Two-thirds of iPhone buyers bought their phones through a carrier, vs. 77% in Q1, with 2% at Best Buy and 5% elsewhere. In the 12 months ended June, 37% of buyers had their previous phone for two years or less; 30% for three-plus years.
On Semiconductor’s image-sensing and lidar technologies are part of AutoX’s RoboTaxi Gen5 self-driving platform, the chipmaker told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference Thursday. On’s AR0820AT eight-megapixel image sensor enables high-resolution camera fusion with other sensors, important in dense urban scenarios where a wide field of view is needed to capture objects on sidewalks or cross traffic, said AutoX CEO Jianxiong Xiao. Twenty-eight AR0820AT chips extend the sensing distance to beyond 300 meters, enabling autonomy at freeway speeds, Xiao said. Four On lidar sensors give RoboTaxi a full surround view, said the company.
Combined laptop and tablet revenue grew 25% globally in 2020 and will rise another 17% in 2021, reported Strategy Analytics Wednesday. It’s forecasting sustained demand in mobile computing because hybrid work environments “will become more prevalent” than pre-pandemic. “Many employees report tangible benefits from remote work and are increasingly demanding more flexible work environments,” said SA. Supply chain issues and wider vaccine distribution will “tamp down supply and demand by the beginning of 2022,” but household ownership will continue growing through 2025, it said. “Smartphones have become larger and more essential to daily life, but we found out the hard way that real productivity still happens on Notebooks and Detachables,” said analyst Eric Smith.
Ring’s end-to-end encryption feature is out of technical preview and available to customers with eligible devices worldwide, blogged Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth Tuesday. Ring is the first major home security provider to offer end-to-end encryption, Roth said, saying the opt-in feature offers an added layer of security to videos. The company is adding support for authenticator apps for two-step verification. Customers can choose a compatible authenticator app, in addition to existing methods like SMS, as their second method of verification when logging into their Ring accounts. The company is also rolling out Captcha in the Ring and Neighbors apps to safeguard customer account information and help prevent automated login attempts from bad actors, Roth said. In coming weeks, Ring will launch an automated self-service process to allow customers to securely transfer ownership of used Ring devices without having to call customer service. The new device owner scans the device during setup, then follows instructions on the Ring app, which alerts the original owner to remove the account from her app, said Roth.
The worldwide surge in PC demand persisted in Q2, despite global semiconductor shortages and supply chain logistics issues, reported IDC Monday. Global shipments of “traditional” PCs, including desktops, notebooks and workstations, reached 83.6 million units in Q2, up 13.2% from 2020's second quarter, it said. Though annual growth remains “quite high,” the market is beginning to show signs that the torrid demand “has begun to taper off,” said analyst Neha Mahajan. The 13% growth rate in Q2 was “far lower” than the 55.9% increase in Q1 and the 25.8% growth in Q4, she said: "With businesses opening back up, demand potential in the commercial segment appears promising. However, there are also early indicators of consumer demand slowing down as people shift spending priorities after nearly a year of aggressive PC buying." Lenovo leapfrogged HP to take top global share in Q2, albeit by a slim 1.7-point margin, said IDC. Dell Technologies was third and Apple and Acer tied for fourth. Though the top 5 brands had 77.5% of combined global share, “smaller vendors have helped drive growth by offering unique features or niche designs," said IDC.
Vizio will release Q2 financial results Aug. 4 after the markets close, its second quarterly report since going public March 25 (see 2103250029), said the vendor Thursday. The once-reclusive Vizio made appearances at four investor conferences in May and June to trumpet its transition from a legacy device company toward an ad-monetization business based on its SmartCast connected TV platform. Yet Vizio drew nearly 90% of its Q1 revenue from device sales. The company reported a 28% year-over-year Q1 increase in smart TV shipments to 1.5 million sets, but it said volume would have been higher if not for bottlenecks at California ports that impeded product from reaching distribution hubs (see 2105120064). Investors will be watching to see if port delays began easing in Q2 as Vizio predicted they would. The challenge for retailers and supply chains “is keeping shelves stocked as port congestion and other supply chain disruptions continue to impact the industry and the economy more broadly,” reported the National Retail Federation Thursday (see 2107080047).
Sonde Health technology will be offered as part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 and 778G 5G mobile platforms, bringing vocal biomarker capability to mobile and IoT, said the company Thursday. The technology uses audio signal processing and machine learning to identify changes in the human voice that may indicate a health condition. With a six-second voice sample, the Sonde product can detect symptoms of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and it can be used as an early warning system for COVID-19, said the company. Sonde CEO David Liu gave examples of a car detecting whether a driver is impaired, a home hub that can detect the onset of depression or a phone making continuous asthma assessments. Because the capability is native to the device, users opt in to allow voice processing to occur on the phone, eliminating the need to send health data to the cloud and enabling faster results, said the company.
Urbanista bowed true wireless earphones for gamers Wednesday. The Seoul earphones ($89.90) are compatible with iOS, Android and Windows devices and have a low-latency rating of 70 milliseconds, the company emailed. Play time on a charge is given as eight hours; the Qi-compatible wireless charging case gives three additional charges, said the company. They can be voice-controlled by Apple Siri and Google Assistant.
Sony began taking preorders for a neckband speaker inspired by work-at-home trends. The SRS-NB10 wireless speaker is designed to rest on the shoulders with an open-ear design for “all-day wearing,” said Sony Tuesday. The NB10 is designed so users can hear virtual meetings and phone calls clearly, without disturbing others in the room, the company said. The $149 speaker is due to ship in September.