Haier’s GE Appliances tapped Cirrent to simplify Wi-Fi onboarding of products for consumers and for “reliable connectivity” of their smart home products, it said Wednesday. Cirrent software lets consumers set up connected appliances without typing in their home network name or password and ensures products stay connected when network names and passwords change.
There’s “no question” that consumer demand for virtual- and augmented-reality products “has not developed” as fast as experts or Kopin expected, said CEO John Fan on a Q4 call Tuesday. Kopin, which supplies consumer AR and VR headsets and head-mounted displays for the U.S. military, expects the startup soon of BOE’s new "state-of-the-art" flexible-OLED fab in Chongqing, China, he said. With it will come “a substantial increase in the supply of low-cost displays,” which will be a “necessity” to “help stimulate” wide consumer adoption of AR and VR goods, he said. BOE has “teams of engineers that can turn a factory on very quickly,” said Fan. The building is finished and the fab equipment is installed, he said. BOE is doing test runs before making the plant operational, he said. With the market infusion of low-cost OLED displays that will result, “the world of AR/VR will be different” by 2019's second half, when Kopin expects to deliver such consumer headsets fashioned from the BOE materials, he said. “Everybody will be very surprised.”
Motorola pushed three-day battery life Monday in its upcoming moto g7 power smartphone ($249), due to be available for presale Friday at Best Buy, B&H Photo and Motorola.com and in stores March 22 on Amazon.com. The moto g7 play ($199) will preorder on March 29, with release on April 5, it said, and claims a faster processor, 5.7-inch HD+ display and 13-megapixel rear camera. The moto g7, released earlier this month, is available at Best Buy, B&H Photo and Walmart for $299.
Samsung’s Galaxy S10 smartphone family trio hit Best Buy Friday with up to $650 back in enticements (up to $550 with trade-in, plus activation savings of $50 for Verizon, $100 for Sprint) or a buy-one-get-one offer with qualified activation, said the website. Verizon and Sprint offered a free Galaxy S10e (or $750 credit toward the S10 or S10+) with the purchase of any of the new S10 series phones; AT&T’s version of the BOGO deal tossed in a S10+ (or $1,000). Free extras include an AKG-tuned headset, USB-C and micro-USB connectors, screen protector and three months of SiriusXM Premier streaming. YouTube said Friday its Premium service will be offered free for four months with Galaxy Fold and Galaxy Tab S5e devices when those phones are available. Other Samsung Galaxy owners who activate a device through Feb. 29 can try YouTube Premium free for two months, it said.
Allstate joined the Intelligent Car Coalition (ICC), a group chartered to create a safe, efficient transportation system with autonomous and other advanced technologies. The change in the personal transportation system is the “single biggest opportunity to create economic wealth for everybody in America,” said the insurer, noting it relies on technologies including advanced data, sensors, infrastructure, automation and connectivity. Allstate’s “expertise in policy conversations" will help shape solutions to make the intelligent vehicle ecosystem "more beneficial for society,” said ICC Executive Director Catherine McCullough.
Tablet shipments, increasingly concentrated in holiday quarters, will have a negative 4.4 percent compound annual growth rate to 95.6 million units globally by 2023, down from 114.7 million this year, IDC said Thursday. Despite growth in the commercial segment last year, traditional PCs had declines overall and are forecast to slip 0.4 percent from 254.4 million this year to 250.5 million over the period. Detachable shipments are expected to grow 4.6 percent to 26.5 million, up from 22.1 million this year, as vendors turn attention to enterprise and education markets. Chrome-based devices, focused on education to date, will likely gain traction in the enterprise as more detachable models enter the market. Traditional PCs will continue along a “tough landscape” with falling desktop demand offset by emerging notebook opportunities, said IDC. Gaming PCs, seeing building momentum in 2018, will face some short-term challenges as the market works through older graphics processor inventory, it said.
Two Apple inventors devised a solution for protecting the "cavity" in a smartphone's input/output port against water and debris by coating the device's housing with “electrically conductive” film, said a patent application (2019/0069848) published Thursday at the Patent and Trademark Office. The deposited film can provide a robust “pathway” leading into and out of the housing, said the application, filed in September. The pathway “can be configured to relay sensor readings and/or power between the inside and outside of the housing," especially if it's fashioned from materials that are “unlikely to bend or deform,” it said. Housings made from glass, sapphire or ceramic substrates are more likely to hold their shape than aluminum, plus they “also have the advantage of being electrically insulating, thereby allowing the electrically conductive pathways to be deposited” directly on the substrates, it said. The film coating ideally should have a thickness between 0.5 and 10 microns, but the thickness can be “adjusted” up or down, depending how much electrical current is needed for the deployment, it said. Apple didn’t comment.
Dialog Semiconductor agreed to buy Silicon Motion Technology’s FCI mobile communications product line for $45 million cash, it said Thursday. The FCI product range -- including SoC technology for mobile TV, smartphones, tablets and portable navigation devices -- is designed for battery-powered IoT devices. Dialog CEO Jalal Bagherli called ultra-low-power Wi-Fi a “strong strategic fit," giving it the opportunity to combine Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low-energy chips for IoT, consumer and automotive markets. Dialog has shipped more than 250 million Bluetooth low-energy SoCs for IoT applications, and ultra-low-power Wi-Fi positions the company to drive integration with “optimized combo solutions,” it said. Silicon Motion’s mobile communications unit reported about $30 million revenue last year. The deal is expected to close this year and is subject to regulatory approval.
Smart TVs continued to rise in popularity last year, IHS Markit reported Thursday. Smart TVs that support Ultra HD through streaming services rose in volume shipped. More than three-quarters of 221 million TV sets shipped globally in Q4 had internet connectivity. That includes more than 85 percent in North America, 10 points above Q4 2017, the researcher said.
Cloud-based telecom company Ooma is looking toward subscription services to drive residential and commercial revenue growth, said Chief Financial Officer Ravi Narula on a Q4 earnings call Tuesday. Revenue for the quarter ended Jan. 31 was up 15 percent year on year to $34.7 million, 89 percent from subscriptions and services. Product revenue, which recently hovered around $12 million-$13 million, is expected to be flat from FY 2019 to 2020, while the company eyes near-term subscription revenue growth from business and residential. CEO Eric Stang said development plans are shifting to new premium services the company can enable through its office platform, and its partnership with Sprint, announced at CES, for a 4G wireless home phone that doesn’t require an internet connection will play a bigger role in the broader company portfolio over time. The company is expanding its Telo residential phone service into home security, and its $149 indoor/outdoor Smart Cam, launched at CES, has had a good "take rate" with additional services on Amazon, said Stang: “We always like it to be higher, but it's gotten off to a good start." Shares closed down 0.1 percent to $16.04.