Microsoft’s “most strategic objective” is to build “developer momentum” behind Windows 10, and that’s what the company is focusing on “with a lot of different actions,” CEO Satya Nadella said on an earnings call. Microsoft plans to release Windows 10 later this year as a free upgrade for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users who act to redeem the offer in the first year, Microsoft has said. Its goal with Windows 10 is to create a “great opportunity for every developer” to write these “universal” applications that will run on the desktop as well as on Microsoft phones and tablets, Nadella said Monday. With Windows 10, “we're building a device platform for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” Nadella said. “It's a world where the mobility of a person's experience is paramount, requiring a platform that spans devices from small screens to large screens, to no screens at all. It's a world where interacting with technologies is as natural as interacting with other people and it's a world that demands trust and security." For developers, Windows 10 “will be the most attractive windows development platform ever,” Nadella said. “We ... have made this our most collaborative project yet with more than 2 million insiders giving us feedback every day.” Microsoft also is “making progress with our own devices,” Nadella said. For Q2 through Dec. 31, Microsoft surpassed the $1 billion revenue mark with its Surface tablets for the first time, he said. For Microsoft Surface, “the value proposition of being the most productive tablet is resonating,” he said. But the company's stock closed down 9.3 percent to $42.66 Tuesday. Microsoft sales of Lumia phones topped 10 million units in Q2 and are up 30 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier, Nadella said. Sales were particularly strong of Lumia 500 and 600 series “affordable smartphones,” he said. “In this segment of the market, the combination of our brand and value stand out and we plan to continue to build a beachhead here.”
A sneak preview of T-Mobile’s Super Bowl ad, a spoof PSA featuring Kim Kardashian, is now online. “Each month millions of gigs of unused data are taken back by wireless companies. Tragic,” Kardashian intones, as she takes a series of selfies. “Data you paid for that could be used to see my makeup, my backhand, my outfits, my vacations and my outfits. Sadly, all lost. Please, help save the data.” A 30-second ad like the one from T-Mobile costs an estimated $4.5 million, according to news reports.
CEA’s monthly index of consumer technology expectations jumped 0.3 points in January from December to reach 88.9, CEA said Tuesday in a report. The January index, which is a measure of consumer intentions on tech spending, is 5.2 points higher than in January 2014 and suggests “momentum from the holiday season is spilling into the new year,” CEA said. The association's separate index of consumer expectations, which measures consumer expectations about the “broader economy,” however, fell 2.2 points from December to 177.9, CEA said. But the January index is 10.6 points higher than that of January 2014, it said.
Sonos applied fixes to its software in an update that corrects problems caused by a new app launch last spring, the company said Tuesday in a blog post. Android users could try a beta version of the new software in update 5.3 beginning Tuesday, and a full fix will be available for Android and iOS users in the coming months, the company said. The update addresses changes to the software last spring that “made some things worse,” said the post, including a change that made it more difficult to move music between rooms and the removal of features from the previous app such as a track progression bar. The new software also didn’t make good use of a tablet's screen size in the tablet app, Sonos said. Tuesday’s update, “intended to make things better,” offers a faster way to manage the Sonos rooms in a home with a more accessible rooms menu that’s available to users by tapping the top of any screen in the Sonos app, the company said. The new tablet app has dedicated screens for what’s playing and music discovery on iOS and Android tablets that make toggling between screens “more intuitive,” it said. Using a swipe down motion in the new software, users can quickly switch between screens on their phones and then swipe left to right to show music sources, Sonos said. A cross-fade feature allows users to blend tracks within the info menu, it said, and the track progression bar is back on the now-playing screen allowing users to access a particular point in a song with a drag motion.
Cablevision is launching an all Wi-Fi phone service with unlimited data, talk and text, the company said in a news release Monday. Called Freewheel, it’s the “first all-WiFi service to be introduced by a cable provider,” the operator said. Freewheel will use a Motorola Moto G smartphone that will work “exclusively” over Wi-Fi, and customers will have “automatic access” to Cablevision’s 1.1 million hot spot Wi-Fi network, it said. The service will be available starting in February, and cost $29.95 a month. The Moto G phone will cost Freewheel customers $99.95, and Cablevision Optimum Online customers will be able to get the Freewheel service for $9.95 monthly. Limited to Wi-Fi, the Freewheel service is unlikely to generate much revenue for Cablevision, said MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett in an email to investors. “The best Cablevision might hope for is to monetize the company’s WiFi footprint, even if only to a small degree, by lowering churn,” Moffett said. “Cablevision’s real game is almost certainly to use the new Freewheel service as a beta test for what will eventually be a WiFi-first, rather than WiFi-only, service.”
Despite “saturation” in many well-developed Western European markets, unit smartphone shipments in Europe overall climbed nearly 14 percent last year to 200 million handsets, Futuresource Consulting said Monday in a report. The European tablet market also continues to grow, “but major markets have reached saturation point earlier than the industry expected,” Futuresource said. Although percentage growth in tablets equaled that of smartphones in 2014, growth in Western Europe “will slow further in 2015, with consumer shipments moving into decline by 2017,” it said. "We're seeing a smartphone growth bubble in Eastern Europe, perpetuated by the low level of ownership in many of its countries," the company said. "It's not all good news, as we expect growth to slow in 2015 as Russia -- the largest market in the region by some distance -- faces increasing economic uncertainty.” Across Europe, the Samsung and Apple “duopoly remains solid,” albeit with some market share being lost to Microsoft following its acquisition of Nokia’s devices business, the firm said. “This decline in smartphone prices was somewhat offset by a persistent shift towards higher-priced smartphones,” resulting in an overall increase in mobile handset average selling prices, it said. As for tablets, Apple and Samsung represented more than half of total units shipped in Europe last year, it said.
Forty percent of U.S. Internet homes will have a streaming media player by Q1 2017, said an NPD report Monday. Some 16 percent of U.S. Internet homes had a streaming media player in Q1 2014, and that percentage is expected to grow to 24 percent this quarter, NPD said. While early on, Apple and Roku players drove the streaming media player market, Amazon and Google have made a significant impact over the past 18 months, NPD said. Factoring in connected TVs, Blu-ray players and video game consoles, the total projected count for devices delivering apps to TVs will reach 211 million by Q1 2017, it said. On the content provider side, the top five video apps used by streaming media player owners were Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus and HBO Go, said NPD. Amazon had the highest increase of the five, growing from 15 percent viewership to 23 percent from Q4 2013 to Q4 2014, it said. “Over the coming years we will continue to see a growing audience of TV viewers for streaming video services, authenticated network apps, and offerings such as CBS All Access that no longer require a pay TV subscription from a cable or satellite provider,” said John Buffone, executive director, NPD Connected Intelligence. The report was based on a survey conducted in Q4 with more than 5,000 U.S. consumers aged 18 years or older.
The established multichannel video programming distributor ecosystem is “most certainly going to lose a meaningful number of existing subscribers -- the only question is how many millions and how fast?” said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield in a research note Monday, after a weeklong review of Sling TV service. “After playing with Sling TV, it is hard not to love the ease-of-use, similar user interface across devices and quality of the experience,” Greenfield said of the $20-per-month plan that offers content from Disney (including ESPN), along with Turner, Scripps and A&E in the future. BTIG “remains confident that free, over-the-air broadcast television networks will not be part of the base Sling TV package,” Greenfield said, saying a “subset of broadcast stations may end up being offered as a premium add-on to Sling.” Among Greenfield’s highlighted callouts: Sling TV's linear channel navigation capability, which offers extra kids’ and news/info packages available as add-ons to the basic service. He said he was able to watch the Australian Open on Sling TV’s iPad version while simultaneously browsing channels. He cited free video-on-demand, which enables users to watch shows that already have started airing or aired earlier in the day. Transactional movies-on-demand allows users to rent movies in SD or HD for a 24-hour viewing period, which includes being able to start a movie on one device and finish on another that’s part of a universal watchlist. Users can pause, rewind and fast forward linear content on some channels, he said. He also said the quality of the video stream fluctuated, at one time delivering at a 3.7 Mbps bitrate and at another time a 4.7 Mbps data stream. On bandwidth consumption, Greenfield said a Sling TV subscriber who watches the industry average of five hours of streamed TV per day at a 4.7 Mbps bitrate would consume 320 GB of data per month. Streaming two hours per day at 3.7 Mbps would eat 100 GB per month, he said. A “significant portion of Sling TV subscribers" will pair their subscription with some combination of Amazon, Hulu and Netflix streaming, he said, resulting in monthly data consumption that will be “quite significant.”
The challenges the smart home market faces as it moves from the protected environment of the manufacturer's beta test bed to the harsh realities of the mainstream market were highlighted in a recent blog post by NPD connected technology analyst Eddie Hold. Hold, who lives in a 1910 home in suburban Nyack, New York, described his experience testing a Bluetooth-controlled smart lock as part of an effort to live with connected technology. Hold installed the do-it-yourself lock and found it wasn’t up to the rigorous real-world test lab of a 12-degree New York day. The “frigid weather was too much for the lock to handle,” he said speculating that the cold sapped the lock's battery life or the motor inside had frozen. Hold turned to his smartphone for a fix, but “it’s not that smart and couldn’t help me out,” he said. The smartphone was supposed to automatically initiate a command for the lock to open as he came within Bluetooth range of the lock, he said in a phone interview. A backup option on the phone app can initiate a manual command by pressing an unlock button, he said. Neither option worked. The lock "was trying but it wasn’t really doing anything,” Hold said. He could hear the motor trying to engage the lock, “so it wasn’t a Bluetooth issue,” he said, saying the "brand-new batteries” likely didn’t have enough juice to move the motor due to the cold weather. Aesthetics will challenge connected technology across the board whether it’s wearables or home automation, said Hold. “It has to bridge that gap between elegance and technology,” he said. It’s one thing to build a smart product that’s functional “but it has to look right for the house just as a wearable has to be something you’d be prepared to wear,” he said. For Hold, his door lock experience underscored that it’s “still early days for the connected home,” he told us. Connected home technology is “an interesting concept, but it has a long way to go before it hits the mainstream market,” he said. Most consumers who had Hold’s experience would likely have been turned off to home automation for a long time after, he said. “It pushes you back a couple of years before you’ll try it again.” The technology market has a history of stutter starts where things don’t always go smoothly out of the gate, Hold said. “That’s OK for the early adopter who goes in with eyes wide open, but for the mass market, don’t tell me my lock is not going to work when I need to get in," he said. "That’s not a beta test that’s going to get better,” he said. “That’s just an epic fail.”
Sprint said it will give T-Mobile customers a “guaranteed minimum” of $200 instantly for current working smartphones when they bring their wireless number to Sprint. Sprint also will continue to match all major U.S. carrier phone trade-in pricing, it said Friday. The offer runs through April 9 and can be combined with a contract buyout in which eligible T-Mobile customers can get up to $350 per line via a prepaid or reward card to cover their installment billing balance on their current phone or early termination fees, Sprint said. The carrier matches AT&T and Verizon pricing via the Sprint Buyback program but without the $200 switchover reward, a Sprint spokeswoman told us.