Aruba Networks, Broadcom Corp. and other technology vendors formed an alliance to meet industry demand for higher ethernet speeds. The companies making up the Multi-Rate Gigabit Ethernet Base-T Alliance, put their support behind efforts at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to bring 2.5G and 5G ethernet speeds to enterprise access points and other systems relying on unshielded twisted-pair cabling, MGBASE-T said Monday in a news release. The specification adopted by the alliance "leverages many of the fundamental technologies in Ethernet standards as defined in the IEEE 802.3 10GBASE-T, enabling faster time to market with minimal research and development efforts for ecosystem vendors," it said.
IDC sees the Windows Phone operating system more than doubling its share of global smartphone shipments to 5.6 percent in 2018, compared with 2.7 percent this year, the research firm said Monday in its worldwide quarterly mobile phone tracker. In terms of global share, the Windows Phone OS will still pale in comparison with Android (its share will decline to 80 percent in 2018 from 82.3 percent this year) and iOS (12.8 percent in 2018 vs. 13.8 percent in 2014), the firm said. It sees the industry shipping nearly 1.3 billion smartphones globally in 2014, an increase of 26.3 percent over 2013, it said. IDC expects 1.4 billion smartphones to be shipped worldwide in 2015, a 12.2 percent year-over-year growth rate, it said. Slower annual growth continues through 2018, when shipments will approach 1.9 billion units, for a 9.8 percent compound annual growth rate for the 2014–2018 forecast period, it said. "Smartphone revenues reflect a starker picture, as they will be hard hit by the increasingly cutthroat nature of pricing," resulting in a 4.2 percent compound annual growth rate over the same forecast period, it said. "The impact of upstart Chinese players in the global market will be reflected in a race to the bottom when it comes to price. While premium phones aren't going anywhere, we are seeing increasingly better specs in more affordable smartphones. Consumers no longer have to go with a top-of-the-line handset to guarantee decent hardware quality or experience. The biggest question now is how much lower can prices go?" IDC pegs the average selling price of smartphones shipped globally this year at $297, but sees ASPs dropping by 19 percent to $241 by 2018, it said: "Emerging markets like India will see much lower smartphone prices, as ASPs hit US$135 in 2014 and fall to US$102 by 2018. In contrast, ASPs in mature markets are not expected to change significantly and modestly higher shipment volumes will not drive up overall revenues as each generation of flagship phones shows less and less differentiation from its predecessors."
As production of smartphones and smart watches that use flexible displays ramps up, the market for flexible displays is forecast to increase almost ninefold next year over 2014, said Charles Annis, DisplaySearch vice president-manufacturing research, Monday in a blog post. "This nearly exponential advance is being enabled by rapid flexible manufacturing capacity growth as both LG Display and Samsung increase capacity on current lines and Samsung begins production at its new flexible-dedicated A3 line." Since late 2013, "a variety of displays fabricated on plastic substrates have come to market" that are "very thin, light, and rugged," and also "enable device design freedom with curved features," he said. "Regardless of the remaining challenges and unknowns about how fast and how far the market will grow in the long run, our outlook remains optimistic." From a "simple applications perspective," any current rigid flat-panel display "could be replaced by thin, light, unbreakable, and even low-cost flexible alternatives," he said. "Also, flexibility may create new applications, some of which we may not have even imagined yet."
Hughes’ latest portable broadband global area network (BGAN) terminal received Inmarsat type approval. The 9211-HDR terminal will operate with Inmarsat’s High Data Rate (HDR) streaming service, Hughes said Monday in a news release. The terminal provides data streaming rates of “an average speed of 650 kbps and speeds as high as 800 kbps” over Inmarsat’s BGAN HDR service, it said. It has multi-user Wi-Fi access and an active external antenna port that enables “future optional connectivity of remote semi-fixed and mobile tracking antennas,” it said.
Best Buy’s possibly worst Black Friday nightmare became reality just before 10 a.m. EST Friday when visitors to BestBuy.com were greeted with the message: "WE'RE SORRY. BestBuy.com is currently unavailable. Check back soon." In a statement emailed to us at 11:11 a.m., spokeswoman Amy von Walter denied the site had crashed under the weight of Black Friday traffic. Instead, "a concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to shut down BestBuy.com in order to take proactive measures to restore full performance," von Walter said. "Our consumers can return to BestBuy.com in the next several hours to take advantage of today’s door busters." BestBuy.com was back up and running again when we checked minutes after receiving the statement. In very light trading volume Friday morning, Best Buy’s stock performance seemed unaffected by the outage, with shares trading 1.8 percent higher just before noon EST. But analysts took Best Buy to task for its untimely outage, many brimming with sarcasm, such as one who reported that "Black Friday isn't the best day for your website to crash." Another said the outage was evidence why Wall Street has long been critical of brick-and-mortar companies that "are still in transition to moving their model online," because "the transition for those formerly doing only in-store to moving to e-commerce is a real caveat that not many people think about." When BestBuy.com returned to action, listed among the doorbuster sellouts were a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 2544 wireless all-in-one printer for $26.99 (normally $79.99) and a SanDisk 128-GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $27.99 (normally $139.99). Still available were a $499.99 Vizio 50-inch LED-backlit 1080p LCD TV with 240 Hz frame rate (normally $699.99) and a $779.99 MacBook Air laptop with 11.6-inch display, 4 GB memory and 128-GB flash storage (normally $899.99).
Retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers reached $17.5 billion for the first 23 days of the 2014 holiday selling season through Nov. 24, 11 percent above the same period a year earlier, comScore said in a Tuesday report. Nov. 21 was the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $914 million in desktop spending, while spending topped $900 million on two other shopping dates, Nov. 12 and Nov. 19, the firm said: "Although current growth rates are trailing slightly the anticipated full season growth rate, it is important to note that this gap should be essentially made up with the extra shopping day between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year compared to last year. In addition, given the recent strength on certain individual spending days it is likely we'll see our first ever billion dollar spending day occur prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, before the heaviest part of the season even kicks off."
IDC said the worldwide tablet market will see a “massive deceleration” in 2014, with growth braking to 7.2 percent, down from 52.5 percent last year. At the core of the slowdown is the expectation that 2014 will be the first full year of decline in Apple iPad shipments, IDC said Tuesday. The slowdown for the iPad along with the overall category isn't "a surprise,” said Ryan Reith, IDC program director, citing stretching tablet life cycles that resemble those of PCs more than smartphones. In the early stages of the tablet market, device life cycles were expected to mirror those of smartphones at two to three years, Reith said, but instead tablet owners are holding on to tablets typically for more than three or four years. The drivers of longer-than-expected tablet life cycles are legacy software support for older products -- especially within iOS -- and the increased use of smartphones for a variety of computing tasks, he said. In addition, shipments of 2-in-1 devices have been modest, despite advancements in the category, and are expected to reach 8.7 million units this year, accounting for just 4 percent of the combined tablet/2-in-1 market, Reith said. IDC attributed sluggishness in 2-in-1 products to “consumer hesitancy around the Windows 8 platform.” There’s “a lot of pressure on tablet prices,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, IDC research director-tablets, noting “an influx of entry-level products" that "serves Android really well.” Tablet makers are trying to offset price pressure by focusing on "larger screens and cellular-enabled tablets,” Bouchard said. Factors that could affect upcoming tablet shipment totals include industry reaction to Windows 10, Google’s moves in the category with Android and Chrome OS and Apple's rumored product line expansion, he said. Android tablet/2-in-1 shipments for 2014 are estimated at 160 million, up 16 percent year-over-year, and will command nearly 68 percent of the market, IDC said. The iPad will account for 65 million shipments, down 13 percent, comprising 28 percent of the market, IDC said. Windows tablets tallied 11 million shipments for just under 5 percent market share, it said.
C Spire introduced rolling data plans it said were aimed at saving customers money and eliminating surprise data overages. Three plans at $40, $55 and $65 a month offer 2 GB, 4 GB and 6 GB of rolling data, unlimited talk, text and photos, "along with automatic data overage protection and optional top-up data passes" on the company's mobile broadband network, C Spire said Wednesday in a news release. Customers can save any unused data for use in the next month, it said. The plans also can be used for device tethering and personal mobile hot spots, C Spire said.
E-readers and e-books continue to be popular with children, and they figure to be "among the hot technology gifts for kids" this holiday selling season. So said the findings of a survey from Digital Book World, an online educational and news platform, and PlayCollective, a research and consulting firm. PlayCollective canvassed families in October and found more than 45 percent of all parents with children between the ages of 2 and 13 plan to buy a new device for their child to read e-books this holiday season, the firms said. Of those parents who already own a device, half are planning to buy a new one this season, up by 4 percentage points from last year, and nearly six of 10 "intend for the device to belong primarily to their child," they said. Although tablets have "reigned for the past two years," the Kindle e-reader is the device parents most intend to buy this year, "perhaps because the growing variety of tablets has splintered the competition," they said. Three-quarters of the parents surveyed plan to buy new e-books for their children this holiday season, up 2 percentage points from last year, they said. Parents plan to spend an average of $26.14 for new e-books, up by $1.03 from last year’s average, they said. "Although parents are spending more on ebooks, they are not necessarily buying more books. Parents' spending habits and holiday budget allow for three books this year, which is the same number as last holiday season."