Rebecca Day

The Internet was buzzing with anticipation for the next-generation iPhones heading into the smartphones’ release Friday. Retailers and carriers last week tried to push their way to the front of consumers’ eyes for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and advertising highlighted the upgraded finishes, led by the wildly popular rose gold along with silver, gray and gold. Engadget noted that the rose gold model had rose gold screws to match. Target is selling 6s and 6s Plus in stores only on the AT&T, Sprint and Verizon networks, it said. Sprint (see 1509240023) and T-Mobile touted consumer-friendly upgrade deals to get customers to swap up their still-valuable iPhone 6 phones. Verizon joined them, announcing its first iPhone upgrade plan that allows customers to get a new phone every year without having to wait for the contract to end. Carriers are competing now with Apple, which offers its own upgrade program promising “a new iPhone every year” starting at $32.41 a month. That could be trouble for companies including eco-ATM and Gazelle, whose business models rely heavily on the iPhone’s trade-in value. CNET focused on the 4K content creation capability of the iPhone 6s models, which it said will lead to a “surge” in user-generated 4K video. “The content that ushers in the age of 4K is likely to come from the stars and aspiring filmmakers on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and from regular folks who shoot their baby's first steps or grandma's 80th birthday,” CNET said. Meanwhile, IHS forecasts a 22 percent jump in iPhone shipments this year versus 2014. “Sales of the iPhone 6S should do better than past iPhone initial sales because of wider country availability early, especially China,” said an IHS email, which forecast Apple will ship 236 million iPhones this year. The key differentiator this year for Apple is 3D Touch, which is “strongly differentiated from every other smartphone maker's phone,” IHS said. 3D Touch will power new apps that are exclusive to the iPhone “because Android smartphones lack the hardware support needed for a pressure sensitive screen,” it said. The pressure will be on Apple next year to continue to drive upgrade sales with a radical new design, IHS said. That will be “a greater challenge than achieving success in 2015,” when Apple was able to capitalize on sales of larger screen phones, it said.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The automotive display market is moving to a multimodal model, experts said at an IHS conference. Drivers will interact with their vehicles' infotainment systems in numerous ways, IHS analyst Brian Rhodes said. Steering wheel controls, proximity/gesture recognition, head-up displays, touchpads, haptic feedback, touchscreens, speech recognition, multifunction controllers and instrument cluster displays will drive the human-machine interface market, he said. Voice control, proximity sensing and touchscreens will continue to grow in usage, although familiar knobs and buttons won’t disappear, said Rhodes, who called basic buttons “still relevant and important” in vehicles. As multimodal interaction grows, it opens up possibilities for differentiation in the user experience, Rhodes said.

The fledgling do-it-yourself smart home market was dealt a blow Tuesday when community invention facilitator Quirky, owner of the Wink platform, announced it had filed a voluntary petition under Chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Quirky took the action to facilitate a sale of “substantially all of its assets,” it said in a news release.

Amazon rolled out streaming media players and tablets for the holidays. The company began taking pre-orders Thursday for the four Fire HD tablets and three Fire TV media streaming players, including Amazon’s first gaming player. The new Amazon Fire TV, 75 percent more powerful than its predecessor, streams 4K Ultra HD movies and is the first media player to include an HEVC encoder, said Amazon. It adds voice control via Amazon’s Alexa, which allows users to find music or TV shows or query for information such as weather and traffic, it said. The player has add-on storage capability up to 128 GB with a microSD card slot. Amazon said it has access to more 4K Ultra HD movies than any other streaming media player, with 4K content from Netflix, Amazon Video and Prime Video. Fire OS 5 will debut in the new tablet lineup, offering a overhauled user interface, “deep integration” with Amazon services and a multitude of upgraded features, said Amazon.

AT&T Digital Life’s expansion into the multidwelling unit (MDU) market was a natural extension of the smart home platform due to the platform's flexibility and the “fairly reasonable size” of the MDU population, Digital Life President Kevin Petersen told us Thursday. The company rolled out Digital Life to apartment and condo owners this week, after successful trials this summer in Atlanta, Dallas and several markets in the Northeast, said Petersen.

Smartphone makers are focusing on price, as the average size and number of features in the devices has been increasing, said Andrew Rassweiler, IHS senior director-cost benchmarking services, during a session in Santa Clara, California, at the company's conference. “As you reach the limits of what you can do on some of these features, they begin to become less relevant to the consumer,” Rassweiler said Monday, and that turns the focus to price with “hundred dollar BOM [bill of materials] and the $50 Android One.” In its effort to challenge the iPhone, Samsung has continued to build more technology into its Galaxy smartphones at a higher cost, while Apple costs have remained relatively stable, Rassweiler said.

Apple’s watchOS will have 47 percent of the smart wristwear market by 2019, an IDC wearables report said. Smart wristwear shipments are forecast to grow from 24 million units globally this year to 85 million units by 2019, IDC said. A proliferation of devices, expanded experiences and a range of price points will lift overall consumer demand for wearables to 173 million worldwide by 2019, IDC said Monday. In 2015, total wearables shipments are forecast to reach 76 million units, up 163 percent from last year, it said. Smart wearables are roughly a third of the total wearables market, compared with basic wearables, led by fitness trackers, which are the rest, analyst Jitesh Ubrani said. Smart wearables are projected to surpass basic wearables in 2018 due to advancements in user interfaces and features, he said. Smart wristwear -- including watches and bands capable of running third-party apps -- are driving the smart wearables category, led by Apple Watch, the Motorola Moto 360, Samsung’s Gear S devices and the Pebble Time, the industry research firm said. More vendors are entering the space, “setting the stage for more selection and ultimately more volumes,” Ramon Llamas, research manager, said.

Apple’s introduction of what some followers saw as me-too technologies drew comments Wednesday as the Twittersphere weighed in in real time about the latest news about the iPad, Apple TV and iPhone.

Among products Harman unveiled for cars is an in-vehicle portable communication and entertainment system that allows users to make hands-free phone calls, listen to music and hear navigation voice prompts, the company's JBL brand said Thursday. Trip is the first of a new line of car accessories from JBL addressing demand for additional audio capabilities to manage different content types, the company said. Trip, designed to clip to a car visor, has built-in noise cancellation to facilitate voice control. Via Bluetooth, drivers can hear navigation prompts from a smartphone and advanced driver assistance system alerts from iOnRoad, and listen to music and have hands-free conversations, JBL said. It said voice control works with Apple's Siri or Google Speech.

DirecTV subscribers with LG webOS smart TVs will have access to streaming 4K and HD content without a dedicated set-top box in LG TVs that are DirecTV Ready, LG said. The models are the first LG TVs certified for the RVU Alliance based on its testing criteria, said an LG spokeswoman. On whether the company will make the free webOS firmware upgrades standard policy, she said “it’s certainly something that we’re evaluating" and the company is pleased with the response it has received from consumers. Among the performance improvements in the webOS update, LG added a My Channels section that allows users to customize their favorite live TV or set-top box channels on the launch bar for quick access. Improved quick settings are said to minimize distraction from content as vertical buttons on the right side of the screen are activated when the Magic Remote cursor passes over them, the company said Tuesday. Input selection is a Quick Menu option in the updated software, giving faster access to more inputs, it said. LG’s webOS update also includes additional streaming content apps from iHeartRadio and Rdio, the company said. Some of its Ultra HD TVs are recommended by Netflix.