Rebecca Day

While Apple’s strong Q1 sales were largely driven by smartphone growth in China (see 1504280034), China’s overall year-on-year market growth in the quarter “flattened significantly," said Melissa Chau, senior research manager at International Data Corp (IDC). Apple and Samsung will continue for the rest of the year to battle it out at the high end of the smartphone market with their 6 series smartphones, but all vendors will be “squeezed on falling ASPs" (average selling prices), she said. Apple’s challenge for the No. 1 smartphone spot in Q4 “returned to a clear lead for Samsung in Q1," said Anthony Scarsella, IDC research manager.

Those waiting for an update on Apple’s HomeKit efforts were disappointed as Apple’s smart home plans were one of the few topics CEO Tim Cook didn’t touch on in the fiscal Q2 earnings call Monday. Noting the expansion of the Apple ecosystem, Cook cited “great momentum” with Apple Pay and with health-related technology. More than 50 hospitals in the U.S. will include Apple Pay this year for co-pays and bill payments at registration and check-in, he said.

On April 19, 1965, three years before co-founding Intel, Gordon Moore put forward what became Moore’s Law, predicting that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double roughly every 24 months. In recognition of the 50-year anniversary of Moore’s Law, Intel Product Evangelist Ryan Tabrah said in a blog post that Moore’s projection became a layman’s explanation of the "exponential" introduction of new devices and technology over the past 50 years. Putting Moore’s comment into historical perspective, Tabrah noted that at the time the computer mouse was still a prototype; DRAM hadn’t yet been invented; development of Arpanet, forerunner to the Internet, hadn’t begun and no one had received a Ph.D. in computer science. Moore said the theory wasn’t about technical hurdles but about the associated economics, and Tabrah reminded engineers and developers that economics should inform the way the industry views the IoT market and “the eventuality of technology.” Competition, advancements in technology, and scale will automatically provide more affordable and smaller computing devices, he said. Those devices will continue to become less about “nice to have” and “more of a vehicle, forcefully driving human advancement and raising the standard of living for everyone on earth,” Tabrah said. Recalling the anniversary of Moore’s Law, Tabrah urged tech society “to think about how we use these economies of scale.” With the much-anticipated Apple Watch on pre-sale, Tabrah referred to “everyday technology enthusiasts struggling to get the latest digital watch that costs more than most people in the world make in a week.” He urged enthusiasts to “take some time to pause and think about the rest of the world: how are most going to get clean water tomorrow, or survive tomorrow’s traffic as millions of people stress overloaded transportation infrastructures.” He said we should all try together to “create and extend computing technology to connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth,” which he called the “truly amazing legacy of Moore’s law.”

Major product launches with a “clear commitment to wireless charging” will make 2015 “a breakthrough year" for the wireless power industry, said David Green, research manager, IHS technology. Wireless power receiver and transmitter shipments will more than double to 120 million units this year, from 55 million in 2014, said IHS research released Tuesday. The Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge will help drive revenue to more than $1.7 billion this year, said IHS. It said the Apple Watch will help spur growth of wireless power receivers for wearable technology to more than 20 million units this year. To avoid initial negative customer experiences, said Green, the wireless charging industry will need a stronger focus on interoperability among the standards from the Alliance for Wireless Power (Rezence), Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and Wireless Power Consortium (Qi), even accounting for the combination of A4WP and the PMA announced earlier this year (see 1501060013). Consumers “do not care which technology or standard their device uses; they just want it to work well,” Green said. Multimode wireless charging receivers supporting more than one technology will comprise 30 percent of the market by 2018, said Green. MediaTek announced in early March it was the first semiconductor company to mass-produce multimode wireless charging chipsets supporting PMA, Qi and Rezence standards. IHS forecasts industry revenue will grow by nearly $15 billion a year through 2024. But 63 percent of consumers weren’t aware of wireless charging in IHS consumer surveys conducted last year. New products in 2015 should help raise awareness and drive demand, said Green.

Connected home platform supplier iControl Networks -- which powers security and home automation services offered by ADT Pulse, Bell Aliant, Comcast Xfinity, Cox Homelife, Time Warner Cable IntelligentHome and others -- is courting security dealers with its new iControl One home automation platform. On a webcast presented last week by Parks Associates, iControl Vice President-Marketing Greg Roberts encouraged dealers to use the sunsetting of the 2G mobile network -- due in 2016 -- as a means to upsell existing customers to interactive services and home automation. Some 4 million to 5 million security panels in the U.S. are equipped with 2G radios, Roberts said. Regardless of whether the 2G cutoff occurs on schedule, those customers still “need to be upgraded,” he said. The platform includes a Web portal, apps for iOS and Android devices and iControl’s 3D user interface that allows users to control each smart device in their homes by touch screen, he said. To broaden the appeal of smart home features, iControl added Z-Wave and Wi-Fi radios to the 3G radio at a cost that’s below that of stand-alone radios, Roberts said. Connectivity from the panel to the router is over Wi-Fi, and when the system is activated, Wi-Fi and broadband will be the primary communications links out of the home, he said.

Carriers disclosed pre-order and pricing plans Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge smartphones that launched at Mobile World Congress earlier this month. Sprint said the 32 GB S 6 will be available free as part of an $80 monthly lease plan over 24 months that includes unlimited talk, text and data on the Sprint network; international value roaming in Telefonica countries; and annual upgrades. Sprint will continue its promotion offering to pay all of customers' costs to switch to Sprint from another carrier, including the contract and whatever is owed on the device. Price for the Galaxy S 6 edge with a 24-month lease is $5 monthly after a $20 per month lease credit, Sprint said, and the monthly charge paired with the Sprint Unlimited Plus Plan is $85 per month. Sprint's Boost Mobile unit will offer the S 6 (32 GB) in black for $649 as a no-contract purchase option, the carrier said. Preregistration began Thursday at the website. Boost Mobile's Data Boost Up plan with automatic payments is $35 per month for unlimited talk and text and 2.5 GB of high-speed data, it said. Availability for the S 6 and S 6 edge on Sprint and Boost Mobile is April 10. U.S. Cellular announced its presale Thursday for the Samsung Galaxy S 6 and S 6 edge beginning Friday in stores and online. U.S. Cellular has pricing options including $0 down using installment pricing over 20 months, it said.

Luxury watchmakers announced smart watch intentions at the start of the Baselworld watch and jewelry showcase event in Switzerland Thursday. They were as reluctant to provide product details as they were eager to trumpet their technology partners. At a news conference announcing a relationship among luxury watch icon TAG Heuer, Google and Intel, TAG Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver called it “my biggest announcement ever” in his 40 years attending Baselworld. Biver prefaced a brief Q&A with the caveat that he wouldn’t provide pricing, availability or product features of the TAG Heuer smart watch. Biver called the announcement something he could “never have imagined,” a partnership that would “give birth to the greatest connected watch.” The Silicon Valley companies supplying the technology to TAG Heuer also are providing the tech foundation for Fossil Group’s upcoming smart watches (see 1503060058). That led to a question in Q&A on how the partnership with TAG Heuer differs from that with Fossil. Michael Bell, general manager-Intel's new devices group, responded for the group and said, “What we’re talking about here is a very nice luxury Swiss smart watch” and called Fossil “also a phenomenal partner.” The TAG Heuer smart watch will reside on a software platform called Android Wear, a version of the Android operating system tailored for the connected watch, said David Singleton, director-engineering of Google's Android Wear. The brains of the watch are made by Intel. Because of the collaboration among the three companies, and the fact that the watch's "brain" is made by Intel, the upcoming watch won’t be able to be labeled what has been a point of pride for TAG Heuer’s other watches: “Swiss Made.” Also at Baselworld, Gucci Timepieces said it partnered with i.am+ and will.i.am to develop wearable technology. In announcing the collaboration, Gucci Timepieces CEO Stéphane Linder, who left TAG Heuer as CEO in December, said he coined the term “fashionology” to describe the merging worlds of fashion and technology. The Gucci device will operate as a “completely standalone smartband, untethered from any smartphone,” said the company. The feature list of the smart device includes: the ability to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages and emails, music, maps, calendar, fitness functions and a “sophisticated personal assistant activated by voice command,” the company said.

Apple and Samsung’s combined dominant share of the tablet market could plummet to 38 percent by 2019 in a “tectonic shift” to lower-priced tablets, a Juniper report said. Evolving form factors and emerging players such as Lenovo with low-cost alternatives are a threat to today’s dominant tablet vendors, said the industry researcher Monday. It expects Lenovo to lead the movement and increase its shipments by 30 million units per year by 2019. Lenovo announced several Android- and Windows-based models at Mobile World Congress, Juniper noted. Android will remain the dominant tablet platform over the forecast period, with Windows-based devices expected to be close to 10 percent of the market by 2019, Juniper said. Hybrid devices such as two-in-ones will find a place in office environments, but tablets will struggle “due to peripheral compatibility requirements,” it said. Phablets also will have a growing impact on tablet sales, Juniper said. More than 400 million phablets will ship globally in 2019, up from 138 million forecast for this year, it said. The iPhone 6 has been a catalyst for bringing the phablet category “further into the limelight,” but budget-priced devices are the key to driving phablets into the mainstream globally, it said. The phablet emerged out of the transition of the smartphone away from communications and toward multimedia use, Juniper said, although in terms of device hardware, a phablet is “virtually identical” to a smartphone except in screen and battery size. A smartphone can perform most computing tasks, which would suggest that other mobile devices can become increasingly like smartphones, Juniper said. At the hardware level, that would involve integrating modem and cellular functionality within the chipset “rather than as add-ons,” it said. The platform-centric approach would require systems on a chip to be scalable for different products and hardware possibilities, it said.

Eight in 10 U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, and 52 percent have multiple HDTVs, according to data from Leichtman Research Group. LRG said the multiple figure is up from 46 percent five years ago. The budding Ultra HD TV market is at 1.6 percent U.S. household penetration, analyst Bruce Leichtman told us. Of the tiny percentage of 4K TV owners, 85 percent reported having an "excellent" experience with the TV and none rated the experience as poor, Leichtman said. Awareness of 4K Ultra HD TV is on the rise at 41 percent, versus 30 percent last year, and 26 percent of those who have seen 4K TV expressed interest in getting one, versus 6 percent who had not seen it, Leichtman said. Of the consumers who bought any TV last year, 38 percent reported having an Internet-connected model. Overall, about 11 percent of all smart TVs in the U.S. are Internet-connected, LRG said. Of the single-HDTV households, 89 percent subscribe to a pay-TV service; but the percentage expands to 91 percent in multi-HDTV homes, LRG said. Roughly a quarter of U.S. households purchased a TV in the past 12 months, mirroring a 20 percent or higher trend in place for the past 11 years, Leichtman said. “While HDTV now seems commonplace in the U.S., much of the growth of HD has come in recent years,” Leichtman said, as more than a third of households have bought their first HDTV in the past five years. The phone survey of 1,231 adults in the continental U.S. was conducted in January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Smartphones made up two-thirds of the global phone market in 2014, said research from Gartner released Tuesday. Worldwide sales of smartphones to end users grew nearly 30 percent in Q4 over the year-ago quarter to reach 368 million units, Gartner said. Apple was tops, selling 75 million units, stealing the top spot from Samsung (73 million), which had owned the market since 2011, it said. Samsung lost roughly 10 percentage points in market share in Q4 versus the year-ago quarter, continuing a downward trend since its peak in Q3 2013, said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst: "Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share.” Analyst Roberta Cozza cited Apple’s dominance at the premium end of the smartphone market and pressure from Chinese vendors offering “quality hardware at lower prices” at the lower end as challenges for Samsung. A “solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices” will be necessary for the Korean vendor to secure customer loyalty and provide long-term differentiation at the high end, she said. Lenovo’s share of the end-user market -- including Motorola and Lenovo devices following the companies’ transaction in October -- ranked third in Q4, reaching 24.3 million units, giving it 7 percent of the global smartphone market, followed by Huawei at 6 percent share and Xiaomi with 5 percent share. Xiaomi’s unit sales to end users nearly tripled to 18.5 million units in the quarter, while its market share more than doubled, Gartner said. Apple’s best-ever quarter -- Q4 2014 with 74.8 million smartphones sold -- was buoyed by “huge demand” in China and the U.S., where sales leaped by 56 percent and 88 percent, respectively, Gartner said. The larger screen sizes of the iPhone 6 models presented new users a “strong alternative to Android,” Gartner said. Huawei and Xiaomi, meanwhile, propped up their sales in the mid- and low-end smartphone markets at home and overseas, it said. "Chinese vendors are no longer followers," Cozza said. "They are producing higher quality devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more established players in the mobile phone market.” Dropping prices drove the migration of feature phone users to smartphones last year, Gartner said. The Android ecosystem benefited most from the transition, growing 2.2 percentage points for 2014 to 80.7 percent share, followed by iOS at 15.4 percent share. Windows Phone's performance was basically flat in Q4, selling 35 million units, but it recorded strong results in some markets in Europe -- and in the business segment, Gartner said. Windows Phone held 2.8 percent market share for the quarter, while BlackBerry came in under 1 percent at roughly 8 million units, it said.