Handset OEMs Dominate Mobile World Congress 2012 – Common Denominator: Premium Hardware

The handset OEMs are making the most of Mobile World Congress (MWC), showcasing their newest and greatest phones. HTC, Nokia, and Sony have all made significant device launches on the first day of the show.
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Nokia Strengthens Music Service at Mobile World Congress

In one of many Nokia announcements at Mobile World Congress, the company announced significant improvements to its Nokia Music streaming service (available on the Lumia series). The service now includes an off-line function, allowing users to download up to four channels of music (each channel is three to four hours in length) to listen to off-line. This is ideal for customers on planes or other locations where a signal is not guaranteed.
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“Words With Friends” Finds lots of Friends on Android Smartphones

“Words With Friends,” the Zynga Scrabble-like (or “inspired”) game that garnered both notoriety and lots of free marketing thanks in part to Alec Baldwin’s antics on an American Airlines flight, has come into its own among Android smartphone users.

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Video’s Wounding (but not yet killing) the Pay TV Model

When MTV played the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1981 it launched a new era of pay television. Cable TV was no longer Community Antenna TV (CATV); now there were—or soon would be—as Bruce Springsteen put it, “57 channels and nothin’ on.”
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Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3

Not the best known song, and frankly not a particularly great one sung by the bizarrely named 80s band Ian Drury and the Blockheads, but a great title nonetheless and one that fits perfectly here. There are no blockheads in CE as this is an industry that sheds underperformers and laggards pretty quickly. After our last post some may be tempted to view the stagnant consumer technology industry fortunes and think the whole market is really a laggard among consumer markets. But that is far from the truth. What is true, as we pointed out, is that in an environment of stagnation there must be some strong niches and opportunities out there to offset the decliners. So it seemed like a natural segue to review some of the product segments and industry trends that give us a reason to be cheerful about the future of consumer technology.

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It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

This week, NPD released an account of how the CE market fared in2011, and the numbers are tough. Total sales volume was essentially flat from 2010 despite the huge advances made by tablets, e-readers, and smartphones. Sales outside of the top five categories dropped precipitously (around 8 percent) from 2010, clearly a result of the ongoing volume declines across a whole range of traditional IT and CE products. Most observers, however, likely would have expected sales to increase in conjunction with the jump in those categories. That fact that sales didn’t is a red flag for the future of overall industry growth. This is the key point that was missed by most who reported on it.
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Big Screen TVs, The Real Super Bowl MVPs

A look at NPD’s recently released Weekly Tracking Service data for the 2012 Super Bowl week shows total TV sales, and in particular big screens, maintained the momentum gained over the holiday shopping season. Sales of screens 50 inches and larger grew 11 percent in dollars compared to last year, and sets over 60 inches, still a small share of total screen sizes, nonetheless doubled last year’s revenue total. Meanwhile, sales of sets under 50 inches fell by 14 percent on a revenue basis.
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In-Vehicle Connectivity An Opportunity For Mobile Audio

The auto market’s resurgence over the last year has coincided with an equally interesting period in consumer electronics as sales of mobile and portable devices continue to reach new heights. New features and services are allowing these devices to be used in a variety of places, and the vehicle is one environment where usage is sure to increase. In fact, The NPD Group’s recent study, Mobile CE: A Look Inside the Vehicle, finds nearly eight-in-ten (79 percent) car owners are using some type of portable digital device in the vehicle.
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IP Gives AT&T U-verse An iPad Advantage

AT&T is again demonstrating how to use managed IP video delivery—sometimes known as IPTV–to improve the multichannel video programming experience by linking the Web and the TV with the appropriately, albeit boringly, named “U-verse for iPad App.”
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Super Bowl A Boon For TV Sales In 2 Or 3 Dimensions

This weekend, the 2011 sports year comes to a crescendo as the Patriots and Giants meet in Super Bowl XLVI. The timing of this de facto national holiday—after New Year’s and the frenzy of the holiday shopping season, is advantageous for retailers and manufacturers looking to invigorate their Q1 TV sales. Understandably, much of consumers’ focus will be on trading up to bigger screens in the shopping week prior to the game, but other features like 3D could also have an impact on buyers.
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