Hasta La Gadget!

An analyst group is predicting that the TV manufacturing industry will suffer its first overall revenue loss in years in 2009, leading to significant short trends in the industry.

Among the predictions by the consumer display researcher DisplaySearch are that well-known companies will suffocate smaller brands with lower prices, plasmas (or PDPs) will momentarily regain their old popularity, and that it will take the industry close to two years to regain its late-2007 momentum.

Like the other consumer technologies, TVs have not been immune to the economic recession. Even with the coming digital transition, consumer demand for TVs were down late in the year. The current estimate is that LCD revenues will fall 16 percent down to 64 billion, in a market where all TV sales will go down by 18%.

As we have noted before, the most obvious way in which companies deal with a downturn in the economy is by slashing the prices of their most popular products. Samsung and Sony notoriously chopped down their entry-level Blu-ray players over a month ago and they’ve since dominated the competition with over 75% of Blu-ray player sales.

If they continue this trend next year with TVs as expected, they’ll take a stronghold of that market as well, which isn’t really a good thing for consumers in the long term. In the last couple of years, so-called ‘low-tiered’ vendors like Vizio and Olevia have offered quality TVs at some of the best dollar-for-dollar TV values, keeping the big companies honest (and the prices stable) by leveling the field.

When the larger companies like Sony lower their prices (and they will), they will also decrease the market share of the smaller ones and put them at a disadvantage that could lead to cuts in their business. We want to see a viable Vizio pumping out sweet OLEDs four years from now, rather than seeing it sell off its scrap heap to Sony.

DisplaySearch notes that that the price quandary has also positively
affected the growth of Plasma displays by up to 24% (to 13.9 M sold in
2008), and they say it will go up in 2009 to 14.6 M. This makes
sense. Plasma displays are like power-armed pitchers in baseball — the
newest brands go for premium prices that moneybaggers will spend
whatever it takes to obtain, and old models are downgraded but are
still seen as excellent bargains by consumers, because, hey, how can
you not pick up a 60-inch plasma or a 95 MPH fastball for a dime?

Even though plasmas are energy hogs and take up too much space,
cheap big screens are hard to pass up. Mitsubishi offered relatively inexpensive huge-screen offerings for Black Friday that proved popular, and
others will follow.

Looking between the lines at the graph above, there’s also the
understanding that a large growth in new display technologies like
OLEDs will not occur fully until the economy gets up on its feet.

Oh, geez. Not this again. Just months after everyone involved with that virus-ridden Insignia frame finally cleaned things up, here comes two new reports that select frames could indeed be shipping from the factory with malware pre-installed. For starters, the 1.5-inch Mercury Digital Photo Keychain — which is sold at Walmart and other fine retailers — seems to have some pretty nasty software loaded on, and Amazon has went so far as to issue an alert that some Samsung SPF-85H frames are leaving the dock with the 32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc. Something tells us someone in quality control couldn’t quite get in the holiday spirit.

[Via Slashdot]

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Displays

Another pair of infected digiframes promise to ruin the rest of your holiday break originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take that sucky economy! Italian company Angelis Labor is set to show an uber-expensive turntable at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month.

Called the Gabriel, the device has been manufactured in an Italian Ferrari parts manufacturing factory, says the company, and can cost between $27,000 and $64,000.

The Gabriel is a magnetic
suspension record player constructed by overlapping bronze over
aluminum and can be customized with up to four arms.

The turntable system is composed of three parts- the table and base for one to four arms, the 13-inch arm, and the cartridge. Even the company calls it "admittedly over-the-top."

For that price tag, too bad it isn’t made of gold.

The Gabriel [Product Page]

Pantech’s SKY division has just released the quite handsome, Korea-only IM-S400L. The CDMA slider boasts a 2.6-inch LCD, and a keypad using the company’s new “Glide Sensor” technology which it says operates like a laptop trackpad. We don’t have much else in the way of specs for this puppy, but we do know that it’s available in white, pink, blue and green for ₩500,000 — about $395. Crème brulée is, sadly, not included.

[Via Akihabara News]

Filed under: Cellphones

Pantech’s Sky IM-S400L slider with “Glide Sensor” keypad debuted in Korea originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 beta ISO leaked to internet, world originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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