Hasta La Gadget!

The PC industry may be shaken up by the rapid encroachment of tablets into consumer and enterprise spending habits — a trend that’s seeing lighter devices like the iPad, as well as cheaper tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and more, eat into the market share of bigger and more expensive computers. But it’s all a matter of perspective: today IDC said that it’s actually lowering forecasts for tablet shipments this year and in the future.

“Growing competition”, IDC says, from smartphones with bigger screens (the recently-legitimized phablet) and wearables like smart watches, combined with a lack of exciting tablet product launches in Q2, are leading the analysts to says that there will be 227.4 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2013, down some 2 million from 229.3 million as previously estimated.

Yes, it’s not a huge drop, and you can argue that these are only estimates anyway. And it’s still some 57.7% higher than 2012 shipments. But IDC’s figures point to some themes that are worth watching for: whether even less-expensive tablets are possibly still too expensive for what consumers are willing to pay; whether even tablets — in some regards pared-down in functionality from PCs — are still too over specced for what many consumers want and need; and the issue of how much of our wallet we will want to dedicate to these products, as more of them enter the market.

On the enterprise side, IDC notes that right now, in fact, the tablet is pretty minor but is growing: It notes that tablet adoption in sectors like education and retail collectively accounted for 10% of all tablet sales in 2012, and that will only grow to 20% by 2017.

IDC also notes that it’s starting to see more developed markets already take their feet off the gas in terms of rapid adoption, with “maturing markets such as the U.S. now expected to cede share more rapidly to emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific.” It predicts that by 2017 there will be 407 million tablets shipped.

More immediately, competitive pressures will mean lower prices for tablets coming soon, IDC notes. “We expect average selling prices to continue to compress as more mainstream vendors utilize low-cost components to better compete with the whitebox tablet vendors that continue to enjoy widespread traction in the market despite typically offering lower-quality products and poorer customer experiences,” writes Tom Mainelli, research director for tablets.

In terms of regional activity, IDC points out that North America, Western Europe and Japan, which had traditionally been the leaders in tablet adoption, are already seeing some slow-down in sales, compared to other parts of the world. Today they account for 60.8% of the market, but that will drop to 49% by 2017, with emerging markets making up the remaining 51%. (Another proof point for why it’s so important for companies like Google, Facebook and others to build out their businesses in these markets.)

“Year-on-year growth is beginning to slow as the tablet market approaches early stages of maturity,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “Much of the long-term growth will be driven by countries like China where projected growth rates will be consistently higher than the worldwide average.”

Have you ever wanted to wave your hand to unlock a door or transfer your contact information by simply touching a phone? How about keeping all of your top secret passwords at arm’s length, literally? Well, with this Kickstarter-funded near field communication-enabled ring, all that could soon be possible.

Read more…

Wearable computing! Yeah! Woo! Glasses! More (probably non-existent) glasses! Watches! Shoes? Shoes! More »

Innovation is problem-solving. Radical innovation is seeing normalcy as problematic, and solving it. That level of invention, which solves a generally unrecognized problem to create a new product category, or user experience, can be difficult to recognize in the conceptual stage. A far-reaching idea can seem trivial if it solves routineness. Sometimes it takes the product itself, the manifested experience, to demonstrate how to rise above the customary. Email solved postal mail, which died another incremental death last week by announcing a proposal to end Saturday letter deliveries. Cell phones solved the disconnect between phones and the walking-around life. Mobile apps solved the gap between computers and cell phones. Perhaps HTML5 will solve apps.

So forgive me if I’m being small-minded, but Bruce Tognazzini’s speculative manifesto about an Apple iWatch fails to make a convincing futurist case for the imagined device — despite whipping up a whirlwind of attention. What is the future of wearable computing?

Filed under: Apple

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Valve Software’s hardware division is still in its infancy. Despite having existed for over a year, recruitment is still its primary concern — “prototyping is almost secondary,” longtime inventor/hacker/now Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth told us in an interview this week. As the team ramps up, production becomes more and more prolific, of course; Ellsworth lights up when she talks about the work her team is doing now. She gets verbose when asked about corporate culture at Valve, about how she’s never worked at a company where risk and failure are so acceptable — even encouraged. She’s visibly excited about the prototypes she’s creating at Valve’s new prototyping facility, but manages to contain herself enough to not let slip exactly what her and her team are working on.

When asked what the team’s immediate goals are, she obliquely states, “To make Steam games more fun to play in your living room.” That’s the team’s one-year goal, at least. The challenge is making games that require a mouse and keyboard palatable to people who are used to a controller, or to people who just don’t want to migrate PC controls to the comfort of their living room. Working in tandem with Steam’s newly beta’d “Big Picture Mode,” Ellsworth’s team is creating a hardware solution to the control barriers found in many Steam games. She wouldn’t give any hints as to what that solution is exactly, but she left no options off the table — from Phantom Lapboard-esque solutions to hybrid controllers.

Regardless, it sounds like gamers will have a chance to give feedback on those designs, as Valve’s hardware team is planning a beta for its various products. Ellsworth is hoping to have one for the team’s first product in the coming year — we’ll of course know much more about the product by then, she says. Internal beta tests are already underway, and a variety of the team’s prototypes are available in the office for other Valve employees to tool around with. The next step is getting prototypes into gamers hands — she says Valve already has a production line for short runs, making a beta possible — and iterating on design before launch. As for how the beta will be handled, she posits it’ll be tied to Steam in some way, but no logistics are anywhere near nailed down.

Continue reading Valve’s first hardware beta starting by next year, wearable computing still far off

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops

Valve’s first hardware beta starting by next year, wearable computing still far off originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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