Hasta La Gadget!

According to Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn, the iPad has replaced as much as half of all laptop sales. Further, the little tablet is also slowing TV sales, despite the manufacturers’ desperate push to shift 3-D sets.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Dunn said that sales are slowing in general on bigger gadgets, and that the hot products are the iPad, e-readers like the Kindle, and digital cameras. Instead of upgrading televisions, many people are sticking with the ones they own and spending the cash on iPads and other things they don’t already have.

But the biggest surprise is that 50% figure. It’s an internal, Best Buy estimate, but proves what we at Gadget Lab thought all along: that Mom and Pop would switch from cheap, unreliable and hard-to-use laptops and buy the iPad instead, an intuitive device which covers 90% of their computing needs. When the iPad gets a FaceTime camera (and hopefully a video-capable version of Skype) then the only people buying laptops will be those who need the horsepower for work.

Over on Fortune.com, Philip Elmer-DeWitt cites unrelated figures from Morgan Stanley showing that notebook sale growth has been steadily slowing. The bank’s analyst takes a more cautious conclusion, stating that “tablet cannibalization” is at least partially responsible for the decline. Since Apple has been the only significant tablet maker on the market for most of the past five months, that really means “iPad cannibalization.”

These crazy iPad sales are taking their bite out of Windows market-share, too, not the Mac’s. Mac sales, which are mostly notebook sales anyway, continue to grow every quarter. This means that people are dropping Windows for the iPad. With the lack of any viable Windows-based iPad competitor, Microsoft should be getting very worried indeed: after all, the bulk of its business comes from bundling its OS with commodity hardware — the exact hardware that Best Buy has seen drop in sales by half.

Retailers Turn to Gadgets [WSJ]

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

See Also:

• Netbook Sales Shrivel as Apple Rolls Out iPad
• What the iPad Means for the Future of Computing

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This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but no less significant — Apple’s sold 275 million of those ubiquitous white earbuds since it swallowed the portable audio market whole a few years back. Oh, and it might have shifted a few tons of MP3 players, too.

Check out our liveblog of the keynote event right here!

The Apple iPod: 275 million customers served originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s bet on Android seems to have paid off big for the company. Samsung has shipped more than one million Galaxy S phones in the U.S. since the devices were launched in mid-July.

The news makes the Galaxy S devices one of the hottest Android phones available today, though the smartphones haven’t reached iPhone-like popularity yet. Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 devices in just the first three days of sales in June. Though official numbers for the Droid weren’t released, analytics firm Flurry estimates 1.05 million Droid phones were sold in 74 days.

So far, Samsung has two models of the Galaxy S phones, Samsung Vibrant and Samsung Captivate, available on T-Mobile and AT&T respectively. But two more Galaxy S devices are expected to debut soon–Samsung Epic 4G on Sprint and Samsung Fascinate on Verizon Wireless.

Common to all these devices are features such as AMOLED display, a 1GHz processor called ‘Hummingbird’ and entertainment apps. Samsung says all Galaxy S devices will be upgraded to Android 2.2 Froyo operating system.

It will be interesting to see if the Galaxy S phones can topple Motorola Droid as the best-selling Android phone. Motorola recently launched Droid 2 on Verizon Wireless. Though HTC’s Evo has been a big hit on Sprint and Sprint has called a best-seller on the network, the two companies have never disclosed exactly how many Evos have been sold till date. The Evo has also suffered from shortages and a recent estimate suggests that only 300,000 Evo phones had been sold as of mid-July.

Samsung’s Epic 4G, which is scheduled to be available on Sprint starting August 31, could give the Evo some real competition, though it remains to be seen if the device can do better than the Evo.

Meanwhile, Samsung is gearing up to launch a 7-inch tablet in September called the ‘Galaxy Tab’. The tablet will run Android 2.2 Froyo OS, include video-calling capability and full web browsing—which likely means support for Flash, according to a teaser video that Samsung posted last week.

See Also:

• Motorola Droid Rules Android
• Samsung Android Phone Captivates AT&T
• Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones
• Why You Should Avoid Phones With Android Skins

Photo: Samsung Vibrant (Stefan Armijo/Wired.com)

Been waiting for evidence that the iPad will dent the netbook market? If you believe ASUS, that’s already happened, with the Eee PC vendor reporting fewer sales in the second quarter relative to the first and downgrading expectations for the usual peak season of Q3. Apple’s prodigious tablet is specifically named by ASUS CEO Jerry Shen as an invader that is “crowding out” netbook demand, though he remains firmly committed to the small and affordable laptop market. All the same, Shen does also point a finger to the horizon, where a trifecta of Eee Pads marches ever nearer with the intent to do battle with the iPad. So while netbooks aren’t going away in a hurry, these latest numbers seem to suggest they’re set to at least share the lower-end spotlight with touch-friendly slates, or rather Pads.

ASUS downgrades Eee PC shipment forecast, blames iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt is quite the quotable man — we hear he’s pretty chatty at coffee shops, too — and at the Techonomy conference, he hasn’t failed to disappoint. First, some cold hard data: according to Schmidt, about 200,000 new Android devices are being sold each day, which he claims is up from 100,000 daily sales about two months ago (and up from the 60,000 daily activations from April). That number is just one drip from a stream of good news for the platform this week, including 866 percent year-over-year growth and the top spot in NPD’s sales rankings. We’re fairly confident there’s a team of top mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers in Mountain View right now tasked with finding new and innovative ways to boast about Android’s success.

Speaking of Techonomy, Schmidt used some of his on-stage time to discuss the new concerns technology has engendered. “The technology of course is neutral but society is not fundamentally ready,” he said, claiming AI today could very likely use location-based services and predict where a person was going next, among other nightmares for privacy advocates. Schmidt opines that it’s up to the society on how the collected information is regulated while computers do what they do best — gather and recall information. We like think adorable kitten pictures falls nicely into that latter category, and that’s all we care about anyway.

Google’s Schmidt boasts 200K Android devices sold daily, waxes intellectual on society and technology originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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