Month: November 2011

HP discontinues it’s tablet sales, but guess what? Technically they are currently number two behind Apple in tablet sales.

HP surprisingly emerges as No. 2 tablet maker

“At least for now, Hewlett-Packard can lay claim as the second most popular tablet manufacturer behind Apple.

Too bad, it’ll be a short-lived reign.

Despite all of the attention focused on Apple’s iPad, other tablet makers have seen some adoption this year. In total, the U.S. tablet market–excluding Apple–saw sales of more than 1.2 million units and retail revenue of $415 million from January through October, according to a new study from NPD. HP stood on top of that non-iPad hill, closely followed by Samsung Electronics.

Of course, the market is still tiny when compared with Apple, which moved 11.1 million iPads in the last quarter alone.

That a fluke like the short-lived TouchPad–which launched July 1 for $499 but only sold well amid a fire sale in mid-August–was able to capture the No. 2 spot speaks to the fragmentation of the tablet market beyond Apple.

Despite Apple’s dominance, NPD believes there is an opportunity for alternatives.

‘According to NPD’s consumer tracking service, 76 percent of consumers who purchased a non-Apple tablet didn’t even consider the iPad, an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business,’ said NPD analyst Stephen Baker.

HP managed to grab 17 percent of the share. Its TouchPad was snapped up quickly this summer when HP discontinued the tablet. The TouchPad’s price cratered to $99, and retailers moved quickly to unload the tablets. Of course, the phenomenon was only temporary; HP has since run out of TouchPads and has no apparent plans to start up production again.

Samsung has been in the tablet business longer than anyone outside of Apple, moving quickly to release the 7-inch Galaxy Tab a year ago. Since then, the company has released a variety of tablet sizes, including a 10.1-inch version that is able to connect to a high-speed wireless network. As a result, it had 16 percent of the non-iPad market and is poised to overtake HP in the coming months for the No. 2 spot.”

YouTube is leaning toward HTML5 as well! Last week we had a story about Revision3 moving toward HTML5 and away from Flash… now, YouTube is pushing the envelope that way as well!

YouTube’s HTML5 Player Gets Better

“YouTube’s HTML5 player has improved a lot lately and it’s almost ready to replace the Flash player. You can enable annotations and captions, the contextual menu lets you copy the embedding code and the video’s URL, YouTube now offers 480p and 1080p options for WebM videos and there’s native full-screen support if you use a Firefox nightly build or Chrome’s dev channel.

I’ve also noticed that sometimes embedded videos use the HTML5 player even if you’ve already installed Flash and you haven’t enabled the HTML5 trial.”

There’s an old joke about the vendor in New York that bragged that he sold his wares cheaper than anyone else. “Yeah,” said his competitor, “but you are selling BELOW the actual cost of the item!” “Ha!,” said the vendor, “I make it up in volume!” Get it? Selling below cost, even at volume, nets you no profit! However, that is what Amazon is doing! But they WILL make it up in volume of books sold!

Kindle Fire teardown puts build cost at less than $3 above retail price

Computerworld – Teardown experts at IHS iSuppli found that it costs $201.70 to build Amazon’s new Kindle Fire — that’s almost $3 more than the device’s $199 retail price.

Many analysts expected Amazon to take a much larger loss on the Kindle Fire, if only to better compete against other tablets such as the iPad 2, which has a starting price of $499, or the Nook Tablet, which starts at $249. Amazon is expected to make up the loss through sales of products and apps to Kindle users.

According to iSuppli’s tally the Kindle Fire’s hardware costs $185.60 and the cost of manufacturing the device is $16.10.

The $201.70 figure is an actual teardown cost estimate that was derived from taking apart one of the Kindle Fire tablets, which were released Monday. That total is $7.83 less than the $209.63 virtual estimate that iSuppli made in September.”

HTML5 and Webm video rocks! It is smaller in size, streams well… and is simple! So, let’s all move to it!

Revision3 bets on HTML5, drops Flash player development

“Revision3 was faced with a dilemma: Its Flash player was getting a bit long in the tooth, but Flash isn’t supported by a growing number of devices that its viewers are using to watch its videos on. The company had already built an HTML5 player to be used by viewers with iPads and other HTML5-compatible devices, but it wasn’t as advanced as what the startup had built into Flash. As a company with limited resources, updating both players wasn’t really an option, so it had to choose between updating its Flash player, or placing more emphasis on HTML5.

So what did it do? It bet on the future.

Revision3 rolled out a new, HTML5-based video player Thursday to help standardize the video experience across web browsers online and those on new mobile and connected devices. At the same time, Revision3 made a strategic decision to phase out support of Flash and throw more development resources behind HTML5 instead.

The new player went live on Thursday, as the default option for Revision3 viewers. In addition to being available on more devices, Rev3 CTO Rob DeMillo told us in a phone interview that the new player has some other immediate benefits: The new player loads more quickly than its Flash player, and scrubbing through a video is much more responsive. It also supports all the same advertising and analytics that Revision3 had from the Flash player.”

Cable content via the Internet. I want it! I would love to be able to “tune it in” on my Roku. I am sure that Time Warner, DirecTV, etc. are not thrilled, however!

Sony Weighs Assault on Cable TV

“Sony is considering launching an internet-based alternative to cable TV, according to people familiar with the situation, the latest threat to cable and satellite operators that now dominate pay television.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company approached several big media companies that own TV channels to negotiate the rights to offer TV channels over the web to US consumers, the people said.
Sony is proposing to beam the channels over internet connections to Sony-made devices including PlayStation gaming consoles, television sets and Blu-ray players.

Sony has sold approximately 18.1 million PlayStation 3 consoles in the US, according to the latest data from tracker NPD Group, and many homes have other internet-connected Sony devices.
The biggest US cable operator, Comcast, has about 22.4 million video subscribers and serves a geographic area with over 52 million homes.”