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"We're seeing a bit of the natural adoption cycle going on with tablets," says John Barrett, an analyst with Park Associates. "Early buyers want lots of features, which is Apple's forte. The value shoppers come later and they're more willing to make trade-offs for price."

The second Apple issue is related to the first. At the low end of the market, tablets costing a few hundred dollars or less, Apple has left a so-called price umbrella for competitors. Apple lowered its entr ...read more

The survey's findings are also backed up by the most recent report on the subject by Parks Associates. It claims that 33 percent of US consumers want the ability to listen to their music libraries in their cars and there is also a growing demand for navigation, vehicle performance and diagnostics features and of course hands-free phone access.

"The rapid growth in smartphone adoption combined with the development of a robust app industry has educated consumers on the benefit ...read more

Fewer than 5 percent of cable subscribers have cut the cord, according to research firm Parks Associates, but nearly all of them did it for the same reason: Their cable bills were too damned high. The average American now pays nearly $100 a month for cable TV, says the NPD Group, a bill expected to top $200 by the year 2020. Meanwhile, cable providers consistently rank among the worst companies in annual surveys of customer satisfaction. That’s a big reason why pay TV subscripti ...read more

The Ocuity 500 comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that supports two hours of streaming video, maintaining a complete video record even through power outages. Multiple power management modes maximize battery life in different applications. It even includes a Micro SD card slot for expandable memory to protect video should the network connection become compromised, automatically synching later with remote network attached storage or cloud storage solutions.

“NETGEAR is ...read more

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. today announced that Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Anchor Bay Entertainment now encode movies and TV programs in the UltraViolet™Common File Format (CFF) using Dolby® Digital Plus™.

With UltraViolet, consumers can download and stream their favorite movies and television programs anytime and anywhere to their TV screens, personal computers, tablets, and mobile phones. With the launch of UltraViolet CFF for downloads, titles from Twentie ...read more

Two separate surveys are showing that the PlayStation 4 sits substantially ahead of Microsoft’s Xbox One when it comes to polling American consumers about console preference. According to Parks Associates, 36% of console shoppers favor PS4 while 27% are leaning towards Xbox One.

It’s possible that the decision to price the Xbox One $100 above the PS4 may hand Sony an edge in the short term when it comes to sales volume. But launch sales don’t necessarily tell much about the ...read more

One in four US consumers now rely on their smartphones for advice and guidance when shopping in physical stores.

According to Parks Associates, over 25 percent of shoppers use their devices to research products, when buying consumer electronics devices from bricks and mortar stores.

Further proving that the smartphone is well and truly cemented into modern life, the study shows that among US consumers, those that frequent Target are the most likely to turn to their hands ...read more

About 14% of all households have a streaming media device, twice the number that had one two years ago, research firm Parks Associates says today. But the most interesting finding in its new report on trends in connected TV is that relatively tiny Roku handily beats the mighty Apple among people who own a streaming video media device. Some 37% go with Roku vs 24% who “primarily use” Apple TV, the company found in a survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband households early this year. The ...read more