"smartphones" articles

A 3D TV? A smartphone? A smart meter? Digital Lifestyles: Outlook 2010, a new industry report focuses on the consumer, with an emphasis on expanding and enhancing user experiences in communications, entertainment, support, and connectivity. This report provides analysis, forecasts, and industry and consumer drivers for a variety of digital lifestyle categories including: Access Services, Television Services, Mobile Services and Devices, Digital Media and Gaming, Trends in...

Throughout its 24 years of history, Parks Associates has been grappling with the question of when and how home control systems will become mainstream. Home systems analyst Bill Ablondi , in Parks Associates’ most recent report, Home Systems: Home Controls-- Analysis and Forecasts flips the question. Ablondi and colleague Farhan Abid say that the current value propositions for consumers to purchase control systems are not sufficient to appeal to mass markets. Either the...

New research from Parks Associates, host of the upcoming executive summit CONNECTIONS™ Europe , indicates that the number of smartphones shipped in 2009 topped 180 million units worldwide, with Nokia, Research in Motion, and Apple sharing 60% of the market. Annual sales will reach almost 400 million by 2014, and as the number of users approaches one billion, consumer demand will grow for mobile broadband services that can share content, particularly high-quality video, across connected...

Microsoft this week announced their KIN social networking devices (phones) designed for a younger set whose primary interest, in addition to an occasional phone call, is social networking. The timing of the announcement interestingly coincides with news that the sagging Palm phone maker is up for sale, having missed several windows of opportunity to capture growing consumer interest in smartphones. Microsoft, expert marketers that they are, have left no question as to who is the target...

The demand for smartphones is creating a demographic shift among users, who will exceed 1 billion worldwide by 2014, stimulating demand for more entry-level models that offer mainstream solutions such as mobile email and social networking applications, according to Parks Associates’ Smartphone: King of Convergence. This new report includes consumer data from Parks Associates’ primary study Mobile Convergence: Platforms, Applications, and Services. This consumer survey finds only...

We've been pleased to have Mitch Singer from Sony Pictures and the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) coalition speak at our recent CONNECTIONS events and speak about the potential of "digital locker" services. Roughly defined, these would be services that could authenticate and manage a wide variety of user-owned content in a virtual environment. One key element of the digital locker is widely agreed-upon digital rights management protocols, where multiple...

The cross-platform app market just got smaller…and yet bigger at the same time. This week Pocketgear announced its acquisition of Handango, a leading competitor in the direct to consumer, cross-platform app market. The acquisition and merger of the two will bring the unified company into closer competitive range with the market leader Apple App Store. It will also serve to make the company a more appetizing choice for mobile carriers and device manufacturers preferring to outsource app...

While the Mobile World Congress was abuzz with smartphones, operating systems, and apps, I was following announcements related more to enhancing mobile support applications. Given the interest in this space expressed to me during some CES meetings, mobile support is an area that we are adding to our digital home tech support coverage. I would classify the mobile support offerings into three categories: * Mobile security: These features can include "safe browsing" and...