Roku just announced via its blog that it has sold 5 million of its streaming Internet media players since its launch back in 2008. The devices have managed to stream a total of 8 billion pieces of content in that time, impressive for a device that started out as essentially a dedicated Netflix box. Roku recently introduced its third-generation hardware to market with the Roku 3, which went on sale in March.
The milestone is significant, since it indicates that there’s a very real and growing market out there for a device that essentially just acts as a service layer for bringing web-based content to televisions, independent of what TV manufacturers themselves are doing with their own built-in Smart TV services. Roku announced that it reached 2.5 million streaming devices in sales back in January of 2012, after having sold 1.5 million during all of 2011. That means it managed to sell somewhere close to 2.5 million devices in the U.S. between then and now, which is a marked increase from its previous yearly high.
We’ve seen how this 5 million milestone compares with Roku’s performance to date, but how about vs. the rest of the market? Despite the fact that Apple still isn’t driving massive amounts of sales with its Apple TV products (especially when compared to its iOS devices), it still sold 2 million in total during the holiday quarter last year, up from 1.3 million in the quarter before that, and up from 1.4 million year over year.
Apple’s sale totals are global, but that still adds up to more than 10 million sales since the device’s introduction, and it sold as many devices as the Roku did in a whole year at home in the U.S. in a single quarter. Still, for a company without Apple’s marketing clout and ecosystem of devices, Roku is definitely holding its own.
The Roku 3 is receiving high praise so far, and has simplified things on the product side, as well as narrowed Roku’s product line to a single device, which is probably best in terms of helping it focus its marketing efforts and avoid consumer confusion. But it will face new competition from Panasonic, which introduced two new streaming media players this week, both of which plug into the popular new Miracast tech, essentially AirPlay for Android, being built into many of today’s smartphones.
LG’s Galaxy Note clone forthcoming flagship, the 5.5 inch Optimus G Pro, has been confirmed for the U.S. market. Writing in a release on its website (translated from Korean by Google Translate), LG said the device will be released in international markets including North America and Japan in the second quarter of this year. Pricing has not been confirmed.
Phones that are large enough to act as small tablets — hence the phone+tablet ‘phablet’ portmanteau — were popularised by Samsung’s original Galaxy Note — and now its successor, the Note II. Back in November Samsung announced it had pushed past five million channel sales of the Note II in around two months since the device went on sale. Analyst iSuppli is predicting phones with screens of more than five inches will more than double their share of the smartphone market this year, with 60.4 million units forecast to ship in 2013 as big phones carve out a larger niche for themselves.
On paper, the LG Optimus G Pro is a specs-busting affair — packing in a full 1920 x 1080 HD display, with screen resolution equating to 400ppi. Under the hood the 4G phablet is powered by a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor, which LG claims offers improved performance — including lower power consumption — than Qualcomm’s S4 chip. It runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, skinned with an updated version of LG’s UI.
On the back there’s a 13 megapixel camera, while the front facing lens is 2.1 megapixels. The removable battery is a whopping 3,140mAh. There’s also NFC on board. Device thickness is 9.4mm.
The forthcoming phablet will make its debut in LG’s domestic market later this month, and will doubtless also be on show at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow next week — so stay tuned for hands-on.
Apple has managed to nab three of the top 5 spots for the top-selling mobile phones in the U.S. during Q4 2012 according to the NPD Group, with the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 ranking first, third and fourth, respectively. Apple also retained the crown for best-selling overall smartphone maker, accounting for 39 percent of smartphone sales in Q4 2012, compared to Samsung’s 30 percent.
iPhone 4 sales rose 79 percent compared to Q3 2012, and iPhone 4S sales grew 43 percent sequentially, while the iPhone 5 accounted for 43 percent of all iPhone sales in Q4 2012, which is roughly in line with the numbers we’re seeing out of carrier data as well. It also made up nearly two-thirds of all smartphone sales on post-paid plans with a value over $ 200, NPD says. Samsung made considerable gains on the year, going up to 30 percent of all U.S. smartphone sales in Q4 2012 from 21 percent in the year ago quarter, but the gains were mostly at the expense of other Android OEMs, including HTC, while Apple’s overall share remained constant.
Net Applications also released its monthly report on mobile OS share, which found that Apple’s iOS increased slightly in terms of traffic, accounting for 60.56 percent of all mobile operating systems, while Android actually took a bit of a dip to 24.51 percent, continuing a decline that has occurred over the past two months from a peak high in November of 28.02 percent. It looks like Apple’s release of the iPhone 5 might have essentially begun to erase earlier gains made by the longer availability of the Samsung Galaxy S III, but Apple still has some ground to make up if it wants to climb back to its 2012 high of nearly 66 percent web traffic share among mobile devices.
Apple’s holiday quarter, which included 47.8 million iPhone sales and 22.9 million iPads, looks to have helped it in terms of remaining the leader in both smartphone and mobile device sales in the U.S., and in keeping the hold it has on mobile browsing. The strong quarter also accounts for Apple’s regaining the role of largest mobile phone maker by volume in the U.S., an honor it reclaimed according to the latest data from Strategy Analytics released earlier today.
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The Northern District Court of California has overturned a sales ban against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 won by Apple in patent litigation against Samsung, Reuters is reporting.
This follows a ruling at the end of last month by the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh could decide whether or not to lift the ban on U.S. sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1-inch tablet. Koh had previously refused to rule on the matter.
“We are pleased with the court’s action today, which vindicates our position that there was no infringement of Apple’s design patent and that an injunction was not called for,” Samsung is reported as saying in a statement.
We’ve contacted Apple and Samsung for further comment and will update with any response. Samsung provided the following statement: “On September 28, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit made a ruling, permitting the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to consider our request to lift the preliminary injunction on the GALAXY Tab 10.1. We will continue to take all appropriate measures to ensure the availability of our innovative products.”
Apple filed for a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet back in May ahead of the trial. In the U.S. the dispute focuses on the iPad D’889 design patent — Apple’s trade dress — but the jury in the Apple vs Samsung trial subsequently decided Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 had not infringed this design patent, effectively invalidating the earlier ruling banning U.S. sales.
However it’s not necessary the end of the road for the Tab 10.1 design disputes — FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller notes that after a hearing scheduled for early December Apple can still win a permanent injunction against Samsung’s slate “over the D’889 tablet design patent if it prevails on the related part of its Rule 50 (“overrule-the-jury”) motion”.
Apple won an E.U.-wide preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 last year – although this was subsequently lifted in all countries except Germany, where the sales ban was granted. The dispute over the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the E.U. rested on Apple’s Community Design 000181607 for the iPad.
LG’s new top-tier Optimus G certainly looks like a contender on paper — its 4.7-inch HD IPS display, 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, 13-megapixel camera, and LTE support make sure of that — but one thing the company hasn’t been willing to talk about so far is U.S. availability.
But it seems the company has just become just a bit more chatty. At a small press event in New York, LG representatives confirmed that the device will make its U.S. debut in Q4 2012, though exactly which carriers will sell the device is still up in the air for now.
I managed to score a little hands-on time with the device, and came away a bit more impressed than I normally am with LG’s work. The Optimus G is slim and plasticky (in keeping with the company’s M.O.), but despite its light weight it never crossed the line into chintzy territory. It’s a surprisingly solid-feeling device to boot — no questionable creaks when applying pressure to it, though that’s thanks in part to the fact that the plastic back plate extends up over the sides. Also of note is the particular three-button configuration that LG opted for use here — they’re discrete buttons as opposed to on-screen icons, and the G sports a menu key rather than the ICS-standard recent apps key.
As always though, hardware is only part of the equation. The pre-release version of the Optimus G I fiddled around with ran Android 4.0.4., and while a Jelly Bean update is probably in the works somewhere, there was no official word one way or another on the matter. That said, the Optimus G was a speedy little bugger — there were no hiccups to be seen as I swiped through myriad menus, fired up applications, and loaded up a handful of websites. I couldn’t sneak my preferred benchmarking app onto the device so the hard numbers will have to come later, but it’s clear that the Optimus G is no slouch.
Things got just a bit dicier during the Optimus G’s video streaming demo — there was a fair amount of visual stuttering as an LG rep was showing off the multi-touch video zoom on a television, as well as when running through a pre-loaded presentation of the device. In fairness, LG reps were quick to note that the device should see some tweaks before its official launch next week, and I’d expect the company to do even more overhauling before the G makes its way Stateside.
LG is fond of referring to the Optimus G as the first quad-core handset with LTE support to officially hit the international market, but that doesn’t mean there’s no one out there giving the company a run for its money. Samsung’s recently-announced Galaxy Note II sports a quad-core Exynos/LTE radio combo (it’s slated to hit the U.S. fairly soon, too), and a Korea-only variant of the Galaxy S III pulled a similar move not too long ago. Samsung has a habit of trouncing LG when it comes to smartphone sales performance, but the Optimus G is a worthy addition to LG’s mobile lineup. That’s not to say that it’s going to be a guanranteed game-changer for LG — I still have my doubts — but at least they’ve got a solid device to throw into the fray.
Like the Galaxy S III before it, Samsung has just announced that the new Galaxy Note II will indeed hit all five major U.S. carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless — by the middle of this November.
Fine, I admit it, the company’s still being pretty vague here. As usual, Samsung has left it up to the carriers to announce exactly when the new-fangled phablet will hit their respective store shelves, but rest easy — those announcements are bound to start trickling out any minute now.
There’s also no official word on pricing (on-contract or otherwise), but if the original is any indicator the Note II should launch with a price tag between $ 249 and $ 299.
Before we get too wrapped up in the details, let’s consider the hardware for just a moment — the Note II’s 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display and redesigned S-Pen may count among the device’s biggest draws, but its internals are worthy of some extra scrutiny here. While plenty of international handsets tend to get neutered once they make their way stateside, that thankfully doesn’t seem to be the case with the Note II. Samsung’s 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos chipset still runs the show here, while 2GB of RAM and an LTE radio help keep things moving at a snappy pace.
What’s more, the device is Samsung’s first to ship pre-loaded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, though the Korean company’s liberal application of TouchWiz may make that fact a tough one to discern at first glance. Of course, Samsung’s additions don’t end there: the full slew of S-Pen applications is present too, as are plenty of modifications and updates seen in the recently-launched Galaxy Note 10.1 (think increased S-Pen sensitivity, greater hover distance, and more).
It’s also worth noting that Samsung’s timing really couldn’t be any better — LG opened the doors to its latest press conference/domestic phone unveiling just an hour ago, and now its rival has announced availability for its newest top-tier Android handset. To top it all off, LG also just recently launched its own hulking handset — the LG Intuition — which was largely panned by critics. The poor guys just can’t catch a break.
Apple’s website now shows the unlocked pricing for the iPhone 5 in the U.S. Using the site’s compare tool, you can see that the 16GB model starts at $ 649, with the 32GB version costing $ 749, and the 64GB top-tier configuration running $ 849.
That’s the same that the iPhone 4S used to cost unlocked, and it’s a considerable additional expense above and beyond the on-contract price, but you get a couple of advantages.
First, you’re not locked into a lengthy carrier contract, which is useful if you suddenly have to move. You can also then use the iPhone on T-Mobile, which is in the process of deploying a network on the 1,900 MHz spectrum that will finally let the iPhone achieve top mobile broadband speeds on the U.S.’s fourth-largest carrier.
Choosing which unlocked device to buy will be important, however, as there are three variations that provide overseas LTE support, support for U.S. and Canada LTE networks on the 700 MHz frequency, and support for Sprint and Verizon LTE networks respectively.
Pre-orders for the iPhone 5 start at 12:01 AM PT Friday, so get your motors running.
Nintendo will finally make its Wii U available to customers this November, after having previewed the next-gen console for over a year now, the company announced at a press event today. The Wii U will come in a $ 299.99 Basic version in white with 8GB of onboard storage, and a 32GB Deluxe model in black for $ 349.99. It’ll hit the U.S. on November 18 and Europe on November 30.
The console will ship with one of its signature GamePads, the touchscreen controller that looks and behaves a bit like a standalone mobile console or a tablet, and which gives gamers an added element of play, either via second-screen content or via the ability to play games on the handset instead of the TV.
Early response to the controller device has been lukewarm, with many criticizing its battery life (three to five hours) and how it can’t operate as a standalone device without the Wii U base, something Sony is capitalizing on by making the Vita a second-screen device for some PS3 games. Another concern was that originally, each console only supported one GamePad at a time; Nintendo, however, has since said that the Wii U will ship with support for two GamePads at once. Wii U owners can also connect up to four Wii Remotes at once, and your existing hardware for the original Wii will be compatible.
For Nintendo, this is a huge launch. The company ran into trouble early on with its last hardware release, the 3DS, which started slowly even though it gradually gained steam. But following the blockbuster success of the Wii and Nintendo DS, it was a considerable wake-up call. The gaming giant posted its first loss in three quarters in July, owing to a 3DS that still wasn’t generating income despite an uptick in sales. Some credit the rise of mobile gaming as one of the reasons behind Nintendo’s flagging fortunes.
Depending on how the Wii U fares, we could see drastic changes at the Japanese game company. Shareholders have pushed Nintendo to consider becoming a platform-agnostic game publisher in order to get out of the thin-margin hardware game and bring lucrative brands like Mario to iOS and Android devices. The Wii U could be Nintendo’s last big chance to prove that it can still move hard goods, not just beloved gaming icons.
