Smart TV penetration in Japan will reach 50% by 2019

Smart TV adoption has improved in many developed regions, along with China, as consumers increasingly seek streaming content from online video services. By 2019, more than 50 percent of TV households in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany will have smart TVs, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight.

According to the latest information from the IHS TV Sets Intelligence Service, smart TV household penetration in Japan has already reached 50 percent and will rise to 63 percent in 2019, followed by the United States at 57 percent. Among Western European countries, Germany and the United Kingdom are expected to reach 53 percent penetration for smart TVs in 2019, followed closely by France at 50 percent.

“Increasing demand for 4K resolution, the debut of high dynamic range (HDR) for both hardware and content, and access to streaming content that supports these features will accelerate smart TV demand globally,” saidHisakazu Torii, Senior Director of Consumer Device Research for IHS Technology. “Growing availability of 4K content from online video providers will also support this trend, as will the introduction of ultra-high-definition Blu-ray in 2016.”

Although China is considered to be an emerging TV market, smart TV household penetration is expected to reach 46 percent by 2019, which is higher than other emerging regions. Smart TV is an essential feature on TVs sold in China, because many Chinese consumers seek out online content services. “With content providers and smart-device manufacturers, such as Alibaba, LeTV, Xiaomi, now entering the TV set market, Chinese consumers have more smart TV choices than ever before,” Torii said. “Increased sales of 4K TVs will accelerate these trends in the Chinese market.”

Unlike the high adoption expected in most developed countries and China, smart TV household penetration in other emerging countries will remain low, due to a lack of online video content and insufficient infrastructure to deliver the required broadband Internet content to the home. For those reasons, smart TV household penetration in Brazil and Russia will only reach 36 percent in 2019 and just 3 percent in India.

via [technology.ihs.com]

Rs. 251 smartphone by Ringing Bells

Ringing Bells a Indian smartphone manufacturer is launching Rs.251 smartphone in Indian market on 17th February 2016.  The event is honored by Indian Defense Minister Mr. Manohar Parrikar.

The Freedom 251 specifications are 4-inch display, 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, 8GB internal storage (expandable up to 32GB), 3.2-megapixel back camera, 0.3-megapixel front camera, and a 1450mAh battery.

It will available for sale on freedom251.in with registration. Appears to be the project has government support.

Ringing Bells says that the smartphone is in line with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to connect every Indian and enrich their lives.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 wearable oriented SOC

Adding to the league of Samsung Exynos 3250 and Apple S1, Qualcomm announced the new SOC for wearable devices named Snapdragon 2100.

The Snapdragon Wear 2100 is a quad-core Cortex A7 running at up to 800MHz or 1.2GHz (Qualcomm at various points states both) with an Adreno 304 GPU and 400MHz LPDDR3. The choice of using a Cortex A7 is warranted by the fact that Cortex A53s are too power hungry for wearables and that it's likely too early to see Cortex A35 based SoCs as ARM announced the core only a couple of months ago. A big advantage that Qualcomm has with the Wear 2100 is that it's able to offer an integrated X5 modem for basic cellular connectivity. 

The Snapdragon Wear platform is ideally suited for smartwatches, as well as for kid and elder trackers, sports watches, connected headsets, smart eyewear, and more. Numerous wearables powered by the Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor are already in development; smartwatches are expected to be commercially available in the second half of this year.