Rebecca Day

With rumors of a Sept. 9 launch of the iPhone 6 swirling around the blogosphere, as consumers, media and competitors await the launch of next-gen Apple smartphones, iPhone 5s offers reached new lows, according to deals website DealNews Wednesday.

Despite the Wireless Power Consortium’s announcement last week that it has integrated resonant technology into the Qi specification for wireless power, the industry is no closer to a unified wireless power standard, John Perzow, Consortium vice president-market development, told Consumer Electronics Daily. “I wish it did,” Perzow said, when we asked if the addition of resonant technology opened the door to a unified standard down the road, but “it does not."

Recent moves by Apple and Google toward developing connected home portfolios “don’t frighten” Control4, CEO Martin Plaehn said on its Q2 earnings call Thursday. A year after the Control4 IPO, Plaehn referred to the company’s “evangelizing” role in the growing awareness of the connected home and how it has been educating investors about the “home automation opportunity” before the arrival of new market entrants.

Product development company VSN Mobil -- stocked with former employees from General Dynamics, Motorola, Pininfarina and Samsung, among others -- is taking on GoPro in the action webcam market and plans to hit the U.S. market with a co-branded smartphone later in the year, Matt Gordon, vice president-strategic relationships, told Consumer Electronics Daily. VSN is funded by a private investor based in Singapore, a company spokesman said.

A 19 percent drop in comparable store CE sales of TVs, audio, personal electronics and accessories contributed to a $10 million fiscal Q1 loss at h.h. gregg, the company said Thursday, while sales of tablets and PCs fell 30 percent year-over-year. The company also had a 2 percent dip in appliance sales, a category h.h. gregg turned to in recent quarters to bolster sagging profits due to lower margins in CE. Sales of home products, including furniture, dipped half a percentage point for the quarter, h.h. gregg said. By segment, the Q1 sales mix was 57 percent appliances, 31 percent CE products, 7 percent PCs and tablets, and 5 percent home products, the company said. The falloff in CE sales was due to a double-digit decline in video unit sales “offset slightly” by an uptick in average selling price on the company’s shift to larger TV screen sizes and premium featured TVs, said CEO Dennis May. Janney analyst David Strasser said h.h. gregg TV sales were also likely down due to Best Buy’s stronger vendor relationships. Janney is optimistic about 4K Ultra HD TV driving holiday sales and believes pricing compression “will be dramatic, driving demand,” Strasser said. “The question is, will profitability remain elevated as the pricing gets aggressive,” he said. Meanwhile, the drop in the computer and tablet category was due to the retailer’s exit from the contract-based mobile phone business and lower demand for PCs, May said. Citing ongoing initiatives to reposition the business around a broader assortment of home products and “continued volatility in the consumer electronics industry,” May chose not to provide guidance for fiscal 2015. But the company now expects annual comp store sales to be “negative high-single digits to negative mid-single digits” compared to previous estimates of negative low-single digits to flat, he said.

The audiophile of the future is going to be concerned “less about technology and more about robustness of sound,” incoming Thiel Audio CEO John Wittman told Consumer Electronics Daily Wednesday. “Our world is so much more complex,” Wittman said, “and we need to evolve with that."

Best Buy didn’t immediately respond to questions about its plans for its tablet mix for the second half, following an article by Walt Mossberg in Re/code Wednesday quoting CEO Hubert Joly on slumping tablet sales. “Tablets boomed and are now crashing,” Joly told Mossberg, saying volume has “really gone down” in the past few months. Joly cited a dearth of innovation in tablets that has given consumers little incentive to upgrade since tablets burst on the CE scene as a market “phenomenon” four years ago.

Top global smartphone company Samsung saw its market share drop from 32.3 percent to 25.2 percent from Q2 2013 to 2014, while a “wide range of Chinese OEMs more than outpaced the market” in Q2, according to a report from IDC. Samsung’s shipments declined 3.9 percent in Q2 to 74.3 million units, still far ahead of No. 2 Apple, which saw shipments increase 12.4 percent over Q2 2013 to 35.1 million units, according to IDC. But Apple’s market share also shrank from 13 percent to 11.9 percent year over year for the period, it said.

Samsung clarified details of its $120,000 curved 105-inch Ultra HD TV (CED July 23 p1) this week. Samsung Elite Service, included with the purchase of the TV, will include an in-home visit from Samsung field engineers who will explain to consumers the features of the TV and optimize it for viewing, the company said. The visit to a customer’s home will take place “a period of time after delivery and installation and is not necessarily coordinated with the retailer,” it said. Samsung has not prescribed installation parameters to dealers for securely mounting the six-figure TV to a wall. Samsung said the TV has a “solid structure” that supports the large size, “and to maintain the high aesthetic, it’s designed to hide any screws on its exterior.” The company said that “great care has been taken to ensure the best picture quality while maintaining an even curve on such a large screen.” While a dealer had told us dealer cost was “about $90,000,” Samsung disputed that figure. It didn’t provide dealer cost, citing company policy. The aspect of the widescreen TV is 2.37:1, Samsung said, adding that the 105-inch offers “different options for the consumer to view content of the various aspect ratios available.” Samsung also noted that the price of the 2014 One Connect box, which the Samsung website said will ship in two to four weeks, is $399, versus $299 for the 2013 model. Samsung has not provided a lead time for the TVs but said they will be “built to order.”

Bose is giving away a D2 Android tablet with the purchase of a Wave SoundTouch system ($599.95) through July 31 at Bose.com. The SoundTouch is Bose’s wireless music system that offers on-board streaming from Pandora and “thousands” of Internet radio stations. By pairing the SoundTouch with a tablet, users have more options for streaming over Wi-Fi via the SoundTouch app. On the SoundTouch product page at the Amazon website, it appears that access to a broader selection of music other than what the SoundTouch has onboard has been an issue for some users. One customer asked how she could connect her Amazon Prime music account from her computer to the SoundTouch system. A user responded to her July 19, saying, “You don’t. You can only connect to Pandora at this time.” He referred her to his post on the top at the Bose user forum, but that post was no longer available when we tried to access it. Another respondent said, “At present that’s not possible.” A third user responded to the question with a solution for streaming music services from an iPad via the SoundTouch app and AirPlay, telling her that then, “you can listen to anything.”