Rebecca Day

Back-to-school sales are packed with low-end computing options including tablets, PCs and Chromebooks all competing for the sub-$500 segment of the market, we found in a scan of ad inserts from Sunday’s New York Times. In addition to $399 and $499 Galaxy tablets, the opening page of a P.C. Richard ad featured an HP Pavilion laptop with Intel i3 dual-core processor, a 15.6-inch screen, 4 GB RAM, a 500 GB hard drive and a DVD combo drive, selling for the $399 price of a Samsung 8-inch tablet, with a $100 rebate tossed in.

Home control is key to the future of Logitech’s Harmony remote control line, David Lubinsky, senior product manager, told us on a pre-holiday season walkthrough of the company’s 2014 lineup in New York Thursday. Playing supporting roles on display with Logitech’s existing lineup of premium remotes -- the Harmony Ultimate ($349) and Harmony Smart Control ($129) -- were a Nest thermostat and Sonos Play:1 speaker, which join Philips’ Hue LED lighting system as third-party “end points” that are part of the turnaround strategy for the once-threatened product line. Logitech had the Harmony line on the block a year ago (CED July 26 p3) but pulled it back when offers were deemed too low and the higher-end remote control market reversed, with average selling prices for the category jumping 77 percent. In a survey earlier this year, 60 percent of Harmony customers said they wanted to be able to add home control to their remotes, Lubinsky said, helping to breathe new life into a category hit hard by smartphones and apps. The market research is a selling point Logitech is taking to third-party companies with the added clout of offering an installed base of “tens of millions” of Harmony remotes sold. Those remotes that aren’t Wi-Fi-enabled can become so with the addition of a Harmony remote, Lubinsky said. He wouldn’t disclose the next third-party companies Harmony plans to do business with but said logical home control category extensions could include window treatments and locks. Third-party support for home and entertainment system control is critical to success of the line, or any remote control line, because “no single company is capable of delivering the entire experience,” Lubinsky said. “The winner is the one who’s talking to everybody,” he said. Harmony has a way to go in home control to reach the number of audio/video-related devices it supports, which stands at 270,000 products from some 5,000 brands, he said.

Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman touted the company’s relationship with Amazon and the Fire Phone on its Q3 earnings call Thursday, after noting there was no update on talks between Dolby and Samsung for mobile devices. On its previous earnings call (CED May 1 p3), Dolby Chief Financial Officer Lewis Chew scaled back mobile licensing revenue projections by 10 percent for the quarter ending June 27, citing Dolby’s omission from Samsung’s latest smartphone, the S5, which began shipping in April. Yeaman said then that Dolby still had an opportunity to grow business with Samsung and “everything is still on the table,” while calling the absence of Dolby Digital Plus on the Galaxy S5 “disappointing."

Lowe’s is looking to broaden its relationship with insurance companies with its Iris smart home management system, Kevin Meagher, general manager-Smart Home for Lowe’s told Consumer Electronics Daily Friday. Lowe’s also hopes to boost the rate of insurance discounts customers can get when they link monitoring solutions to a State Farm home insurance policy, Meagher said.

New York-based CE retailer DataVision re-launched in a downsized location in Manhattan’s trendy Flatiron district, “the epicenter of New York City’s thriving tech scene,” the retailer said in a Wednesday news release. DataVision had operated for 21 years at 5th Avenue and 39th St., five blocks up from the Empire State Building, in a massive three-story showroom in a commercial area selling everything from camera lenses to home theater seating.

Silicon Image said it secured a “key design win” with the announcement that Nubia, a step-up brand from Chinese smartphone company ZTE, will incorporate MHL 3.0 (Mobile High-Definition Link) in its flagship Z7 smartphone. The Z7, using Silicon Image’s SiI8620 and SiI6031 MHL 3.0 chipset, is the first smartphone to implement simultaneous 4K UHD video and high-speed data, part of the latest MHL specification. It’s the first 4K smartphone made by a Chinese brand, Silicon Image said.

Ultra HD TVs gained a point of global TV market share in May, to five percent from 4 percent in April, 3 percent in March and 2 percent in February, said IHS, which said “pricing in the market remains too high” for Ultra HD TV to gain “meaningful share.” Despite the incremental growth among the top 13 LCD TV brands over the four-month period, Ultra HD TV “growth hasn’t budged much” since September when market share was 2 percent, IHS said. The top 13 brands account for more than 90 percent of overall Ultra HD LCD TV shipments and more than 75 percent of all LCD TV shipments, it said.

Samsung officially entered 100-plus screen size territory Tuesday when it said it was taking pre-orders for the 105-inch UN10559W Ultra HD LED-backlit LCD TV. The company announced the jumbo TV at CES and showed it as a prototype at its 2014 TV product launch last spring (CED March 21 p1) without giving marketing details. Tuesday, the company disclosed the staggering $119,999 price tag and said it would be “built to order."

Longtime specialty AV retailer Bjorn’s in San Antonio quietly launched an e-commerce business, President Bjorn Dybdahl told Consumer Electronics Daily Monday. The move is notable for the high-profile retailer whose commitment to the AV demo made his store the go-to launch pad for the compact disc. Bjorn’s also gave the first public demos of Dolby Digital, dual-layer DVD, HDTV and first U.S. consumer demos of Blu-ray.

Kaleidescape, having settled its longstanding court case with the DVD CCA (DVD Copy Control Association) over copyright infringement, is energetically positioning itself as a streaming content provider, Angelika Stalman, vice president-marketing, told us at a gathering of home theater industry professionals in Brooklyn Thursday. “Suddenly people have access to an unlimited amount of movies” that are accessible from tablets, smartphones and PCs, but the experience is being compromised in exchange for convenience, Stalman said. “What’s getting lost is the immersive, cinematic experience."