Rebecca Day

Affordable Android tablets are projected to be among the hottest selling CE gifts this season, and Lenovo seeded the market Tuesday with its offerings at a media event in New York. The $249 and $299 tablets were due to go on sale Wednesday at Lenovo.com and at third-party retailers Best Buy, Newegg and Tiger Direct, with an exclusive at Best Buy for the 8-inch model, Stephen Miller, Lenovo brand ambassador, told us. The Best Buy website promoted the iPad with Retina display on its splash page Wednesday morning, and a search for “Yoga” brought up Lenovo’s Yoga Ultrabook instead, along with a long list of yoga DVDs led by Jillian Michaels’ Yoga Meltdown. We found the 8-inch model at BestBuy.com only after a targeted search for “Lenovo Yoga tablet.” Lenovo is making money on the devices, said Miller. “We're not trying to go out and be a price leader for the sake of buying a market.” The company wants consumers to see Lenovo as “a cool brand” and one that people “fall in love with and keep for five or 10 years,” he said. On how Lenovo will make the Yoga tablets stand out in a crowded category this holiday season, Miller said unique features including 18-hour battery life and a kickstand that allows versatile positioning will “give salespeople something to talk about.” The battery is stored in a cylindrical section on the side of the tablet, which presenters used as a handle for holding the tablet while taking photos with the five-megapixel camera. Miller positioned the Yoga models as Android tablets for those “without a lot of money to spend,” as well as tablet veterans. “In North America, there’s not a lot of first-time buyers left,” he said. “Almost everybody who wants a tablet has owned at least one.” Tablet buyers may have shared one in the past, but buyers generally have experience with tablets, Miller said. Company research indicated battery life is a top priority for tablet customers, Miller said, so the company included a “notebook-style” lithium-ion battery that “doubles or triples” the battery life of standard tablets, he said. The battery case doubles as a stand, he noted, positioning it as a value-add for consumers who won’t need to buy an additional stand. He touted the “multi-mode” capability of the devices, which can be used in “hold, stand and tilt” positions. The tablets have Dolby Digital 5.1, quad-core processors and 16 GB internal memory, expandable to 64 GB via micro SD. The tablets weigh 0.88 and 1.33 pounds, according to literature.

Bang & Olufsen on Tuesday officially launched the BeoLab 17 compact speakers ($3,990 a pair) with Wireless Speaker and Audio (WiSA) capability it previewed at CEDIA Expo last month, along with the BeoLab 19 geometric subwoofer ($3,395) and flagship BeoLab 18 speakers ($6,590). BeoLab 18, designed after the company’s iconic BeoLab 8000 speaker that debuted in 1992, adds a slatted wood grill option ($1,390) that brings a mixed-material strategy to the line combining aluminum and wood, said CEO Tue Mantoni. The speakers, sub-branded Immaculate Wireless Sound, will ship at the end of November, Mantoni said.

Amazon’s addition of “millions” of new Amazon Prime customers in the past 90 days should bode well for revenue growth “given the tendency of Prime members to spend more on the site than non-Prime members,” said Bank of Montreal Capital Markets analyst Edward Williams after Amazon’s Q3 earnings call Thursday. Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak said on the call that retention of Prime members has been strong and those shoppers are doing more “cross-shopping” among the company’s various offerings.

Simultaneous promotional discounts from Redbox in the first half of Q3 negatively affected revenue and gross margins, but Outerwall made adjustments “quickly and appropriately,” said CEO Scott Di Valerio on the company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday. Promotions in July and early August involved “a little more volume than what we typically would do,” including a rent-one-get-one-rental-free deal, 50 percent off on Friday rentals and a text club, Di Valerio said.

CEA forecasters predicted at the Industry Forum in Los Angeles an uptick in novel marketing moves to get consumers to open their wallets early and often during the crucial Q4 selling season. We found in a scan of email promotions and websites Thursday early strategies at work, including free shipping, free products as part of bundle deals, trade-in programs to bring customers into stores and customary price-cutting. Retailers are combining email marketing with in-store promotions, coming up with innovative ways to pull customers into stores.

LOS ANGELES -- Fewer shopping days this holiday selling season -- 26 compared with 32 last year -- will have “some impact” on consumers but much more on retailers looking to boost same-store sales growth, Steve Koenig, CEA director of industry analysis, told us after the 2013 holiday sales panel at the CEA Industry Forum. “Consumers aren’t that cognizant that there are fewer shopping days this year between Black Friday and Christmas but the channel is supremely aware of this,” Koenig said.

LOS ANGELES -- “The stakes have never been higher for brick-and-mortar retailers,” said Steve Koenig, CEA director-industry analysis, at the 2013 Holiday Sales and Forecast session during the CEA Industry Forum. The goal for retailers this year is “to raise store comps,” Koenig said, saying the progressively lower prices in holiday doorbuster deals aren’t “sustainable.” The industry has to “demonstrate to Wall Street that they're getting people into the store, and they're getting them to open their wallet,” Koenig said.

LOS ANGELES -- An Ultra HD Blu-ray player could be on the market by Christmas 2015, said 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn, during a Q-and-A session after the keynote speech at the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Dunn referred to “multiple flavors” of Ultra HD but said the “best thing” would be to have a consumer experience Ultra HD on a big-screen TV in a retail store and come out saying, “That looks different, that looks so much better, that sounds incredible.” Ultra HD “in full flavor” involves sending “really fat files that throw tremendous amounts of data up to a display,” he said. Fox is working with studio and hardware partners on what Dunn called “the Digital Bridge” within the Blu-ray Disc Association, he said.

Amid news reports in Japan that Panasonic will discontinue plasma panel production within the fiscal year ending March 31, plasma TVs continue their price free-fall at retail, we found in a scan of e-commerce sites Friday. Panasonic itself has declined comment on the reports.

SanDisk is looking to 4K video and services from streaming video providers to help drive higher density storage capacities in smartphones, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said on the company’s Q3 2013 earnings call. Features that used to be available only in premium smartphones are transitioning to mid- and low-end smartphones, driving higher average capacities in a broader segment of the smartphone market, he said. Emerging 4K video and content from YouTube and Amazon that can be downloaded to a smartphone for later viewing are the start of trends that will proliferate across devices and manufacturers, he said. Average capacities are expected to double by 2016, Mehrotra said, citing “exciting opportunities ahead” for flash usage in smartphones.