Rebecca Day

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.

A shortened holiday sales season could trigger an earlier start for promotional buzz this year as Black Friday falls on the latest possible date, Nov. 29, following an usually late Thanksgiving Day that’s sharing the calendar with the first day of Hanukkah.

After failing to meet product deliveries and sales goals, AudioXperts “ceased operations” Friday, President Eli Harary told Consumer Electronics Daily. CEDIA Expo last month was a last-ditch chance to generate enthusiasm for the company’s slow-to-market product line, said Harary, who repeated comments he made during a CEDIA Expo press event that AudioXperts provided a chair “with only one leg” that was “not enough for dealers to sit on.”

Sonos has quietly begun installing store within a store sections as part of a plan to have 20 locations throughout North America, Consumer Electronics Daily has learned. Several are already in place, including at an Abt’s Chicago-area location and a P.C. Richard & Son store in New York, a Sonos spokesman told us. Sonos is eying 20 stores nationwide to offer a way for “critical custom installation and specialty channels to have more presence with Sonos” and to showcase home theater and music solutions, the spokesman said. Meanwhile, Sonos filled in the entry level of its amplified speaker lineup Monday with the $199 Play:1, a round, compact solution for “nooks and crannies where you want a bit of music,” the spokesman said. Sonos is under siege from a host of audio companies looking to grab a slice of a pie that Sonos has owned to date. In the past month, Bose, Samsung and Phorus have launched multi-room streaming audio products, and Lenbrook is on deck to unveil its Bluesound multi-room audio products Thursday. The timing is purely coincidental, the Sonos spokesman said. Play:1 has been in the works for two years and is the “smallest, most aggressive form factor possible” while maintaining the company’s sound quality standards, he said. “It just happens to be launching at a time when all the others are coming in,” he said, “and it validates what we've been doing all along.” The future is “wireless and streaming,” he said. Although the Play:1 resembles Bluetooth speakers on the market, it doesn’t need Bluetooth due to a software upgrade Sonos added in December that enables users to stream music from an iOS device or Android tablet to one Sonos speaker “or a whole house of speakers,” he said. New software features that launched with the Play:1 and Sonos 4.2 include the ability to use a speaker’s Mute button for play, pause or skip functions without the need to use a smartphone or tablet, according to the website, and social networking song tagging. Also with the new release, a Connect:Amp and Sonos speakers can be configured for use as left and right rear speakers in a Sonos surround-sound setup. The feature was designed for custom installers, Sonos said.

Zonoff, supplier of Staples’ home control platform, will partner with more “big-name” companies by year-end or early 2014, and a service provider could well be in the mix, CEO Mike Harris told Consumer Electronics Daily. Zonoff, a self-described “behind-the-scenes” home control platform branded by other companies, has a “number of partner companies” that it hasn’t made public, Harris said. On whether any service providers are Zonoff customers, Harris said, “None that we can announce yet.”

Franklin, known for electronic dictionaries and PDAs, is looking for distribution in the Bluetooth world, CEO Barry Lipsky told us. At the recent Bluetooth demo event in New York, Franklin showed the Bluetooth Devin bracelet ($79) and two Bluetooth portable speakers called Typhoon ($39) and Tornado ($59) that also pack near field communication. The Tornado offers longer run time of eight hours versus five hours on the Typhoon. Franklin missed the deadline for the 2013 U.S. holiday sales season and hopes to sign retailers early in 2014, Lipsky said. The products are being sold in Europe, a spokeswoman said. The bracelet works via Bluetooth with a user’s phone, vibrating when a call comes in and displaying the number. Users can also answer an incoming call on the bracelet if the devices are paired. A notification buzz is sent when the bracelet is beyond the phone’s Bluetooth range to help users keep tabs of their phone. On the limited functionality of the iOS and Android-compatible bracelet, Lipsky said, “I've never wished I could read my emails on my wrist.” The Franklin speakers have a pop-up feature that’s used to turn on the speaker by pressing on the top. The speakers’ microphones can be used for Skype conversations, he said. Commenting on Franklin’s product segue from dictionaries to Bluetooth devices, Lipsky said, “It’s all about communication.”

Sound United, DEI Holdings’ division encompassing the Polk Audio, Definitive Technology and Boom brands, unveiled the first Polk home audio products developed at DEI’s Global Design Center, which opened last year in Vista, Calif. (CED May 7/12 p1). The center is overseen by DEI Chief Design Officer Michael DiTullo, ex-frog design, Nike and Converse, who told us at the products’ New York launch that the new Polk Heritage series is about changing the look of home audio products from “cold” and “glassy” to “warm and friendly.”

Lenbrook America, which embarked on an ambitious project last year to create digital music experience centers within select AV specialty stores (CED April 16/12 p1), has re-tooled the program, President Dean Miller told Consumer Electronics Daily. Lenbrook had installed five of the centers in retailers’ showrooms to educate consumers about computer audio but hit cost issues with the 400-square-foot display and discovered that one of the demos was too cumbersome, Miller said. The “crazy turntable one” was so involved that “no one could demonstrate it effectively,” he said. The turntable section has been replaced by one showing different streaming music services, he said.

Samsung joined the ranks of companies trying to grab a slice of the Sonos pie when it launched this week the Shape wireless multi-room audio system that goes on sale Oct. 13. The company chose the product name Shape for the powered speaker’s triangular configuration designed for placement in a corner, credenza or mounted to a wall and for the “emotional meaning” of how music has shaped consumers’ lives, Jim Kiczek, director of digital audio and video, told us during a press meeting in New York. Samsung is getting into the multi-room music category now because it’s one of the fastest-growing segments of the CE market, Kiczek said, and the product offers consumers a way to share music from smartphones in various rooms in the house. Shape includes the WAM750 speaker ($399 each), which can be used alone as a Bluetooth music system when paired with a smartphone, and it can be expanded into a multi-room audio system using the WAM250 Wi-Fi Hub ($49) and additional speakers. In a single-room setup, the speaker can pair to a phone using Bluetooth with NFC functionality, Kiczek noted. To create a multi-room system, consumers connect the Hub to a home’s router via ethernet cable and the system uses a multi-channel mesh networking technology to prevent network traffic interference by automatically securing clear audio data paths, according to product literature. The Hub supports dual-band Wi-Fi in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, Kiczek said. At launch, the system will support Rhapsody, Pandora, TuneIn Radio and Amazon Cloud Player and will stream music from any DLNA-compatible device as long as the files are sharable, he said, with multiple sources available to multiple rooms. The company expects to announce additional service partners in the future. A feature unique to Samsung’s music system is the ability to drag and drop a song into a room with a speaker using an Android or iPhone app, Kiczek demonstrated. The smartphone apps will be available at launch, he said, and apps for tablets will be available “shortly after.” Samsung is tying in its TVs to the system via Bluetooth as well, allowing consumers to listen to what’s playing on TV wirelessly via Bluetooth in the same room through a Shape speaker, Kiczek said. The products will be available at national retailers, at regional chains and online, he said.

Bluetooth Smart, finalized in Bluetooth 4.0 in summer 2010, has had the “fastest wireless technology adoption ever,” Suke Jawanda, chief marketing officer for Bluetooth Special Interest Group, told us at a Bluetooth demo event in New York this week. Bluetooth Smart “appcessories” alone are expected to account for Bluetooth 4.0 chipset shipments of 220 million units this year, up from 80 million last year and 20 million in 2011, Jawanda said. He projected shipments will grow to a billion units by 2016. Appcessories include devices like fitness trackers that communicate data to Bluetooth Smart-enabled apps, he said.