Rebecca Day

Specialists are scrambling to keep up with big box retailers, who have kicked off the Super Bowl season with steep discounts on big-screen TVs.

A registered nurse in Springdale, Ark., is hoping her brainchild, a tablet PC accessory, becomes the first product to win aisle placement at Walmart as part of the retailer’s “Get on the Shelf” contest. A little like an “American Idol” for product developers, the contest will produce three winners, either an individual or a company, whose products will be voted in for sale at the largest retailer in the country -- one in stores and online and two online only -- following two rounds of voting beginning March 7.

The decline in netbook sales in the quarter ended Dec. 31 took its toll on the PC industry overall, Microsoft executives said on the company’s Q2 earnings call Thursday. The overall PC market in Q2 faced “particular softness in the consumer segment,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer.

LAS VEGAS -- WiSA, the Wireless Speaker & Audio Association that launched last month, demoed wireless audio systems at CES last week, including an Aperion Audio system already on the market, but no announcements were made of upcoming products incorporating the fledgling technology. That includes no showing of a TV accessory that would carry a wireless signal from a TV or Blu-ray player to a standalone speaker. Such an accessory is a bridge product the association hopes will be an interim step toward its ultimate goal: wireless audio connectivity between TVs and speakers.

Harman International’s Aha unit will add three more car maker partners this year in addition to the partnerships it announced at CES with Subaru and Honda, Robert Acker, general manager of Aha, told Consumer Electronics Daily.

For the first time since their introduction, LED-backlit TVs, the step-up category of flat-panel TVs, became the dominant technology in Q3 2011, moving past models using cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL), said IHS iSuppli. Shipments of LED-lit TVs totaled 4.09 million in Q3, compared with 3.85 million units for CCFL, IHS said. LEDs represented 44 percent of flat-panel TV shipments in Q3, compared with 41 percent for CCFL, with the remaining 15 percent of shipments claimed by plasma TVs, which don’t use backlights, IHS said.

LAS VEGAS -- Mobile electronics continued its growth trajectory at CES as companies including Delphi, Ford, Audi, Mercedes and Chrysler were on hand demonstrating safety, communications, energy, entertainment and health benefits of connected car technologies.

High-end music server manufacturer Olive Media will soon offer an solid state drive (SSD) storage option in its 06HD and 04HD servers, Robert Altmann, senior vice president of business development, told us at CES. In December, Olive Media qualified OCZ’s Deneva 2 SSD drives for its servers based on the drive’s performance, energy efficiency and low-noise operation, Altmann said. Olive contacted OCZ, a San Jose, Calif.,-based company, because “we thought it would make sense to develop a product with an SSD,” Altmann said. The “huge benefits” of SSD storage for hi-fi playback are speed -- a boot-up time that’s 5-10 seconds faster than a hard disk -- and a lack of moving parts, which translates to “no operational or electronic noise,” Altmann said. Introduction of electronic noise by a hard drive is especially important in high-end audio, though the company “already isolates noise so well” in its music servers that the electronic noise introduced by drives is not “acoustically discernible,” Altmann said. Another benefit of SSD is lower operating temperature due to lower power consumption, he said. “Theoretically,” he said, “the reliability of those drives is much better because SSDs have a theoretical lifespan of 80 years.” Altmann said it’s “hard to say” what the lifetime is for the company’s standard hard disk drives because “it’s not a matter of if, but when, they'll fail.” The company has had very few problems with products currently in the market, which Olive has been shipping since 2005. “The application we use the hard drives for is very read-intensive so we don’t have much strain on them versus a PC that’s doing a lot of things at the same time,” he said. The primary drawback of SSDs at this point is the value proposition, Altmann said. He showed us a 480-gigabyte hard drive with a manufacturing cost of $750. The 04 and 06 hard-disk-based servers have 2-terabyte drives. “We are basically selling SSD at cost to our customers,” because the company is less interested in making money on the storage technology and more interested in testing the SSD storage concept “to see if our customers accept this type of solution in a music server.”

LAS VEGAS -- After showing active and passive 3D TV designs at CES last year, Haier America came to this year’s show with its first market-ready 3D TVs, a series of passive models that will each ship with six pairs of polarized glasses, Ken Ayukawa, product and marketing manager, told us.

LAS VEGAS -- In a seemingly reluctant concession to a competitive 3D TV market, Panasonic will ship three LED-based passive 3D TVs in late Q1, but the company will continue to push what it calls the superior performance of active 3D technology, Larry McGough, sales and support representative, told us at the Panasonic booth at CES. The 42-, 47- and 55-inch models, which were neither on display at the Panasonic booth nor highlighted at the company’s press conference Monday, will be packaged with four pairs of polarizing 3D glasses when they ship in late February or March, McGough said.