Rebecca Day

Barnes & Noble is taking aim at Amazon this holiday season with a $249 tablet that it touts as more powerful than the yet-to-be released Kindle Fire ($199) and a repriced Simple Touch Nook reader slashed by $50 to match the price of the lowest priced Kindle.

IT wholesale distributor Ingram Micro executives voiced relief during the company’s Q2 earnings call Thursday over HP’s change of heart toward spinning off its PC business. When asked what HP’s decision meant to Ingram Micro, CEO Gregory Spierkel said, “I see it as a positive.” HP’s decision not to divide the business is going to be “a good thing for them internally” because of so many intertwined systems, programs and initiatives that would have caused “some issues” had they split the company up, Spierkel said: “We knew it would probably be a challenge for a few quarters out when changes did take place."

SAN DIEGO -- “We're seeing a genuine resurgence in the audio space,” said Sean Murphy, senior account manager at CEA, at the CEA Industry Forum Wednesday. Against the backdrop of the iconic Maxell audio tape magazine ad from the 1980s -- showing a young male with hair blowing back from the powerful sound of his floorstanding speakers -- Murphy referred to the “audio Y2K paradigm shift” that’s the “antithesis” of audio 25 years ago.

SAN DIEGO -- A senior Energy Star official from the EPA faced polite hostility from CE executives at a CEA Industry Forum workshop on green labeling Tuesday over what the executives described as unfriendly directions the Energy Star program has taken over the last year. Several in the audience, for example, said they were unhappy that Energy Star’s CE ratings were trending toward including far more green “attributes” than just the energy efficiency criteria for which the program was conceived.

SAN DIEGO -- The future role of the set-top box, standards for connected TV and preserving the traditional TV viewing experience while expanding the universe of TV apps were key topics at the “Connected TV Platforms” panel at the CEA Industry Forum Wednesday. In a world that’s becoming increasingly untethered, the question of whether the set-top box will be “disintermediated” by Internet delivery of TV programming was a recurring question.

SAN DIEGO -- Cracking the health technology market will be challenging for the consumer electronics industry, panelists said Monday at the CEA Industry Forum. It’s a market the industry has pegged high hopes on, as indicated by the six sessions devoted to the topic. “It’s a growing space, said Ben Arnold, senior research analyst for CEA, as the industry “keeps expanding the definition of consumer electronics,” he said. Health and fitness technology offer a “vibrant opportunity” for CEA to engage more companies and do more work, and consumers “want to use the stuff they already own to improve health and wellness,” he said.

SAN DIEGO -- Ensuring safety is the biggest issue facing the mobile technology market as cars become connected and smartphone technology is increasingly integrated into the mobile environment, panelists said at the CEA Industry Forum Tuesday. As cars become connected, either via smartphone or in upcoming connected head units, which are replacing radios and CD players, they'll be able to interact with the cloud, bringing in Internet radio services and apps that are currently available to consumers in other devices, panelists said.

SAN DIEGO -- Spectrum constraints, connectivity beyond traditional consumer electronics devices, the cloud, emerging input interfaces and battery life were among the topics in the Five Technologies to Watch session that opened the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Jason Oxman, CEA senior vice president-industry affairs, spoke of the “looming spectrum crisis” due to consumer demand for wireless broadcast services and reiterated CEA’s position that there needs to be more spectrum allocated for wireless consumer devices. “We're not quite at a crisis point,” said Roger Cheng, senior writer for CNET, “but we're heading toward a spectrum crunch,” he said, citing consumers’ increased usage as they use wireless devices for listening to music, watching movies and playing games.

The “tablet market shakeout” in Q3 contributed to sequential declines in average selling prices for flash memory at SanDisk, Chief Financial Officer Judy Bruner said on a quarterly earnings call. Gigabytes sold grew 18 percent for SanDisk in Q3, but ASP per gigabyte dropped 13 percent, a result of “a reduced mix of iNAND sales during the quarter due to consolidation in the tablet market” and an increased mix of OEM card sales, Bruner said.

Think Finance launched a beta version of a lease-to-own website for CE products Thursday, targeted at the “financially underserved.” Shoppers at the site, called “Presta,” can lease products for a year and then own it, or they can purchase it at a “buy it now” price, CEO Ken Rees told Consumer Electronics Daily.