Telecoms Tech

By all accounts, 2012 will be the year that media tablet adoption accelerates. Tablet usage by existing device owners has skyrocketed. As an example, Apple iPad users are estimated to have already cumulatively downloaded three billion applications since the launch of the iPad in 2010.

Dan York travels to CES to get a sense of the state of IPv6 support - or NOT- among consumer electronics providers.

I have had many friends and relatives share their gadget purchase decisions with me these past weeks and none of them were Apple products. Based on my informal questioning it seems the only reason to not buy an iPad and instead a gadget from Barnes & Noble or Amazon is price. In other words I get the sense these purchases would all be iPad 2s if the prices were similar.

Partly driven by the desire to be connected anywhere, anytime -- and to have access to every type of content -- the consumer electronics (CE) industry continues to develop new mobile communication and computing platforms. A key dynamic of this change is the consumer desire for a rich visual experience on any size screen.

We've reached a significant tipping-point for over-the-top (OTT) video consumption in the U.S. market. Now that online video user penetration surpassed 50 percent of the general population in 2011, it's truly become a mainstream pursuit.

Microsoft has belly-flopped into the middle of the gaming, TV and entertainment market, and is set to make huge waves with the latest iteration of its Xbox software, delivering a vast cache of on-demand movie and TV content directly through the console’s Xbox Live connection.

Mobile device apps adoption has created many new business opportunities for software developers with unique domain expertise. A case in point is the sports and health related mobile application market. Together they will grow to over $400 million in 2016 -- up from just $120 million in 2010.

Media tablets are the latest consumer electronics device to gain adoption at home and then slowly infiltrate the enterprise IT environment. I first noticed the growing use of tablets by numerous early-adopters at the SXSWi event back in March of this year.