5G smartphones, “the most accelerated mobile technology generation ever launched,” could reach sub-$200 price points in 2021, causing challenges for the industry, said ABI Research analyst David McQueen in a 2021 trend forecast Tuesday. 5G’s fast adoption brings a “raft of technical challenges” that may lead to substantial changes in mobile device design, McQueen said. Availability of 5G smartphone models will become more diverse, “brought to market quickly at a wide variety of price points, democratizing the 5G experience,” said the analyst. A “seismic shift to lower price tiers” will be the main growth driver for accelerated 5G adoption, made possible by affordable chipsets from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Unisoc, said McQueen. That will leave a “squeezed” high end of 5G smartphones, he said. Smartphone replacement cycles could benefit short term, but the fast-tracked migration of 5G to lower-tier phones could have a domino effect on average selling prices and overall profitability. “It would be of little surprise if 2021 saw 5G smartphones fall below the $200 mark, driven by the availability of cheaper components and pricing policies of chipset vendors,” said the analyst. 5G will have positive and negative impact on the environment, said analyst Jun Wei Ee. The synergy between 5G and artificial intelligence and the IoT could mean lower energy consumption and increased efficiencies in operations long term, but energy consumption could also increase tremendously in the 5G world as the higher speeds encourage more usage among consumers and applications, he said. Accelerated adoption also will lead to large amounts of electronic waste, said the analyst. He urged operators and manufacturers to do more to encourage recycling and use of recycled materials in their 5G efforts. Geopolitical trade wars left their mark on the smartphone market, with Huawei at the center, said McQueen. Huawei is a market leader, with about 20% global share, but it's “struggling to stay in the market in the longer term and rebuild its now tainted brand outside of China,” McQueen said. A diminished Huawei would leave a void that current smartphone vendors would rush to fill, McQueen said, citing Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus. It could also enable resurrection of “once-notable” smartphone brands including LG, Motorola, Nokia-HMD and Sony, he said. Ultra-wideband (UWB) will be ubiquitous in 2021, said ABI. Increased adoption will result from wider chipset availability, adoption across multiple segments and a “healthy UWB ecosystem across the entire supply chain,” said analyst Andrew Zignani.

Aggregation, security and voice control are key areas in the surging pay-TV streaming video market as consumers continue their exodus from traditional pay TV, panelists told Parks Associates’ recent Future of Video virtual conference. “The value of aggregation is huge,” said Ben Grad, fuboTV head-content strategy and acquisition, saying over-the-top video customers will “continue to flock” to services that offer a wide range of content “all in one place, on one platform, on devices they already have in their home.” Consumers don’t want to split their viewership among a dozen different apps, he said. More viewers are moving to aggregation platforms for streaming channels to simplify billing and access services through a single interface, said Parks analyst Kristen Hanich. Content aggregation will be “interesting” amid a fragmented OTT market, said Lu Bolden, Verimatrix chief revenue officer. It’s a challenge for the industry when a customer searches for content to “figure out what that end user’s authorized for through what platform,” he said. “Did they sign up through fubo for this particular piece of content, or this channel, or through Philo?” Services will want to keep subscribers in an environment that gives them access to applications and content “so that everyone can monetize this along the way,” said Bolden. That requires “complex insight” into data, authorization information and agreements among intermediaries. Voice control has an essential role in helping consumers find content in a fragmented space, panelists said, though Megan Dover, Cox executive director-video and entertainment product management and development, sees it as evolutionary technology. On whether far-field mics might be built into a set-top boxes vs. integrated into the handheld remote, Dover said Cox is studying the possibility as an “ideal” offering for the future. “It would be great to be able to not touch a remote control and say, ‘I want to watch …,' and it starts playing,” she said, but customers are also used to being able to pause, rewind and fast-forward within a program. Those commands are still cumbersome for voice control, Dover said. Sports betting is also becoming more popular on TV services, and security will be important as that segment expands, said Verimatrix’s Bolden. Implementing monetary transactions on platforms previously used only for viewing entertainment will be an issue, he said. It’s challenging to tie in authentication of users “as they’re moving from platform to platform” and make it easy for them to move from a smartphone to a TV to another device while having to remember passwords, Bolden said: “You want to make the experience for the end user easy, so they’ll stay on your platform -- but still secure.”

New Samsung QLED TVs launching globally in 2021 will support a new "HDR10+ Adaptive" feature that adjusts picture quality to ambient room light, said the manufacturer Wednesday. “HDR10+ Adaptive supports Filmmaker Mode and adapts to brighter rooms so customers can enjoy a true cinematic experience with HDR10+ movies and television programs in any environment at home,” said Samsung, developer of the HDR10+ dynamic-metadata technology. It’s unclear what the company meant in suggesting HDR10+ Adaptive supports Filmmaker Mode, the independent TV picture setting hatched by the UHD Alliance in summer 2019 for rendering better movie watching in the living room as creators intended it. Filmmaker Mode works mostly through automatic metadata detection in a TV to deactivate motion smoothing and other processing optimized for live sports when the set senses that the content being rendered is a movie or episodic TV show. It’s also available on TVs from LG and Vizio that support Dolby Vision. “With HDR10+ and Filmmaker mode, Prime Video content is optimized regardless of the viewing environment and customers can enjoy movies and TV shows the way the filmmakers intended,” said BA Winston, Amazon Prime Video global head-video playback and delivery. It was Amazon’s most explicit known endorsement of Filmmaker Mode, after fleeting references on a Sept. 30 UHD Alliance webinar that Prime Video will launch the feature "on select players next year.” Samsung touted Amazon Prime Video support for HDR10+ for years, evidenced by the many hours of content available on the service embedded with Samsung's preferred HDR technology. Samsung critics countered that Amazon Prime Video's HDR10+ hasn't been well-publicized.

Trade-in and resell company Gazelle is ending its trade-in service Feb. 1, it emailed customers Wednesday. Mobile device trade-ins in process will “continue as planned,” it said, providing a link for customers to check on status. Consumers will still be able to buy used electronics from Gazelle’s online store “for a fraction of the price,” the company said, while steering trade-in customers to sister brand ecoATM's kiosks in 4,000 locations across the U.S. Gazelle was acquired in 2015 by Outerwall (see 1510300028), which was bought by Apollo Global Management a year later. After Apollo’s purchase, former components of Outerwall, Redbox, Coinstar and ecoATM became separate businesses. As of July, ecoATM Gazelle had collected over 25 million phones and tablets from consumers, it said. Redbox still operates about 41,000 video rental kiosks in the U.S.

Boost Mobile added the 6.2-inch LG K22 to its smartphone lineup with an online price of $69, it said Tuesday. The 4G phone has a 5-megapixel front camera, 13-megapixel and macro 2-megapixel rear cameras, a 3,000 mAh battery, 2 GB RAM and a quad-core 1.3 GHz processor. Prepaid plans start at $10 per month. Through Jan. 7, Boost Mobile is offering new customers three lines for $90 per month with unlimited talk and text, plus 35 GB LTE data.

Jay Winegard, the legally deaf Queens, New York, resident responsible for filing dozens of Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits against various enterprises since July 2019, is now targeting CTA in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn with his first known ADA complaint against a trade association. All of Winegard's suits allege inaccessibility to online content through lack of closed captioning or other assistive measures violates the ADA rights of those with hearing disabilities. CTA “excludes the deaf and hard of hearing” from “full and equal participation” in its CES website, CES.tech, in breach of the 1990 statute, said the Christmas Day complaint (in Pacer). Like all of Winegard’s lawsuits, it seeks class-action status on behalf of all people in the U.S. with hearing disabilities. “Without closed captioning deaf and hard-of-hearing people cannot enjoy video content” on CES.tech “while the general public can,” it said. CES.tech qualifies as a “place of public accommodation” that “denies equal access” to the deaf and hearing-impaired under the scope and meaning of the ADA, it said. CTA didn't comment Monday.

Dish Network said it will follow a National Advertising Division recommendation and drop or modify some express and implied claims for its Hopper 3 DVR. NAD said Wednesday AT&T brought the complaint, and while Dish maintained it was comparing only cloud DVRs, many consumers likely would see the comparative claims as also encompassing hardware DVRs. Dish emailed us it "believes in the self-regulatory process and will comply with NAD’s decision," but it is "disappointed that our considerable consumer evidence was completely discounted."

“Save $350 when you register for the all-digital #CES2021 by Jan. 3,” tweeted CTA Wednesday. “Get a front row seat to the latest innovations without ever leaving home.” The $149 CES 2021 registration fee for most attendees rises to $499 starting Jan. 4. CTA said it posted the escalated price to encourage CES attendees to register early because it needs time to qualify applicants as legitimate trade visitors. Late registrations have been an unwanted practice common to virtual trade shows and conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic, said CTA President Gary Shapiro (see 2012170058).

The impact of the U.S. iPhone 12 launch was evident in the Census Bureau’s smartphone import data trends for October, as accessed through the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb tool. Apple’s Oct. 23 release of its first 5G-enabled flagship phone helped send October smartphone unit and dollar import volume soaring. The average October smartphone import was more than a third costlier than in September, though all metrics were noticeably lower than those of a year earlier, as 2020 has been a trying year for the category. U.S. importers sourced 17.49 million smartphones from all countries in October, up 17.2% from September but down 22.5% from October 2019, said DataWeb. October dollar imports spiked 59.3% over September's to $5.21 billion but were 24.1% lower than a year earlier. October smartphone imports were worth $298.43 on average, 36.3% higher than in September but 1.9% below the October 2019 average. China was the obvious beneficiary of the October smartphone import surge, with 83% share of all handsets shipped here in the month, compared with only 70.7% share in September, said DataWeb. Apple is known to be sourcing the iPhone 12 from Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory in China's Henan province. The company, notoriously protective of its proprietary sourcing information, didn’t respond to questions. U.S. importers sourced 14.51 million smartphones from China in October, 37.5% more than in September but 19.1% fewer than in October 2019, said DataWeb. The 104.15 million Chinese smartphones shipped here in the first 10 months were 73.4% of all handset imports to the U.S., slightly lower than its 74.3% share in the same 2019 period. China’s October smartphone import spike took a clear toll on Vietnam, which contributed 13.8% of all handset shipments to the U.S. in the month, down from its 23.9% share in September, said DataWeb. Vietnamese unit import volume of 2.41 million smartphones declined 32.3% from September and was down 35.9% from October 2019. Vietnam shipped just under 29 million smartphones to the U.S. in the year’s first 10 months, 20.4% of all handset imports to the U.S. in the January-to-October period, said DataWeb. The country’s significant stature in the smartphone category will bear watching as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative convenes a Section 301 investigative hearing Dec. 29 into allegations of Vietnamese currency manipulation to the detriment of U.S. commercial interests. The threat of possible tariffs on Vietnamese imports looms prominently over the proceeding. Smartphones from China technically remain exposed to the threat of List 4B Section 301 tariffs still on the books, but the Trump administration postponed the List 4B duties indefinitely after reaching the phase one trade deal with China nearly a year ago (see 2001160022).

Picking a vendor to run the digital platform of the virtual CES 2021, culminating in the October choice of Microsoft (see 2010190043), started with about 60 contenders, CTA President Gary Shapiro told us last week. Among the factors, “we went with Microsoft because they had done their own event,” he said of the Microsoft Ignite all-digital conference that debuted Sept. 22. “We actually signed up and watched it” as part of the evaluation, he said. “Microsoft had so many things we wanted, including a production studio, and they obviously know how to do cybersecurity,” said Shapiro. “There was a lot of chemistry.” The deal includes "things they hadn’t done before” such as show registrations and other CES-centric activities, Shapiro said. “There are other companies that were brought in as subcontractors. It’s a pretty complicated relationship.” Shapiro traveled earlier in December to Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to do “production work,” he said. “Essentially, we’ve gone from producing a physical event to producing a number of TV shows. It’s totally different for us.” CTA is “able to do things” in the digital domain it never would have considered before, including changing the CES show dates six months out, he said, laughing. CTA originally planned to do the virtual show on the same Jan. 6-10 dates as the canceled physical Las Vegas show before moving to Jan. 11-14.