One in four Britons says that their computer is “the most irreplaceable thing in their life”, according to new research. A third say they use a PC for more than two hours every evening, even if they’ve also used one throughout their working day. One in seven claimed that their ideal evening now involves surfing the internet while enjoying a glass of wine.
The study of 2,000 users indicates that 14%, however, regard their computer as a fashion accessory. A quarter of respondents say their computer says more about them than their clothes.
Futurologist Dr Rachel Lawes said that the PC “is the essential piece of kit that defines what it means to be alive at this moment in history”. She said that the research, funded by Microsoft, indicated that “The PC is to consumers what the car used to be in the 20th century.” She also claimed that it vindicated Microsoft’s strategy of increasingly emphasising the range of colours and styles available across different computers, via its ‘Collection’ brand.
Most users – 68% overall and 78% of 18 to 24 years olds – also said that they would rather have a PC than a TV. Six out of ten also said they would be replacing their hifi with something computer-based in the next three years.
HP is the latest PC maker to jump into tablets - and in entering the market, it has immediately become the latest tablet maker to land under Apple's shadow. The HP TouchPad is the first tablet based on the WebOS mobile operating system, which HP acquired when it purchased Palm a year ago. It has had tepid reviews this week.
Although WebOS shows some flashes of finger-friendly brilliance (it seems far better suited for a tablet than for the small screen of a phone), the TouchPad suffers from cumbersome design, performance lags, and a poor app selection.
The Wi-Fi TouchPad comes in two versions at launch, with a 16GB model costing £399 and a 32GB model costing £479, price tags that put it on a par with the iPad 2.
Had the TouchPad launched a year ago, soon after the first-generation Apple iPad, it might not have felt so behind the curve. But at this point it seems to be playing catch-up, despite the fact that it has several distinguishing features. Chief among them are the immersive meshing of contacts from multiple Web services and sources, the ability to print, Touchstone inductive charging, and touch-to-share (a Web, phone, and messaging transfer capability that will eventually work with the HP Veer and the upcoming HP Palm Pre smartphones).
HP hopes that Russel Brand can boost sales as the face of the TouchPad. There is a series of 12 short clips where Brand demonstrates the tablet's features.
On Monday 4th July Dell are launched their first ever daytime TV sponsorship, becoming the face of SkyOne family programming. Throughout July, 15'' and 5'' indents will be running throughout daytime TV programming promoting the new Inspiron 15R and its changeable lids. The SkyOne platform allows Dell to cost effectively build a relationship with a key demographic by association with SkyOne's quality daytime family programming.
Performance tracking has been made possible with the use of vanity URLs, whilst we will also be tracking halo effects on our core DRTV campaign (which is aligned with the sponsorship creative).
This is a significant step away from Dell's normal TV activity, promoting a solid relationship with a key station audience.
Canadian smartphone vendor RIM has reportedly cut internal sales estimates for its BlackBerry PlayBook by more than half for its second quarter, from 2.4 million units to 900,000, reports Digitimes.
The revision came after RIM announced it had sold 500,000 PlayBooks in USA and Canada, which were sold from its mid-April launch until early June, but demand has continued to fall since its strong performance (50,000 units) on launch day. It is hoped that as RIM releases 3G, LTE and WiMAX models of its Blackberry PlayBook in the third quarter, demand will increase and sales will begin to increase as the company can fully ready its attack on market leader Apple. However, Apple’s hold on the market is dominant, with sales expected to reach 10 million units in the second quarter, ten times that of its PlayBook rival.
Digitimes estimates that monthly shipments of the Motorola Xoom, Acer Inconia, Asus Transformer and PlayBook are averaging 100,000-200,000 units, suggesting each of Apple’s rivals will need to find new ways of increasing demand for their products.
During a conference Acer's chairman, J.T. Wang, announced that the sale projections made for the Iconia Tab touchscreen tablets were a bit too optimistic and had to be reduced by 60%. When it comes to PC sales the company is not doing much better and shipments are down 16% in the last quarter.
There have been speculations as to what could have contributed toward the company downturn and the tablet failing to keep up with the iPad sales seems to be one of the factors. Another issue that has been raised is the fact that Acer relies heavily on sales from retailers such as Best Buy and the lack of direct to consumer sales, which both Apple and Dell are known for.
Today is the day you can pop down to the shops to buy BlackBerry's first Tablet. The tablet will be made available to customers in Spain, Germany, Australia, and several other countries within the next 30 days. Previous to this, the BlackBerry PlayBook has only been available only in the U.S. and Canada.
Facebook Sponsored Advert
Media
The media campaign for this has been huge and has included press ads through retailers such as Carphone Warehouse, DSG and Phones 4U in a mix of national press titles including the Sun, Metro, Guardian, Independent, Times and Telegraph. There is also a cover wrap around the IMAX cinema in Waterloo (at a 2 week cost of £180K) and inside Euston Station. BlackBerry have also gone online with a facebook sponsored story.
IMAX cover wrap:
photo taken this morning
Focus and Specs
Unlike much of its competition, BlackBerry's tablet focuses on enterprise customers first. The tablet boasts a 7-inch display and runs the company's new tablet operating system. It includes dual 1080p HD cameras for video conferencing and capture, and runs on a 1GHz dual-core processor. The tablet comes in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB storage options, ranging in price from £399 to £559.
BlackBerry Bridge
The PlayBook lets you wirelessly connect to your BlackBerry smartphone for real time access to: Email, calendar, address book, task list and BBM.
True multi-tasking The superfast dual-core processor allows multiple applications to run simultaneously. Switch back and forth quickly and easily between HD media, gaming and email.
Limitless browsing The internet the way it’s supposed to be. Browse all of your favourite sites wherever you are. Full Flash 10.1 capability and built in HTML 5 support is ideal for games, media, apps and everything the real internet offers.
Review The PlayBook has already featured in a number of tech reviews - T3 gave it 3/5 stars in July's issue and The Daily Telegraph declares that "BlackBerry is still ripening". Here are some highlights from today's review:
Benefits
At 7” the PlayBook is more portable than the best rival tablets (all of which are around 10”).
As well built as iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab and its screen is bright and sharp.
High quality accessories available like the Ettinger wallet.
Drawbacks
It is difficult to get used to the swipe action to take you from one menu to another.
You cannot tether your email to it unless you have a BlackBerry phone. Without one you have to access email via the web. BlackBerry are working on remedying this.
Not enough apps for the PlayBook (yet) although the apps that it does have are impressive, e.g. corporate apps like RBS.
Conclusion So the PlayBook is in some ways a lovely device, whose fine hardware is wasted on today’s software. If you’re a BlackBerry aficionado, it is a product you may well want to buy, although you should probably wait until later this year when the problems have been fixed (and BlackBerry plans to launch two 4G models later this year).
BlackBerry had better hope the world doesn’t pass it by.
However, Online Gossip (marketing gossip for small businesses) review brings up an issue that the Telegraph hadn't thought of - the name of the tablet: "Can you really see a serious businessman standing on the platform at Euston station telling someone they are using their Playbook, big error I think."
Smartphones can be used to connect to the internet, hold data, run programs, organise our lives. In orther words, they're fast replacing what we perhaps wrongly thought was an embedded part of our lives: the PC. That's indicative of a huge shift that's coming to computing, and was behind Microsoft's $8bn splurge in May when it bought the Skype internet telephone service, and behind the rumours that Microsoft is going to buy Nokia, the Finnish company that makes the most mobile handsets and Smartphones.
Smarphones orgainse our lives
At the end of 2010, Smartphones sales had overtaken PC sales. From October to December, six million more smartphones than PCs were sold. The gap has grown to 18 million in the first three months of this year.
The change that smartphones, (or indeed Tablets) bring is computing power in the palm of our hands or in our pockets. It is internet connectivity almost anywhere on earth that is going to have profound effects. Horace Dediu, another former Nokia executive who now runs the consultancy Asymco, says: "Besides being powerful, they're going to be ubiquitous. Not only in the hands of nearly every person on the planet, but also with them, or by them, all day long. They will be more popular than TVs and more intimate than wallets."
They're going to do far more than wallets (although they can already serve that function: a system called NFC, for Near Field Communications, is being built into smartphones and will let you pay for small items with the press of a button). All the things you can now do with a smartphone would have seemed like science-fiction only a decade ago: translate signs and words, take voice input and search the web, recognise a face, add another layer to reality showing you the quickest way to a tube or restaurant or the history of your immediate surroundings, show you where your friends are in real time, tell you what your friends think of a restaurant you're standing outside, show you where you are on a map and navigate you while you drive. These are just a few of the many Smartphone uses. In fact, today's phones have about the same raw processing power as a laptop from 10 years ago. And every year the gap is narrowed.
Due to their size and ease of use, Smartphones are fast becoming relied upon as part of day to day life. Once making the transition to a Smartphone, it's difficult to imagine life without one.
The study of 2,000 users indicates that 14%, however, regard their computer as a fashion accessory. A quarter of respondents say their computer says more about them than their clothes. 
