Online Reporter Digital Media News, Research and Insight

1 in 3 Americans to Use a Tablet by 2014

About 90 million Americans, almost 35% of all Internet users, will use but not necessarily own a tablet by 2014, according to eMarketer. It predicts that by the end of 2011, 33.7 million Americans will use a tablet device at least monthly.

Optimists about digital media that we are at The Online Reporter, we thought the numbers might be higher.

Many homes have one tablet that’s shared, but that will change as low-cost tablets like the $200 Kindle Fire come to market. eMarketer agrees and says it believes that as tablet adoption continues, less growth will come from sharing and more from buying new ones. In the end, it said, tablets may become more like smartphones with one user and little if any sharing.

The iPad will continue its reign, according to eMarketer. It said the number of iPad users in the States will more than double between this year and 2014, from 28 million to 60.8 million. It said that by 2014 iPad users will still account for 68% of the overall US tablet audience.

PlayBook Price Cuts Don’t Lead to Sales

So far, no one is truly seeing an increase in getting PlayBooks off their shelves despite cutting prices by $200 recently. According to The Register, PC World, Currys ,Carphone Warehouse, Phone4U, Best Buy, Insight, Vodafone and Orange have all yet to see increased sales attributable to the price cuts available to them. Perhaps price isn’t as killer as we thought, maybe there needs to be a solid product at the core and this is just the latest indication that RIM failed to deliver.

RealNetworks’ Rinse Coming to the UK

RealNetworks earlier this year released a desktop app named Rinse. The service aims to “seamlessly organize and repair your iTunes music library” by cleaning and adjusting metadata using Gracenote’s music database. The service, first launched in the US, has now arrived in the UK with the same pricing model. It cleans up 50 songs for free and can be expanded to the rest of a music library for £30. The launch is coinciding with the iPod’s 10-year anniversary, meaning it comes with a mischievous twinkle given the company’s history with Apple. Rinse works well, but it may not find mass appeal. The service not only has to successfully clean songs, but it also has to show users why their existing library’s metadata mistakes are worth fixing for a price.

Jobs Wanted an Easy-to-Use TV Set That Was Completely Integrated

Might we soon see an Apple TV set? In his book about Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson says, “He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.” Jobs told him, “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.” Be aware Samsung, LG and Sony! The user interfaces on your smart TVs simply don’t stack up to what Apple aficionados expect.

NEC Doubles Life Span of Lithium-Ion Batteries

Technology marches on. NEC has developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that it says doubles the life span but not the time-between-charges of conventional batteries models. It’ll only be used in large batteries like those for houses and buildings that need to store electricity for later use. Who knows? Maybe later it’ll be used in portable consumer devices like smartphones and tablets.

Dish Loses 135k Pay TV Subscribers

Dish Network, the US’ second largest satco, lost about 135,000 pay TV subscribers during the second quarter, leaving it with about 14.056 million subscribers. Revenue for the three months was $3.59 billion, up 13.3% from a year ago. Dish acquired the assets of the bankrupt Blockbuster in April and has said it intends to use it to build a competitive OTT service. Dish blamed the decline on increased competition especially in the form of price-cutting.

SuVolta Chips Halve Power Consumption

Progress in technology seems like the expanding universe in that it’s happening faster and faster. Fujitsu Semiconductor has licensed technology from Silicon Valley startup SuVolta that reportedly makes microchips more energy-efficient so tablets and smartphones stay charged longer. It supposedly cuts power consumption in half by reducing heat production. Fujitsu said the technology does not require major changes to manufacturing and that production of cellphone chips with the technology can begin next year.

UN: Internet Access Is a Right

You knew it was coming, right? Internet access is a right just like water, food and electricity, according to a United Nations report. The report, written by Frank La Rue, a special investigator for the United Nations, said, "Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states." We wonder if he means uncensored Internet?