Digital Consumer Electronics Boom

▪ 2007

by Steve Alexander

      The proliferation of consumer electronics gadgets continued in 2006 as it became routine to encounter people speaking on cellular phones, listening to digital music on headphones, or snapping countless pictures with digital cameras. One survey, by Opinion Research Corp., showed that among American adults 76% owned a computer, 67% had a cell phone, 47% had a digital camera, 38% possessed a video-game machine, and 27% owned a digital video recorder for recording television programs.

 Cell phones were the most common device, with about 960 million expected to be sold worldwide in 2006. Once that number hit one billion, research firm Gartner, Inc., said, 40% of the world's people would be using cell phones. Adding to the appeal of the phones were features that also made them into digital cameras, digital music players, Internet Web browsers, and text-messaging devices.

 As cell phones routinely offered accessory functions, including digital cameras and MP3 music players, phone manufacturers had to resolve potential problems such as the running down of a cell phone's battery by the playing of music. These concerns, however, did not slow down even more ambitious cell phone plans. Several cell phone service providers sought to take advantage of speedups in cell phone data transmission to turn phones into not just music players but also video players that could view streaming news and sportscasts from the Internet or download music videos. Verizon Wireless offered a high-speed data service for its phones with a download speed in most large U.S. metropolitan areas of 400,000 to 700,000 bits per second. That enabled cell phone users to browse the Web, read e-mail, and watch video in much shorter amounts of time. Sprint Nextel and Cingular wireless providers offered similar services.

       Digital music players, while seemingly everywhere, ranked far behind cell phones, with about 185 million units sold in 2006. Research firm In-Stat predicted that annual sales would reach 286 million units by 2010. One study showed that an estimated 40 million American adults—about 20% of the adult population—owned a digital music player using the ubiquitous MP3 format. The Apple iPod accounted for about half of world unit sales of digital music players and about three-quarters of American unit sales.

 Apple offered new iPod models that played video (such as downloadable TV shows) and others that achieved smaller size by relying on computer chip flash memory rather than bulkier disk drives. In a deal with athletic shoemaker Nike, an Apple iPod wirelessly connected to the shoe could display running statistics and coordinate music with running.

      The iPod's name also was used to describe a related social and technical phenomenon, the podcast. Podcasts were voice or music recordings, either professional or amateur, that resembled radio shows. Once uploaded to the Internet, they were available for consumers to listen to on a computer or an MP3 digital music player. While podcasts initially were a grass-roots movement attracting would-be radio personalities, the technology was soon embraced by radio broadcasters and the news media as another way to reach their audiences.

       Satellite radio attempted to compete with the digital music players. XM Satellite Radio introduced a portable model that recorded songs as they were broadcast and allowed them to be played back individually, but XM was sued for copyright infringement by the music industry.

      Ground-based digital radio seemed poised to become yet another mainstream consumer electronics product. Besides offering signals that would improve the sound quality of both AM and FM broadcasts, digital radio broadcasting also enabled stations to broadcast two or three different FM programs simultaneously, a process called “multicasting.” The service was held back, however, because few consumers bought the necessary digital radio receivers, which cost $300 and upward.

 Digital cameras, some so slim that they fit easily in a pocket, delivered such high-quality photos that many people could not tell a digital image from one produced by a film camera. Ultrasmall models were about the length and width of a credit card and less than an inch thick. Digital camera sales overwhelmed older film cameras, which caused Nikon Corp. to cease manufacturing most of its film cameras. Camera makers Kodak and Canon had previously made similar decisions.

      The digital camera industry stressed increasing a camera's capability by offering units with more megapixels. (A megapixel is one million of the individual dots of light that make up a digital photo; photos with more megapixels can be enlarged further without degrading the image.) While 5-megapixel cameras were popular in 2005, cameras with up to 8 megapixels were common in 2006, though analysts said that most consumers would not be able to tell the difference in picture quality between these cameras.

      Meanwhile, the spread of digital photography made millions of consumers familiar with technical problems with photos, such as “red eye,” an undesirable red reflection from the eye caused by a camera flash. While red eye could not be easily removed from a film photograph, it was easily deleted from digital images by using computer software, either on an actual computer or in the camera itself.

      Just as digital music players stimulated online music sales, digital cameras spawned a related industry: the printing of digital pictures. Retailers who had developed film for consumers began adding computer-based printing kiosks in their stores that printed images from digital camera memory cards. This digital printing service faced competition from software that allowed consumers to view, share, and store pictures digitally on personal computers (by storing them on a hard drive or burning them onto a compatible DVD) or over the Internet. As a result, analysts were unsure whether by 2010 American consumers would pay to print 12 billion or as many as 25 billion pictures.

      Long-anticipated next-generation computer game consoles were slow to emerge, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 was left with the field to itself until the Sony PlayStation 3 debuted in November 2006 after a delay of several months. Nintendo introduced its new Wii video-game console in November. Though the slow pace of introducing new game consoles hurt video game sales, by the spring of 2006 game sales were showing signs of recovery.

       Personal digital assistants (PDAs), a favourite consumer product in earlier years, continued their worldwide sales decline, at least as stand-alone devices. According to market research firm IDC, unit sales of devices that were only PDAs dropped in the first quarter of 2006 more than 22% from the same period in 2005. In-Stat predicted that PDAs were nearing the end of their product life because PDA functions were being incorporated into high-end cell phones, sometimes called “smartphones.”

 The digital divide, which separated those who could afford technology from those who could not, continued to exist in 2006. In an effort to reach more customers, cell phone companies offered prepaid services and other special rates. Some digital camera manufacturers offered low-end disposable digital cameras that fit on a keychain, while others offered inexpensive one-time-use digital cameras with minimal features (the camera actually was returned to the store at the time pictures were printed rather than being discarded). In addition, some cities, notably Philadelphia and San Francisco, addressed the digital divide problem by starting up their own wireless networks to provide high-speed Internet access to local consumers, who would connect wirelessly via laptop or desktop PCs. The municipal networks posed a potential threat to cell phones because they could be used to provide Internet-based telephone service, which some analysts predicted could be “the next big thing” in digital electronics.

Steve Alexander is a freelance technology writer.

* * *