On CE - For Dealers, Distributors and OEMs of Consumer Electronics throughout EMEA

Samsung confirms plans to spin off its loss-making LCD TV division-- with "Samsung Display Company Ltd" to start operations on April 1st 2012 (following shareholder approval).

"The spin-off will allow us to make quicker business decisions and respond to our clients' needs more swiftly," Executive LCD business VP Donggun Park says. The new TV making business will start with $6.6 billion in cash reserves. It might also merge with Samsung Mobile Display, the company working on OLED technology for both mobile and TV use.

On December 2011 the company bought the Sony stake (worth around $938.97M) in the S-LCD LCD panel joint venture.

As we all know, times are hard for the TV business-- some of the biggest TV endors (including Panasonic, Sony, Sharp and Philips) are recording record losses as consumer TV demand slows down to a crawl even as TV makers slash prices even further.

Go Samsung to Spin Off Unprofitable LCD Business (Bloomberg)

Go TV Business: Not Such a Good Picture

Sony believes one device out there still needs to evolve and become "smarter"-- the humble electric socket, which has hardly changed over the past 50 years.

The Wall Street Journal reports the company has a prototype "smart socket" using RFID and authentication technologies to track energy use by appliance, limit consumption by time, user or device and even block energy access to non-authorised plugs.

“Electrical sockets are like a user interface for people consuming power,” Sony home energy network business development GM Taro Tadano says. “Can they just stay the way they are?”

Another Sony prototype has devices carrying RFID tags, which in turn communicate with a single reader (via regular power lines) acting as a smart meter.

The technology comes from FeliCa, the Sony touch-card platform commonly found in Japanese train stations, mobile phones and credit cards. Using RFID tags it handles communications between plugs and sockets.

The company also hopes to create public power charge stations for electric vehicles or mobile phones, settling payments depending on how much power is taken.

However the Sony smart plug dream will need support from CE makers, as well as housing and utilities sectors. Offering no date on when the sockets will be available, Sony will surely need more time before it turns smart sockets into smart businesses.

Go Sony's New Gadget: Electric Sockets (WSJ.com)

Despite previous predictions of Apple gradually losing share in the tablet market, the iPad continues to dominate-- taking over 88% share of the Q4 2011 W. European tablet market according to CONTEXT.

In comparison the iPad's Q3 2011 market share totals 76%.

As a result the analyst predicts such a trend is a "precursor to a two-tier industry" based on pricing-- with luxury brands (chiefly iPad) at one end and cheap-and-cheerful devices (such as the Amazon Kindle) on the other.

CONTEXT says customers want devices with "integrated and reliable" platforms-- something Windows 8 promises to deliver, resulting in some success for traditional PC vendors stepping into tablet territories. Vendors might also find success with hybrid tablet/laptop designs (like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer), particularly within the enterprise segment.

Go CONTEXT Sees Emergence of Two-Tier Tablet Market

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announces the first batch its intriguing low-cost Linux micro-PCs has just entered production-- and pre-orders should start shipping from February 20 2012.

Designed as an affordable PC ideal to get children into computer programming, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer the size of a credit card. Currently a simple open board, it carries an ARM processor (running at 700MHz) on top of a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, together with a Videocore 4 GPU the Foundation says is capable of HD playback.

It runs on ARM Linux, with the OS stored inside an SD card, meaning users can easily change OS (to another ARM Linux version) by replacing the SD card root partition.

Two models will be available-- Model A (with 128MB RAM and x1 USB port, costing $25) and the higher-end Model B (with 256MB RAM, x2 USB ports and Ethernet connection, costing $35). Both models carry RCA and HDMI outputs, and connect directly into TVs.

Soon the Raspberry Pi is also getting a proper commercial release-- on Q3 2012, as a cased device with "a polished educational software stack." The Foundation hopes the cased version will retain the current low price point, and will aim it at customers wanting a tiny home media centre PC as well as educators.

It all sounds very interesting, and we admit we already want to get our hands on one.

Go Raspberry Pi