Is The BlackBerry CEO Partly Right About Tablets?

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Reconsidering The BlackBerry CEO's Tabletphobia (Business Insider)
"In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model,” said BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins. Many commentators have jumped on Heins's statement as further proof of Blackberry's inherent backwardness. But he makes two decent points. First, screen sizes between smartphones and tablets are converging (see our report on "phablets" here). If you own a Samsung Galaxy Note, you really don't need a 7-inch tablet. Second, hardware, and not just tablets, is a tough business. Only two companies are really profiting from the smartphone boom and many tablet manufacturers, including Amazon, are selling their tablets at a loss. If, like BlackBerry, you are only selling a few hundred thousands units per quarter, tablets aren't a very good business model. That being said, we stand by our assessment that tablets are a disruptive media consumption product with enormous growth products. Read >

Jawbone Acquires BodyMedia In A Wearables Device Deal (All Things D)
BodyMedia makes health-monitoring bands, but the deal seems to largely be about patents. It also points to a coming shakeout in the wearable computing market. As we discuss in our report on wearable tech, there's no real reason a consumer needs a smartphone and a smartwatch and a fitness band, but it's clear that a fitness element will be central to any future wearable computing devices. Read >

Jack Dorsey Is A Believer In Smart Wristwear Over Eyewear (The New York Times)
While he praised the Google Glass' technology, he asked rhetorically, "What is the value of Glass?" He thinks fitness bands like Up, Fitbit, and FuelBand are the natural next step in wearable. Read >

Apple's UDID Tracking Officially Sunsets Today, As Advertisers Work To Improve Cross-Device Targeting (GigaOm And Wall Street Journal)
As consumers spend more time on their smartphones and tablets, tech companies are desperate to continue delivering relevant ads based on their browsing habits. Targeting is difficult, in part, because cookies generally don't work on mobile. Broader mobile fragmentation also plays a big role. Several solutions are being floated, such as "triangulating" browsing habits across devices to identify possible unique users, but whoever definitively cracks the code will reap enormous rewards. Read >

Wal-Mart Gives A Thumbs-Down To PayPal's Mobile Payments Scheme (Business Insider)
Wal-Mart says that entering your phone number to identify yourself at point-of-sale adds needless complexity. Read >

Nielsen's New TV Measurement Tool Misses Mobile Audiences (The Wall Street Journal)
It will only capture desktop audiences, to the chagrin of some networks. That seems like a big omission, given the enormous amounts of TV content being consumed on smartphones and tablets. Read >

Path App Sees A Backlash For 'Spammy Tactics' (The Verge)
This earned Path a lot of unwanted attention on Twitter, on the same day that it was celebrating a milestone: the 10 million user mark. Apps need to realize that Twitter's anti-spam vigilantes will give them a bad name if they don't rein in their promotional tactics. Read >

Over A Quarter Of All Premium Digital TV Content Is Watched On Mobile (comScore)
As we mentioned in a recent Chart Of The Day, it's a myth that audiences don't watch made-for-TV content on smartphones and tablets. Read >

Twitter Has Opened Up Its Ad Platform To Any U.S. User (Twitter)
Previously, it had been invite-only. Mobile accounts for 70% of Twitter's usage in the U.S., according to comScore. Read >