Tablet Market Contracting, Phablets, Apple to Blame?

Did Apple just murder the tablet market?

That’s the conclusion reached by Boy Genius Report, based on data assembled by analytics firm Flurry. That data suggests that Apple “won” the holiday season, with the company’s hardware accounting for 51.3 percent of device activations worldwide (followed by Samsung with 17.7 percent, Nokia with 5.8 percent, and Sony with 1.6 percent).

Much of those activations came from oversized phones. “As we reported in September (pre-iPhone 6 Plus), phablets were gaining share,” Flurry wrote in a blog posting accompanying its data. “This Christmas, it appears even more consumers are switching to the larger phone now that there is an iOS option.”

According to Flurry’s numbers, full-sized tablets accounted for only 11 percent of new devices in 2014, a decline from 2013, when that form-factor totaled 17 percent of the new-device market; small tablets experienced a smaller decline, falling from 12 percent to 11 percent of new devices between 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile, phablets expanded from 4 percent of new devices in 2013 to 13 percent this year.

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Three Cheers for Judge Leon

America’s founding fathers would be “aghast” at the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata spying, a federal judge today said, finding that the program violates the Fourth Amendment and the legal argument justifying it is “the stuff of science fiction.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, in Washington D.C., called the NSA program “almost-Orwellian,” and ordered the NSA to stop collecting or analyzing the metadata of the two men who sued. But citing national security, Leon stayed his order pending resolution in the appellate courts.

It was the first time a district court judge has ever sided against the NSA program, and several other lawsuits across the nation are pending.

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