Smartphone Upgrade Cycle

A strong majority of smartphone users wait two years or longer to upgrade their handset, according to June 2016 polling. Nearly half wait at least three years between upgrades.

That’s according to ad tech firm Fluent, which surveyed US smartphone owners in June about their device habits. A plurality of respondents—30%—said they upgraded their smartphone once every two years, which used to be the typical length of a wireless service contract that came with discounted-upgrade privileges. But major wireless providers have phased out such offers in favor of payments plans that ultimately have smartphone users shelling out for the full sticker price of their handsets (plus interest).

That could be one reason why even more respondents wait longer than two years: 42% of the overall respondent base said they waited three years or longer before trading up.

Win 10 Activation News

As Microsoft hurtles towards the release of its major Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the company has introduced a tool that's supposed to help PC owners resolve problems with activating the operating system on their computers.

Microsoft has a complex system in place to ensure people are using a copy of Windows that hasn't been pirated. But that system sometimes gets too aggressive and ends up dinging people with authorized copies of Windows. The new Activation Troubleshooter is supposed to help. It should make it easier for people to reactivate their computers after changing hardware, such as swapping out their motherboard or hard drive.

Right now, it's available only to members of the Windows Insider Program's Fast ring, who got a new beta build of Windows 10 to play around with on Wednesday. Microsoft hasn’t said that the tool will be available to everyone with the forthcoming Anniversary Update, but that seems likely.

Using the Activation Troubleshooter, users can associate a digital Windows 10 license with their Microsoft account. After that, they can change out hardware on their PC and re-activate Windows with the license that they associated with their account.

Amazon Passes Walmart

A new report shows that Amazon is now the second-biggest player in consumer-electronics sales, leaving Walmart in the tech dust. And while BestBuy retains No. 1 ranking, and in fact slowed its market-share loss to the lowest level in years, it may be next.

Writing about the new industry ranking from This Week in Consumer Electronics (TWICE), Deutsche Bank analyst Mike Baker notes that the category’s big gains overall — total sales increased 4.3% in 2015, its best year since the 5.2% increase it scored back in 2011 — are almost entirely created by Amazon. “Amazon contributed $5.1 billion of the $5.6 billion increase,” he writes, “representing 90% of total industry growth.”

Those gains gave Amazon its largest market-share growth in the 12 years Deutsche has been tracking it, while Best Buy’s share loss slowed, “and is now almost flat with last year.” In dollar spending, the Minneapolis-based BestBuy made gains that are “almost identical to RadioShack’s dollar loss, so it appears this was the major source of dollar growth.”

Apple Coding Class

Apple this summer is expanding its lineup of Apple Camp sessions to include a new course that teaches children the basics of coding. Aimed at children ages 8 through 12, the new 3-day session will use software from Tynker to introduce concepts of block-based coding and will allow kids to program Sphero robots. These classes will be small – capped at around a dozen attendees – and are opening to registration this morning alongside others in Apple’s ongoing summer camp series.

While Apple has hosted Apple Camp for years, this is the first time it has offered this “Coding Games and Programming Robots” course. The company has participated in Hour of Code, however, but that is in December and separate from Camp.

The debut of the new coding class comes at a time when Apple has been increasingly focused on helping to introduce coding to younger users. At its WWDC event, for example, the company debuted a new iPad app called Swift Playgrounds which teaches kids to code in Swift.

New Amazon Kindle

Amazon.com’s newest iteration of its Kindle e-reader device is thinner, lighter and the same price it was before.

The Kindle, Amazon’s flagship and entry-level e-reader model, is getting a makeover to make it slimmer and rounder, aiming to make it easier to use by those who like to read one-handed.

The new version will weigh 5.7 ounces, about 16 percent less than the current version. It also is about 11 percent thinner and is available in white as well as black.

The new model announced Wednesday will have twice as much memory capacity as its predecessor, holding about the same number of books but with a speedier processor. That extra power is especially helpful for readers using VoiceView, a voice-to-text service aimed at readers with visual impairments.

LibreOffice 5.1.4 Released

The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, targeted at individual users and enterprise deployments. Users of previous LibreOffice releases should start planning the update to the new version.

For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified developers, migrators and trainers (the full list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here:https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.4/RC1 (fixed in RC1) andhttps://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.4/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Samsung Pay

Smartphone leader Samsung Electronics has for years been a spectator as Apple built a services "ecosystem" supporting its products. But now, as the two develop the market for mobile payments, the Korean tech giant is taking the fight to its U.S. archrival.

For Apple, offering users the ability to tap their iPhones on sales terminals to buy a coffee, snack or train ticket is a fresh revenue stream, like its iTunes music and entertainment service. The banks it works with cough up a small charge for each transaction - reportedly 0.15 percent in the United States.

Samsung, which has trailed behind its competitors in software and services, is taking a different path.

It is not seeking fees from its financial partners, viewing Samsung Pay as an engine to drive sales of phones and other devices.

"We're a hardware company, and at the end of the day I think what we're trying to do is get people who hold (one of) our phones and use it ... to just love it more," Elle Kim, Global Vice President of Samsung Pay, told Reuters in Sydney.