THE DAILY SCOPE, 2/18/2022: In this day and age, when the bulk of people’s online usage habits are happening at home, Internet providers are a good source for intel on what’s trending in connected devices. And there’s plenty to glean from Comcast’s just-released 2021 WiFi Trends Report.Â
Not surprisingly, the report found that more people are connecting with their phones than with laptops or other devices (sorry, once-popular tablets), with a third of all unique devices – almost 347 million out of a total of 1 billion – connected to XFinity WiFi last year, which is 23 times more phones than in 2018.
Also on the rise: Health and wellness devices, which include smartwatches, fitness trackers, and, increasingly in the past two stay-at-home years, connected fitness equipment, registered a 39x increase from 2018. Interestingly, only 10 percent of devices connected to XFinity WiFi were solely dedicated to streaming, which suggests that people are eschewing OTT-specific products and just watching video content directly on their phones or casting it to their TVs from their phones or laptops.
Internet of Things saw a 31x increase, with 2.5 million IoT devices in 2021 versus 2018, while more than 36 million gaming consoles connected to XFinity WiFi last year, which represented a 15x rise from 2018. There is plenty more to peruse on the report, which you can find here.
With gaming so popular across generations, it’s fun to see once high-end only brand Bang & Olufsen cater to the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox market. The new Beoplay Portal PC PS, an updated version of the Danish audio company’s first gaming headphones that came out one year ago, offers more battery life (up to 42 hours) and an improved wireless USB-C dongle that enables speedy, lag-free audio across both PC and console platforms. A coterie of beamforming microphones helps amplify players’ voices among all the sound effects while powering sophisticated ANC that blocks out background noises.
Available in three fairly somber colors, the Beoplay Portal PC PS is out as of yesterday at select retailers and from Bang & Olufsen directly, though we are not seeing it on bang-olufsen.com just yet.
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