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

Sony looks to differentiate its take on the smart speaker with a spot of cuteness-- the Xperia Hello is an Alexa-compatible number featuring a 4.55-inch display and a round, animated face.

First presented in concept form back at MWC 2016, the Xperia Hello is an Android-based device able to recognise facial expressions and gestures as well as voice through a camera on top of the swivelling "face." The camera is paired with 7 microphones and 4 motion sensors, allowing the Hello to detect people approaching within a 3m radius.

The Vapor, the first smartwatch from Fossil-owned fitness wearable specialist Misfit, gets a release date-- 31 October 2017, a date that was delayed from an original summer release window.

Launched at this year's CES, the Vapor a full-blown smartwatch complete with 1.39-inch AMOLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 processor, 4GB  storage, wifi, Bluetooth and a touch-sensitive bezel. It originally was designed to run on a proprietary Misfit OS, but March saw a change to Android Wear 2.0, allowing support for more 3rd party services, unique watchfaces and micro apps.

Fnac Darty announces strong results for Q3 2017, with revenue growth reaching 6% Y-o-Y thanks to telephony, gaming and small household appliance product launches, as well as "significant" calendar effect.

Revenues for the quarter total €1.792 billion, with growth reaching 5.8% on a Q-o-Q basis. A longer summer sales period helped further growth across all territories, namely France-Switzerland (6.4%), Iberian Peninsula (5.2%) and Benelux (2.5%). The Belgian market did show growth, but the Dutch market remains troublesome as the retailer is still in the middle of a transformation plan for the country.

"The strong performance for the quarter demonstrates the Group’s ability to meet customers’ needs as well as the value of the partnerships with our suppliers, in a context of buoyant innovation cycle and numerous product launches," CEO Enrique Martinez says. "The Fnac Darty integration is continuing and the deployment of synergies is ahead of schedule, which allows us to raise our objective to at least 60% of planned synergies to be deployed."

ZTE claims the Axon M brings nothing less than "a new smartphone category"-- or in the least something rather interesting, since it features a foldable design with two full-size displays.

The Axon M has a pair of 5.2-inch 1920 x 1080 displays, one in the front and the other in the back. A hinge connects the two, allowing users to flip the rear display and slot it next to the front one, creating a single 6.75-inch display. Users can then either stretch apps across the larger display or take advantage of Android split-screen features to run two apps simultaneously, one on each screen. Users can even watch two different videos on the two screens, switching between audio streams as they want.

In addition, one can also "tent" the phone and mirror the displays, allowing two people to look at the same content from the front and back. ZTE promises the "top 100" Android apps work on the Axon M, with the tablet version of the app (if one exists, obviously) running when the it is in "extended" mode.