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

Apple sets to revitalise a piazza in the centre of Milan with Apple Piazza Liberty-- a Store in the centre of the Italian city promising to bring the latest in Apple retail design to the country for the first time.

Located off Corso Vittorio Emanuele, one of the most popular pedestrian streets in Milan, the store has an entrance complete with dramatic glass fountain serving as backdrop a large outdoor amphitheatre. The piazza is clad in Beola Grigia, a stone used throughout Milan, is open 24 hours a day and hosts special events year-round.

Among the events held at the Store piazza is Today at Apple, free hourly sessions on creative topics, such as photography, filmmaking, music creation, coding and design. Another is the Milan Series, a set of talks by 21 local artists taking place on September 2018.

Samsung uses the Unpacked 2018 event to launch the next flagship Note-- the Galaxy Note 9, offering what are arguably the best specs for an Android device yet, together with a bigger display and S Pen stylus.

As one might expect, the Galaxy Note 9 is an oversized device with a 6.4-inch SuperAMOLED 2960 x 1440 resolution display. It does not have a notch, since the front-facing 8MP camera resides within a traditional bezel. Inside are a Snapdragon 845 processor with an optimised GPU, 6/8GB RAM, 128/512GB storage (expandable via microSD slot), rear-facing 12MP dual-camera array and a 4000mAh battery Samsung claims allows for all-day use. The OS of choice is Android 8.1 Oreo with the usual selection of Samsung additions, such as Samsung Pay and the Bixby assistant.

W. European tablet shipments are down by -10.1% Y-o-Y to reach 6.3 million units, IDC reports, with Apple and Huawei as the only vendors in the top 5 to see some measure of growth during the quarter.

The analyst attributes such declines to market saturation, lengthening life cycles and a lack of innovation, at least in a consumer segment with shipments dropping by -6.1% Y-o-Y. The commercial segment sees a "degree of resilience" through certain niche use-case deployments. Detachables/hybrid devices also see a challenging Q2 2018, with shipments falling by -23.3% Y-o-Y. This is due to premium Apple and Microsoft devices dominating the market, leading price-constrained customers to consider cheaper alternatives such as lower-end convertibles or even traditional PCs.

"Apple repeated last year's successful strategy of positioning the iPad at a more attractive price point to address the erosion of consumer demand for tablets," IDC remarks. "This triggered a wave of renewals of old iPads and some Android tablets which helped Apple to perform above the market average and regain the leading position in W. Europe."

Sony announces a Blu-ray player option for customers on a budget-- the UBP-X500, a lower-cost alternative to the likes of the UBP-X800 and UBP-X700 capable of playing 4K UHD Blu-rays as well as regular Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs and Super AudioCDs.

It even has a hidden talent in the shape of built-in intelligent upscaling, allowing it to scale 1080p images to 4K. It can also play media stored on USB stick in a variety of audio or video file formats, including DSD, FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AAC and MP3 on the audio side, and Mpeg 2, Mpeg 4, Xvid and WMV on the video side.