China's tablet-use application processor (AP) shipments are expected to decrease 2.9% in 2016 as a result of poor tablet sales, according to Digitimes Research.

While IoT (Internet of Things) is booming, development is faced with problems in frequency band, value-added service and information security, respectively related to use of licensed and unlicensed bands, limited availability of real value-added services on demand, difficulty in obtaining personal and enterprise information for Big Data analysis, according to Digitimes Research.

Digitimes Research estimates that worldwide top-5 notebook brand vendors and top-3 ODMs both enjoyed 31% on-month shipment growth in May because of preparations for new notebook models and growing demand for Chromebooks.

Global shipments for smartphone-use touch panels will reach 369.49 million units in second-quarter 2016, increasing 11% sequentially and 6.2% on year. Touch panel shipments for notebooks and 11-inch and above tablets will reach 6.339 million units, gowing 2.5% sequentially and 78.1% on year, according to Digitimes Research.

China-based makers will ship an estimated 180.322 million touch panels in the second quarter of 2016, increasing 16.6% on quarter and 9.8% on year, according to Digitimes Research.

The South Korea government-sponsored Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute estimates the production value for digital signage in South Korea in 2016 at KRW2.55 trillion (US$2.14 billion) and forecasts that the value will increase to KRW3.97 trillion in 2020, according to Digitimes Research.

Narrow-Band IoT (Internet of Things) and LoRaWAN (long range wide area network) are seeing increased application for wireless long-distance communications at low power consumption, and thereby are likely to become two significantly important LPWAN (low-power wide-area network) standards, according to Digitimes Research.

In the Japan market, chat robots, such as Pepper launched by SoftBank, are increasingly targeted for use by people suffering dementia, and Japan-based Fuji-Keizai predicted that demand for care-oriented chat robots in the Japan market will reach JPY1.7 billion (US$15.5 million) in 2021, 3.4 times the level in 2014, according to Digitimes Research.

Conexant has been putting lots of effort into developing its AudioSmart technology in recent years, and has successfully driven a wide range of emerging audio applications...

While a number of consumer virtual reality (VR) applications for games and video have been developed in 2016, the introduction of more head-mounted display (HMD) VR devices has also brought new aspects to the professional VR application market, according to Digitimes Research.