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In the heyday of PDAs such as the Dell Axim and the Hewlett-Packard Jornada, companies such as TomTom and Navigon offered software that ran on other companies' hardware. The low installed base of PDAs prevented that solution from becoming a runaway success and gave way to integrated portable navigation devices, or PNDs, such as those from Garmin. PNDs sold in the millions, becoming hot gift items.

Now, though, the growing screen size and touch capabilities of smartphones are making them formidable rivals to standalone navigation devices. According to NPD Group's Mobile Phone Track, four out of five cell phones … Read more

Among the reasons people are cutting back on sharing music illegally on peer-to-peer sites is that some have sated their need for songs, according to a NPD Group survey.

Russ Crupnick, a senior analyst with the research firm, said last week at the Digital Music East Forum that the company saw a 25 percent decline in illegal downloading in the United States via P2P sites during 2009.

"You have a lot of people who have built up their collections," Crupnick said. "They are filled up with both paid music and unpaid and it is something like 'I … Read more

NEW YORK--The music industry saw 1 million fewer buyers of digital downloads in 2009 than the prior year, according to NPD Group.

Russ Crupnick, an NPD senior industry analyst, told a gathering of music and technology executives on Wednesday at the Digital Music East conference here not to panic.

Those who stopped purchasing music online were mostly older consumers who came online for the first time in 2007 and 2008, tried out downloading music, then lost interest, Crupnick said. The good news, he said, is that consumers still have a huge appetite for songs, as the amount of money customers … Read more

Tree huggers rejoice.

E-readers are a hit, or rather 93 percent of owners surveyed by research company, The NPD Group, say they are "very satisfied" with their device. Only 2 percent of buyers reported being dissatisfied, according to the research firm.

What this means is that technology appears to be improving upon an information-distribution system nearly 4,000 years old. It also means that book publishers better get on the ball.

Most of those surveyed owned either an Amazon Kindle or a Sony Reader, the leaders in the e-reader space, Ross Rubin, NPD's executive director of analysis, … Read more

After a 2009 dominated by lower year-over-year monthly sales figures, the video game industry turned things around in a huge way just in time for the holidays, recording its best month ever, reported analyst firm The NPD Group on Thursday.

According to NPD, the industry turned in U.S. sales of $5.53 billion in December, up 4 percent from $5.32 billion a year earlier. While it could not have been any more of a relief to the companies in the video games business that they had finally turned in a month of year-over-year growth, the December results were … Read more

Retail software sales rang in at $278 million for the 2009 holidays, a dip of 1 percent from the prior year, NPD Group reported Wednesday. But the results were far more joyous than in December 2008 when software revenue fell by 13 percent.

Thanks largely to Windows 7, operating systems enjoyed the greatest improvement of any category for the five-week 2009 holiday season, climbing to $29 million from $10 million in 2008. Educational software also proved a popular gift for the November 22 to December 26 period, with sales jumping by 15 percent courtesy of strong titles like Rosetta Stone … Read more

The holiday-shopping season certainly could have been worse for the consumer electronics industry.

Sales over the five-week holiday-shopping season chimed in at $10.8 billion, a decline of less than 1 percent from 2008 when sales dropped 6 percent from the previous season, according to new figures from NPD Group.

"The dynamics of the holiday season changed this year," Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, said Friday in a statement. "The holiday season started before Black Friday as retailers ran Black Friday-like sales throughout November. That move may have lessened the Black Friday hype … Read more

Although numerous activities are available to get Americans off the couch, they still prefer to be there, a report from the NPD Group has found.

When asked how they'd spent their leisure-time hours in the past week, a whopping 81 percent of the 10,281 respondents had watched television, for about 10 hours on average for the week. It was the top leisure-time activity in the study, which covered people ages 13 and above. And that figure didn't even include watching movies on TV. It only included shows, news, and sports.

"There's a perception that families … Read more

The video game industry just keeps on seeing its sales numbers decline, in spite of a huge month for Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and the crucial holiday month of November was no different than the last nine months of 2009. For the month, according to industry analyst The NPD Group, sales across the entire video game business were $2.7 billion, down 7.6 percent from $2.92 billion a year earlier.

Yet, NPD added, industry-wide sales were so high in 2008 that even despite this November's significant drop, the month was still the second-best … Read more