ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

According to IDC, the coronavirus (aka Covid-19) outbreak is disrupting global shipments of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) headset, leading to a Q1 2020 decline of -10.5% Y-o-Y, followed by a 24.1% Y-o-Y drop in Q2 2020.

However, production should wrap up by midyear, leading to a rebound on H2 2020 and shipments of nearly 7.1 million units for full-year 2020, a 23.6% increase over 2019. As such, the analyst predict strong long-term growth for the headset market, with shipments growing to 76.7m units by 2024 with a CAGR of 81.5%.

"Much of the supply chain for AR and VR headsets is shared with smartphones and PCs and many of these products are facing supply constraints as factories are operating at much lower capacity resulting in component shortages," the analyst remarks. "However, the spread of the virus is having the opposite effect on demand as an increasing number of consumers and employees stay indoors and look to AR and VR solutions for ways to collaborate with colleagues and entertain themselves and their families."

Apple confirms various rumours with the March announcement of a new iPad Pro model-- one featuring a more powerful A12Z Bionic processor and an ultra-wide camera with a "breakthrough" LiDAR scanner providing depth-sensing capabilities.

“The new iPad Pro introduces advanced technologies never before available in mobile computing,” the company says. “Combining the most advanced mobile display with powerful performance, pro cameras, pro audio, the breakthrough LiDAR Scanner and new Magic Keyboard with Trackpad, this is another huge leap forward for iPad. There’s no other device in the world like the new iPad Pro and we think our customers are going to love it.”

Stefan Lampinen, Managing Director at Game Advisor and game industry veteran, talks about cloud gaming at DISTREE 2020-- an opportunity he describes as nothing less than "growing like crazy," be it in terms of revenues, geographies and user demographics.

As one might know, the gaming industry is evolving. Whereas previously you simply had game consoles, with releases staggered according to region, now you have simultaneous launches across all machines, as well as PCs, mobile devices and the cloud. Games are also further enhanced by the internet, with online titles such as the incredibly popular Roblox and Minecraft creating their own communities while game streamers become powerful influencers, making or breaking a game. One such streamer is Ninja, a top eSports player with YouTube views clocking at over 22 million.

Synology announces an entry-level consumer NAS-- the DiskStation DS220j, a 2-bay storage device able to hold up to 32TB of storage via two 16TB drives, making ideal for a personal cloud solution for data sharing and backup.

The DiskStation DS220j is based on a Realtek RTD1296, a 64-bit, 4-core 1.4GHz CPU, together with 512MB of DDR4 RAM. It has two 3.5-inch bays able to house both 3.5- and 2.5-inch devices, as well as x1 GBe and x2 USB-A ports. It operates the drives in Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), Basic, JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1 modes, and while it uses the ext4 file systems it also supports ext4, ext3, FAT, NTFS, HFS+, and exFAT. Synology claims performance reaches over 112MB/s, at least in terms of sequential read/write.