Smartphone apps have replaced many of the charmingly pointless Japanese gizmos that used to be pop up on late-90s travel shows.
Spending on the latest gizmos, such as game consoles, hand-held devices, MP3 players, mobile telephones and the like, could well fall.In time, of course, economies and stock markets will bounce back.
And alongside its cheap gizmos are many mid-range and some premium gadgets, such as the Yoga, a laptop that cleverly converts into a tablet.On January 6th the firm announced a reorganisation: Lenovo Business Group will make things for cost-conscious consumers, while the new Think Business Group will chase the premium segment.
Start with those spies and gizmos.
Britain has completed the world's biggest randomised trial of telehealth technology, including gizmos from Philips.
The Restart Project, based in London and founded in 2012, holds two local "Restart Parties" each month to help people learn how to fix ailing electronic gizmos; it is expanding to countries such as America, Italy and Tunisia.
Between 1981 and 2008, the time sprogs spent helping at home declined by 25%—to just 24 minutes a day.Many parents blame electronic gizmos for making their children so lazy.
Such devices could increase computing power dramatically, because the zeroes and ones of traditional computing would be replaced by an array of "in-between" spin values.Such gizmos may sound outlandish, and there are plenty of sceptics who scoff at them.
Life360's maps highlight the addresses of sex offenders.Parents in Japan and America are the keenest on such gizmos.
Throw in video games, cell phones, pocket computers and other portable gizmos, and Japanese chip makers think that annual sales of a speedy non-volatile chip could amount to more than ¥3 trillion by 2010.The nearest that semiconductor firms have come to delivering such a chip is the FeRAM (ferroelectric random-access memory) device.
In 2012the company shelled out $816m to buy Kanghui, a large Chinese maker of fake hips, knees and the like.A takeover of Covidien offers Medtronic the chance to slash those pesky sales and administrative costs, acquire a broader portfolio of gizmos and expand its business in emerging markets.
