Living

Aug 12, 2012 7:00 PM   After endless back and forth between Apple and Samsung attorneys over what the jury should and shouldn't be told, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has gotten fed up and ordered them to meet face to face and start hashing things out. For real. Up until now, each company has been blaming the other for impeding the process of meeting and coming to some kind of agreement regarding joint jury instructions. Now Judge Koh's order will force them to sit down, shut up, stop pointing fingers, and get this thing done. According to Foss Patents, the order reads as follows: "The Court is disappointed by the parties' respective reports regarding their meet and confer efforts on final jury instructions. Lead trial counsel shall meet and confer in person today and file joint and disputed final jury instructions by Monday, August 13, 2012 at 8 a.m." We'll have to wait and see if this straightens anything out. Both parties seem pretty intent on squabbling....

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the latest flagship Android smartphone, and it is selling well globally, giving Apple's iPhone a run for its money. But where does the Galaxy S III fit in the pantheon of the world's best smartphones? Not all Android smartphones are created equal. That is evident just from taking a look at Samsung’s own Galaxy series. But when a company aims for the top of the market, it better come armed with its best hardware and software specifications. Smartphone enthusiasts expect nothing less.  The Galaxy S III delivers on the promise of top-end hardware. It sports a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen (1280x720 resolution), 16 or 32 GB of memory, and an 8-megapixel back camera with a 1.9-megapixel front camera. It can run on networks all the way from 2.5 G to 4G LTE. It has all the standard sensors for a top smartphone, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC (Near-field communications, for mobile wallets and such), Bluetooth, gyrometer/accelerometer, compass and even a barometer. ...

Aug 11, 2012 5:00 PM   Samsung and Apple are going head to head in court right now, so doesn't it make sense for the Galaxy S III and the iPhone 4S to go head to head behind a speeding car? OK, maybe it doesn't follow, but it's fun to watch. This is the first ever "Drag Race Scratch Test" in which YouTuber aperfectgalaxy submits both phones to dragging hell and sees which comes out the least demolished. On top of the whole phone-dragging thing, our host is delightful, even if his footage is jittery as hell and makes you feel like you've just had 16 cups of coffee too many. [YouTube via Redmond Pie] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Aug 9, 2012 11:06 PM   For two years, from June 2010 through June 2012, Samsung sold 21.25 million phones. Its most popular model during that span? Not a Galaxy S II phone, not a Nexus phone but the not exactly vaunted... Samsung Galaxy Prevail on Boost Mobile. How do we know this? Because of the Apple-Samsung court battle. Samsung and Apple lawyers had to file documents to the court that detailed the breakdown of their phone and tablet sales which revealed some previously private information to the public. Like how Samsung has only sold a relatively paltry 1.4 million Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1 devices. Or how a phone on Boost Mobile is Samsung's highest seller. The Galaxy Prevail individually sold 2.25 million phones while the entire Galaxy S II series (with all its variants) reached 4.1 million of sales in that two year span. Amazingly, none of the Galaxy S II variants beat the Galaxy Prevail head to head. That Prevail, which is a decidedly low-end Android model that only ...

Aug 9, 2012 1:20 PM   Apple is convinced that Samsung are just a bunch of shameless copycats, but as this patent shows, Samsung went and conjured up an innovation Apple didn't have the foresight to do themselves: make a phone that sprays perfume. Yes, perfume. When the scentphone market blows up in 2020, it'll be Apple having to defend itself from copycat claims. [USPTO via Engadget via Ubergizmo] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Aug 11, 2012 12:02 AM   The latest word out of the epic saga that is Apple vs. Samsung is that in October 2010, Samsung passed up on an offer from Apple to license certain of their patents for royalty rates: $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet device. Additionally, Apple was willing to offer Samsung a 20% discount if they agreed to cross-license their own patents back to Apple. The Cupertino-based company had already begun to suspect Samsung of copying the design of its wildly popular iPhone, and said as much in an an August 2010 presentation. This latest testimony and evidence, released today, seems to make Samsung's case even bleaker than it had already begun to look. Below is Apple's October 2010 patents presentation to Samsung. This will never end. Samsung Apple Oct 5 2010 Licensing [AllThingsD] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the soft...

A new report by a Chinese labor watchdog makes Apple's Foxconn woes look like a game of spin the bottle, Laptop Mag reports. Untreated injuries? Check. Dangerous workplace? Check. Hitting children and forcing them to stand? Check. This is bad. The report chronicles the inner workings of HEG Electronics, which manufactures gadgets on behalf of Samsung. Inside their factories? Kids under the age of 16, being worked like dogs until they bleed. See above. China Labor Watch says it was "stunned" by its contact with child workers and the findings of its investigators: Our research indicates that student laborers amount to 80% of the total workforce in the factory . During our follow up investigations, our investigators suspected that there were a large number of child laborers in other departments of the factory , estimating that there may be 50 to 100 children working there. These children were working under same harsh conditions as adult workers , but were paid only 70% of t...

Aug 8, 2012 12:20 AM   It's quite a whopper, 132-pages of envy and scheming. In sum, this internal document compiled by Samsung is a long, slobbering iPhone jealousy fest. A highly detailed and deliberate comparison of Samsung's Galaxy against Apple's coveted iPhone. Reinventing the wheel is so damn hard . Hmmph. 44 [AllThingsD] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

When a judge decides to dismiss evidence you feel would make your case in a patent lawsuit, you have one of two options: a) You can sit back and deal with it like a timid little tktkt or b) you can fire back and choose another public-facing channel to disseminate your information. Samsung chose the latter, opting to send its dismissed slides from its legal battle with Apple to the press, and drawing the ire of the judge overseeing the case. At the start of yesterday's opening arguments, Samsung's lawyer John Quinn argued that a slide containing phones designed prior to the iPhone unveiling—including the F700 phone—be counted as evidence. The judge then threatened to sanction the lawyer and that seemed like the end of it. But as the AllThingsD tells it, Samsung sent them the slides with the following message: The Judge's exclusion of evidence on independent creation meant that even though Apple was allowed to inaccurately argue to the jury that the F700 was an iPhone copy, ...

There are many, many accusations being tossed back and forth between Apple and Samsung. There have been for months, there will continue to be. But perhaps none of them has perfectly distilled the fight that the two megacorps are having quite like Samsung's Chief Product Officer Kevin Packingham did in an interview today with Wired. It's a matter, you see, of rectangles. The Galaxy Tab has been banned off and on in both Europe and Australia for bearing too similar a resemblance to the iPad. Which, hey, at one point not even Samsung's lawyers could tell them apart! But, as Packingham explained to Wired, that's just unavoidable geometry: "For us, it's unreasonable that we're fighting over rectangles, that that's being considered as an infringement, which is why we're defending ourselves... Consumers want rectangles and we're fighting over whether you can deliver a product in the shape of a rectangle." What does Apple expect Samsung to do, mak...

Jul 27, 2012 4:30 AM   Apple and Samsung are gearing up for one of their largest legal battles to date, which centers around their devices looking incredibly similar. But before things can start, they still need to agree on where to sit in court—which is proving more complicated than you might expect. All Things D reports that the problem is neither party wishes to think of themselves as defendants. Indeed, in a filing posted on Thursday by Samsung, the company explained that "both parties will at times be acting as plaintiffs and both as defendants, and it is therefore important that both parties are treated the same." Instead, Samsung wants both parties to be referred to as "claimants", and requests that its lawyers be allowed to sit at the plaintiff's table during certain periods in the legal proceedings. Samsung explains that: "Equal treatment of the parties with respect to where they sit while presenting their affirmative case will mitigate any preju...

Jul 27, 2012 3:30 AM   In the second quarter of 2012, Samsung sold 50.5 million smartphones—twice as many as Apple—which sees the company extend its sales lead ahead of the iPhone. Reuters reports that Samsung's financial review has seen it record a quarterly profit of $5.9 billion, helped along in no small part by its strong phone sales. In total, Samsung takes 34.6 percent of the global smartphone market, while Apple can only manage 17.8 percent. But it's not all good news. While its phone sales continue to amaze, Samsung's semiconductor business has seen a 6-percent decline in profit. The company blames weak demand for PC DRAM chips and falling prices for NAND flash used in SSDs. But, in fairness, it doesn't need to worry too much—Samsung remains the world's top technology firm by revenue. [Reuters, Samsung] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made aft...

Jul 24, 2012 2:18 PM   Did you hear about the latest Apple versus Samsung patent development in [INSERT COUNTRY]? Judge [INSERT NAME] ruled that [Apple/Samsung] had to stop selling [INSERT PRODUCT] because it infringed on [Apple/Samsung]'s patent on [INSERT VAGUE TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION]. You didn't hear? Well who can keep up anyway? For those who need a refresher, here's one of Apple's basic claims against Samsung boiled down into a single image posted by AllThingsD's John Paczkowski. Before the iPhone, Samsung smartphones were ugly and horrible. After the iPhone, they're beautiful iPhone clones. Case closed? Someday, someone will decide for sure. [Twitter] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Jul 23, 2012 8:00 AM   As another legal case between Apple and Samsung kicks off on Australia, it's come to light that Apple refused to enter into negotiations with Samsung over essential patent licenses for 3G technology included on the iPhone and iPad. The lawsuit is a complex one, including claims and counter-claims by Apple and Samsung over patents relating to touchscreen and 3G data transmission. But announcements in court today suggest that Samsung attempted to enter into negotiations with Apple in fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms—and Apple refused to cooperate. Though it's just another in a long list, it seems particularly poor form on Apple's part. [Computer World] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

You can't blame 'em for trying, but it's no surprise that Samsung's second attempt to put a hold on the impending American ban of its Galaxy Tab failed. Judge Koh has already say the preliminary injunction could not wait while the Korean company pursued an appeal, and now the Court of Appeals is backing her up. To make matters worse, the court has also refused to expedite the appeal process, potentially prolonging the time the flagship slates are missing from the shelves. Now Sammy will just have to wait for the trial to start on July 30th and hope for a victory, or go back and redesign its tablets to look less like an iPad. We hear that triangles might be the ticket. View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

By Brad Molen posted Jul 20th 2012 2:52PM We just received a "save the date" email from a Samsung US representative that revealed a new Galaxy device will be seeing the light of day on August 15th. We didn't receive any details on what it could be, though this is most likely a US-bound device -- the email says "please join Samsung Electronics America for a major announcement and unveiling of the newest Galaxy device." With that tidbit in mind, we have a couple ideas: first, it may be the Galaxy S Blaze Q, since internal docs pin the phone's release on same exact day. With that being a T-Mobile exclusive for now, however, we're unsure that it'll be the recipient of so much pomp and circumstance. There's also a possibility that we'll see the Galaxy Note 10.1, which was announced at MWC in February and previewed in March. While we'd love to see the Galaxy Note 2, the odds of it being the mystery device are incredibly slim since the phablet...