Samsung wants all the beautiful people to use its phones (and, probably more importantly, to be photographed using them). So how does the South Korean company get its latest, greatest smartphones into the hands of celebrities hooked on iPhones?
One method for getting Samsung gear into the manicured hands of Hollywood’s biggest stars is the company’s White Glove program, which smooths the way for the rich and powerful to make the big switch away from Apple’s shiny gadgets.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2014 – We’ve been hearing for months that Apple may or may not launch a larger screen iPad in 2014, but this afternoon Samsung tried to get a jump on the competition with its new lineup of PRO Galaxy and Note tablets for the common working man, and in typical Samsung fashion, they’re busting out a couple of screen sizes, including a 12.2inch monster.
Your smartphone and tablet will soon offer noticeably better performance than a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, thanks to NVIDIA’s new Tegra K1 processor, the successor to last year’s Tegra 4. The 192-core “Super Chip” will come in two versions, one of which is built upon a next-generation 64-bit Denver architecture and boasts clock speeds up to 2.5GHz.
Which phone users are the smartest?
According to a peer-reviewed scientific study online intelligence test by renowned university British betting company Ladbrokes, the answer is iPhone owners.
Having taken the holidays off (in Samsung’s case to nurse its wounds), Apple and Samsung are back to patent negotiations.
According to an article which appeared Sunday in The Korea Times, the two companies have resumed their patent battle — with officials at the Fair Trade Commission saying the companies are looking to hash out issues related to royalties.
The Rockstar Consortium — a group of several tech companies, including Apple — has reportedly been in talks concerning the sale of a portion of its $4.5 billion worth of patents.
This marks a major turnaround from 2011, when the patents — acquired from the Nortel Networks Corp — were highly sought after. In that instance, Apple and its bidding partners outbid Google for access to more than 4,000 patents.
Samsung may have been ordered to pay Apple $290 million in patent infringement damages, but one thing the tech company hasn’t managed to steal is Apple’s knack for good advertizing.
In a holiday season in which Apple has released its effective and genuinely tear-jerking “Misunderstood” iPhone ad, the best Samsung can manage is a Galaxy Gear smart watch commercial that would have looked cheesy in 1982 — which is where we presume the creative team behind this campaign must have been summoned from.
A new book called Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein revealed the mechanism by which Apple influenced the direction of Android — shock and awe.
Yes, the introduction of the iPhone changed the direction of smartphones. But I don’t think it’s going to happen again in the wearables market. Here’s why.
Although reports have surfaced that Apple may be building a top secret $10 billion chip fab, right now, the vast majority of Apple’s A-series chips are made by Samsung. This is obviously not an ideal situation, as it gives Apple’s arch smartphone rival the advantage of knowing what the iPhone-maker is planning on doing next, at least from a silicon perspective.
It looks like Apple may soon be able to rely less on its nemesis when it comes to building chips, though. A new report says that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will largely take over for Samsung in making iPhone and iPad chips in the future. And they’ll be pretty crazy advanced chips, too, at least if the rumors can be believed.
Is nothing sacred in the Samsung vs. Apple clash, we ask you?
It might have recently been ordered to pay Apple $930 million in damages (with a possible side order of Apple legal fees), but Samsung still scored a personal victory this month by hiring away Apple’s senior store designer, Tim Grudgel.
As part of the ongoing legal saga with Apple, Samsung’s lawyers have filed a request with Judge Lucy Koh requesting a retrial of November’s case, which Samsung says Apple only won because it totally race baited the jury to get sympathy.
Two juries have already slammed Samsung with astronomical fines during its patent trials with Apple in the U.S., but the South Korean handset maker says it’s not ready to stop the fight yet and is asking for Judge Koh to award them with a judgment as matter of law in its favor, or a massive adjustment of the damages Apple was rewarded.
Here’s Samsungs’ explanation why the court should let them off the hook for the $379 million in fees Apple was just awarded :
Samsung has merged its digital imaging and mobile communications businesses in a bid to create better smartphones. The South Korean company hopes that the reshuffle will lead to better collaboration between the two teams as consumers become increasingly concerned about camera performance when buying a new handset.
A judge in Seoul, South Korea has denied Samsung’s claim that Apple violated three of its patents, relating to short message services.
Right now, Apple has over $156 billion in its war chest, prompting investors like Carl Icahn to pretty much riot to try to get at some or all of it.
Compared to $156 billion, $16 million is a drop in the ocean of Apple’s money, an amount so small that Tim Cook wouldn’t think twice to even sign the check. But when it comes to Samsung, Apple’s intellectual property arch rival, Cupertino wants to wring out every drop of money it can.
If you’ve been meaning to treat yourself to a Pebble smartwatch and you haven’t already blown all of your savings on other Black Friday deals, then you might be interested to know that you can now get $20 off the device for one day only.
It’s Magic 8-Ball time here, as analysts continue to round-out 2013 by making predictions about what we can expect over the next year.
This time it’s analyst Canalys, which is forecasting that tablets will out-ship almost all other PC form factors combined in 2014 — representing around 50 percent of the total client PC market.
Cult of Mac reported early today (or very late last night) that Samsung has been ordered to pay Apple $290 million in its patent trial for copying key features of iOS devices — bringing Apple’s total damages to $930 million.
According to two of the jurors assigned to the case, however, the key factor that swayed the jury in Apple’s favor came down to just one witness: Chicago-based certified public accountant, Julie L. Davis.
eBay’s Black Friday sale is set to start a day early this year, on Thursday, November 28 — and it includes a whole bunch of tablets, smartphones, consoles, and cameras. So whether you’re into Android or iOS, there’s a great deal to be had, such as an original iPad mini for $239, a Nexus 7 for $199, and the new iPad Air for $469.99.
We finally have a verdict in the high-profile Apple-Samsung patent infringement lawsuit, and it involves Samsung paying Apple $290 million for copying key features of both the iPhone and iPad for its own line of smartphones and tablets.
The jury’s verdict covers 13 of the 26 Samsung devices.
Apple’s re-trial with Samsung over patent infringement has just concluded with the federal jury ruling that Samsung owes Apple an extra $290 million for infringing on the iPhone maker’s patents.
The award is significantly more than the amount Samsung hoped to pay, though Apple’s lawyers didn’t get all the money they wanted either. Including damages awarded from the original trial, Samsung’s bill for Apple now totals $929.83 million worth damages – unless they successfully appeal of course.
The Samsung Galaxy Gear, an Android-powered smartwatch that Samsung has been calling “the next big thing” in commercials, is officially a dud. Why? After BusinessKorea reported that Samsung has sold less than 50,000 units to date, Samsung quickly tried to spin the bad news by saying that it had in fact sold 800,000 units, making it the “most sold wearable watch available in the market place.”
Right. The only problem is that Samsung later confirmed that the 800,000 number was actually for units shipped, not sold, which is a big difference.
Since Apple won a $1 billion lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement last summer, both companies have been fighting to determine how the ruling will actually unfold. In March of this year, the presiding judge for the case subtracted $450 million from what Samsung owed Apple due to the jury’s miscalculations for damages.
The Apple vs. Samsung retrial kicked off earlier this week in California court, and Apple requested an additional $380 in damages from Samsung on top of the $600 million already owed. Samsung believes it should only have to pay Apple $52 million for infringing on five patents related to the iPhone.
Today Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, took the stand in court to talk about the iPhone’s importance to Apple, calling it a “bet-the-company” product. He also got pretty snarky about Samsung copying Apple.
Schiller began his testimony by recounting the original iPhone’s launch and the product’s success to date. He expressed frustration that Samsung started making phones that looked just like the iPhone after Apple started seeing success in the smartphone market. Schiller said he was “quite shocked” when he first saw the Samsung Galaxy. “My first thought was, ‘They’ve copied the iPhone.'”
These first few years of the iPhone’s existence have been “an incredibly important time” for Apple, said Schiller. And Samsung’s infringement has made it “harder for us to get new customers and bring them into our ecosystem.” The iPhone is Apple’s biggest money-maker by far. “At this point, it’s fair to say that most everyone at Apple works on iPhone,” said Schiller from the stand. “It’s our biggest product.”
While being cross-examined by Samsung’s lawyers, Schiller gave off a little Jobsian snark with his responses:
Schiller on Samsung gaining while other android makers lost share. “One is copying. the other are not copying… as much.” #icourt
— Ina Fried (@inafried) November 15, 2013
Samsung atty shows Schiller a Samsung device and Schiller says – “I can’t tell from here. It looks like an iPad to me.” #icourt
— Shara Tibken (@sharatibken) November 15, 2013
The retrial is expected to close next week.
Via: CNET
Image: AP
With the new Mac Pro, Apple has proven its serious about bringing at least some manufacturing back to the States. The next step, though, is chips, and a new report says that Apple is bringing chip fabrication of its A-series chips stateside at a new $6 billion facility in upstate New York. And Samsung is said to be involved.
What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.