Samsung - page 49

Last summer, Apple won the biggest patent lawsuit in history against Samsung. After a long and tedious hearing, a California court ruled that Samsung had infringed on seven of Apple’s design patents. The jury for the trial decided that Samsung had willfully infringed five of the patents, which basically means that Samsung knew what it was doing when it tried to steal Apple’s mojo.

Samsung challenged the verdict, and Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Apple’s patents weren’t willfully infringed upon. This will save Samsung from having to pay Apple up to triple in damages on top of the $1+ billion it already owes.

This doesn’t mean that the case is over. There are still plenty of appeals to be made, and “Apple will presumably move at some point for an award of ongoing royalties for future use of its patents by Samsung,” according to FOSS Patents.

Source: FOSS Patents

People don’t trust Apple with all their personal data as much as they used to. That’s what the latest survey on privacy data claims, after ranking the top 20 companies that U.S. consumers trust the most with their private information.

Ponemon Institute has conducted its annual privacy survey for the past seven years that asks U.S. consumers to rate organizations that they feel are most likely going to keep their information private. Apple was ranked 14th on last years list, but didn’t make the cut this time.

Samsung has gone before the Seoul Central District Court to ask to see Apple’s iOS source code. The goal of seeing the source code is to confirm whether Apple’s iOS 6 infringes on any of Samsung’s software patents. Yes, this is the same Samsung that Apple won $1 billion+ in damages against for patent infringement in U.S. court last year.

Since the innards of iOS are full of valuable company secrets, Apple has of course declined Samsung’s request, “calling it ridiculous.”

Samsung has today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, which slightly exceed the estimations that were set by the Korean company earlier this month. It recorded an operating profit of 8.84 trillion won (approx. $8.27 billion) during the three-month period, on 56.06 trillion won (approx. $54.45 billion) in revenue. That’s a 10% increase in profit over the previous quarter, and a whopping 89.3% increase in profit over the fourth quarter of 2011.

Siri has enjoyed mild success since her debut on the iPhone 4S. She’s not the world’s greatest personal assistant, but she gets the job done most of the time, which is better than a lot of other voice recognition options out there.

Now Amazon is preparing to do battle with Siri thanks to a new digital assistant they just bought. Her name’s IVONA, and we’re pretty sure it’s not the same Ivona from Austin Powers.

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has today published Apple’s latest trademark certificate, which covers the “distinctive design & layout” of its iconic retail stores. The Cupertino company originally filed for the trademark back in May 2010, nine years after the first Apple store opened its doors in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Samsung vice president JK Shin has confirmed that the company will be announcing the Galaxy Note 8.0 at Mobile World Congress next month, but you don’t need to wait until then to see what it’ll look like. Thanks to these pictures of the device out in the wild, we can see that the iPad mini competitor looks a lot like a giant Galaxy S III, with a traditional button setup that’s unlike other Galaxy tablets.

Samsung’s got a flagship smartphone coming down their pipeline. It’ll probably be called the Galaxy S IV. It will probably be launched in April. It will have all kinds of great and ridiculous features that I’m sure Android fans will love. But it will also have a screen that knocks the socks off Apple’s Retina display.

There have been rumors for a while now that Samsung wants to add a display to the Galaxy S IV that’s much more pixel dense than the iPhone’s Retina display. According to the latest reports, the Galaxy S IV’s display will have a pixel density of 440ppi, which sounds like overkill, but it’s actually something Apple needs to consider adding, too.

Samsung has surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors, according to Gartner. The Korean company’s hugely popular smartphones, such as the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, led to a 29% surge in chip purchases in 2012, taking its semiconductor spending past that of any other company.

One of the best things about owning an Apple TV is the ability to share everything on your Mac’s screen with the flatscreen in your living room. It works perfectly. If there’s video on the Internet that you can’t find on one of the Apple TV apps, you don’t have to worry about it; you just screen share and enjoy.

Google and Netflix are tired of Apple having all the fun with wireless video streaming between devices, so they’ve brewed up their own solution to compete with AirPlay. The new protocol is called DIAL, and like Android, it’s free and already has some big companies backing it.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that Samsung and Apple were the only two smartphone manufacturers seeing growth in the United States, and that the pair were slowly eating away at their rivals’ market share. But when you take old-fashioned feature phones into account, the situation looks a little different.

New data from Counterpoint Research suggests that strong December sales have helped LG overtake Apple to claim the second-largest stake of the U.S. phone market. As you might expect, Samsung is still way ahead in first.

Samsung Mobile vice president JK Shin has confirmed to a Korean news outlet that the company will unveil the Galaxy Tab 8.0 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. The device, which is believed to be an iPad mini competitor, is expected to offer an 8-inch display with a 1280×800 resolution, coupled with a 1.6GHz quad-core processor.

Apple has made the iPhone more enterprise-friendly with almost every release of iOS, but some might say the company’s popular smartphone still isn’t ideal for business. When I say “some,” I mean Samsung. The Korean company just released a strange new advert to promote the enterprise features of its Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, and it couldn’t help but bash the iPhone and even BlackBerry devices at the same time.

Sharp has “nearly halted” its production of 9.7-inch iPad displays as consumers shift their demand towards the smaller iPad mini, Reuters reports. Sources familiar with Sharp’s plans have claimed that production of the larger panels at Sharp’s Kameyama plant in central Japan has fallen to the “minimal level” this month following a gradual slowdown that began at the end of 2012.

The news follows speculation that the iPad mini has been “cannibalizing” sales of the larger model since its debut last November.

If you believe recent reports and predictions from analysts, Apple must make its iPhone cheaper or introduce a low-cost model if it wants to compete with Samsung going forward. The Korean company currently boasts the largest smartphone market share in the United States, and its lead is expected to increase throughout 2013. But did you know that Apple has actually sold more devices? 88 million more, in fact.

Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt has been comparing Apple’s cumulative smartphone sales with Samsung’s, and it appears the Cupertino company’s iPhone outsold the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lines 219 million to 131 million.

Even though we’ve seen some positive news over the past few months regarding Apple’s smartphone marketshare, there’s no denying that Android is the most dominant mobile platform in the world right now.

Apple may continue to grow its marketshare of the world smartphone market for another year or so, but according to one analyst, Apple’s marketshare will peak sometime in 2013 unless Samsung does something really stupid.

Samsung looks to be preparing to take on the iPad mini with the Galaxy Note 8.0, a smaller version of the Galaxy Note 10.1, which is expected to be priced very aggressively. In addition to an 8-inch display, the device will reportedly offer a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera, and of course, Samsung’s S Pen stylus.

A Dutch court has today ruled that a number of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablets do not infringe Apple designs. The court cited a previous decision made by a High Court in the United Kingdom back in October 2012, which ruled Samsung’s devices are “not as cool” because they lacked the “extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”

Apple’s share price has plummeted this morning, following an earlier report that said the Cupertino company had cut iPhone 5 component orders due to weaker-than-expected demand. When the market opening on Monday morning, Apple stock dropped to $16.23, or 3.1%, to $504.07.

So the Consumer Electronics Show is over for another year, and for those who’ve been in Las Vegas covering it for us, it’s back to normality. While we allow the Cult of Mac team to sober up, it’s time to look back at the best gizmos CES had to offer. There were thousands of products on show — far too many to cover in one week — but there were a handful that really stood out.

We’ve put together a list of awesome things that we were blown away by, including smartphones, accessories, gadgets, and more. Check it out and tell us what you’re most looking forward to getting your hands on in 2013.

When Microsoft launched the Surface with Windows RT, it was supposed to be the answer to all of their iPad problems. It runs on cellphone chips, yet still looks like regular Windows 8. It’s supposed to be awesome. But sales of Windows RT tablets haven’t been strong, and now Samsung is saying that they’re second guessing the platform.

In a recent interview at CES, Make Abary, Samsung’s senior vice president who oversees the company’s tablet business, said that Samsung has decided they won’t launch their Windows RT tablet in the U.S. after discovering there’s not much demand for them.

That’s a wrap, folks! The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show is done and over, but after walking the tech-packed floors and press events for days, we’re ready to reveal the gadgets that had us yelling “shut up and take the money!” Get the full scoop on our newest CultCast!

Plus, don’t miss our own Deputy Editor John Brownlee regale us with the hilarious story of a press event gone so wrong, the internet can’t stop buzzing about it.

All that and more on our newest and final live-from-Vegas CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes to catch our all-new episode, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App. And while you’re at it, be sure to download our other 3 daily CES recap episodes to hear our favorite booths of shows past and funny stories from the show!

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – We’re always a bit stumped at how PhoneSuit is able to stuff so much battery in to their batteries. Their new Flex line is another great example; those little battery logs above each contain 2600 mAh of juice, which is more than any iPhone battery case I can think of. And that’s not even the coolest thing about them.

Amazon has today launched a new music service called AutoRip, which offers customers a free MP3 version of every album they’ve bought on CD from Amazon since 1998. The service currently boasts more than 50,000 digital albums from all the major record labels, and Amazon insists that new titles are added on a regular basis.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Every year Samsung attends CES it seems like they try to guess what Apple is going to do with TV. One year they announced a TV that has Netflix and other apps built in. The next they included swappable processors and voice controls.

This year, Samsung’s bet is that if Apple ever decides to make a TV it will be able to predict what you want to watch. It will help you find out where to buy an actor’s clothes. And it might come in a soccer goal shaped frame?