Search Results for: samsung

South Korean consumer electronics giant and number two mobile phone seller worldwide, Samsung has re-negotiated its cross-licensing agreements with Qualcomm to the tune of $1.3 billion plus continuing royalties.

Though most of the terms and conditions of the deal are confidential, Samsung has said that the deal will give Qualcomm access to 57 of its mobile technology patents, and in turn receive access to Qualcomm's 3G CDMA/WCDMA and 4G OFDM patents for the next fifteen years.

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In a flashback to the more prosperous years before the current "deep recession," hordes of truly enthused journalists crowded dozens of vendors' booths at a revitalized Pepcom pre-holiday event in New York City last week, waiting for their turns to get up close and personal with forthcoming consumer electronics wares.

ViewSonic, a company known until now mostly for its monitors, introduced a total of four new PCs at Pepcom's press event Thursday night.

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It's amazing what can happen in one year. Before Apple launched the iTunes App store, there was no such thing as the "mobile app store economy." It was limited to a few vendors such as Handango, who controlled the small mobile software distribution market.

Now, most mobile operating systems have their own app store, and phone manufacturers are attempting to open stores with their own devices in mind. Today, Samsung announced it will launch an on-device smartphone app store in Europe on September 14. The company has already put up a placeholder for its app store, and downloads will be available to the Omnia and the I8910 HD. Samsung says support will be added on the Omnia II and OmniaLITE at a later date.

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Blockbuster Inc. and Samsung jointly announced today that new Samsung HDTVs, Home theater systems, and Blu-Ray players will be equipped with Blockbuster OnDemand, the company's streaming rental service, by Fall 2009.

Blockbuster's streaming media service has been rushing to catch up with Netflix, which scored an early lead with critical placement on numerous popular brands of hardware, and has continued to dominate the streaming movie rental market. However, today's partnership announcement with Samsung marks the second time Blockbuster OnDemand will live alongside Netflix on Demand in the same machines. The first time the two were paired was last March, when TiVo announced Blockbuster OnDemand would be coming to broadband connected Series2, Series3, TiVo HD, and HD XL set-top boxes, where Netflix was made available three months prior.

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Today, Samsung announced it has begun shipping its UT series of seamlessly stitchable 46" LCD monitors, the company's building blocks for JumboTron-scale displays.

Home theater enthusiasts are frequently presented with 150" and up single screen solutions that are touted as the recurring "pinnacle" of the home entertainment experience, but multi-monitor solutions can deliver just as giant of a screen with only a small gap for the monitor bezel. Samsung's UT series allows dozens of screens to be joined together into huge video walls with only a 6.7mm gap for the bezel between screens.

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AT&T and Samsung on Thursday announcement the imminent availability of the Jack, a successor to the exceedingly popular BlackJack and BlackJack II. The handset, also to be known as the i637, goes on sale May 19 and will retail for $100 with a rebate, two-year service agreement, and the other usual restrictions.

The earlier BlackJack models have been, according to Samsung, the best-selling series of Windows Mobile phones ever. The significant upgrade in the new Jack's candy bar-style handset appears to be the 3.2-megapixel video-capable camera, an improvement from the 2 Mpx model in the BlackJack II. The phone will ship with 256 MB of RAM (up from 155 MB with the BlackJack II), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and GPS. Like its predecessor it has a microSD slot, and can support cards up to 16 GB (up from 4GB). It'll also ship with Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile and Windows Mobile 6.1, though Samsung says that the handset will be 6.5-ready whenever that operating system is released.

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Bringing to a quiet end a case where one of America's brightest hopes for competing in microprocessors had vowed to go down swinging, Spansion -- the producer of flash memory born from an AMD spinoff -- settled its case brought last November against global NAND flash powerhouse Samsung. Spansion will receive a one-time payment of $70 million in cash, and the two companies have agreed to share each others' patent portfolios.

The news is exactly what Spansion needs right now to survive, having filing for bankruptcy just last month. A few weeks ago, the company reported fiscal first quarter revenue of about $400 million, which isn't small change by any means. But that's a 15% annual drop, and the flash memory business has notoriously thin margins.

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Samsung's Instinct was not only Sprint's fastest selling EV-DO handset, but it also ranked as Best Buy's best selling handset since 2006. And though Samsung followed it up with the Windows Mobile "TouchWiz"-equipped Omnia, the splash made by the Instinct was too big to avoid a sequel.

At CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas, Sprint and Samsung announced the Instinct s30 will be available on April 19 through Sprint's stores and Web site for $129.99 with a two-year contract and applicable rebates.

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This week, Samsung confirmed to Phone Scoop that the SWD-M100 Mondi device demoed at Mobile World Congress '09 is coming to the Clear WiMAX network in the US.

The tablet runs Windows Mobile 6.1, so the 4.3" touchscreen is therefore resistive (i.e., it requires a stylus). It slides up to reveal a QWERTY keypad and 8-direction control pad, there is a 3 megapixel autofocus camera facing outward and a VGA webcam facing the user. It has a microSD slot for memory expansion, but there is not yet a spec telling what kind of onboard memory and processing power it will provide.

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In Germany and the UK today, consumer electronics company Samsung launched the Samsung Movies beta on its mobile portal. The dedicated movie download shop lets users rent or download Hollywood movies and TV shows on their PCs and Windows Media Player-equipped Samsung handset. The only device that supports the beta service is the S8300 Tocco Ultra.

Windows Media Player version 11 is required to watch downloaded content on the PC and sync with the mobile device. An active Internet connection is also required to receive the license key that makes the content viewable. Rentals can sit unopened indefinitely, but once the key is retrieved, the file is only usable for 24 hours.

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Samsung has reportedly denied a rumored rollout of its first Android phone next week, saying instead that the phone looks likely for release in the second half of this year.

In an interview with the UK-based Guardian newspaper this morning, Younghee Lee, head of marketing for Samsung's mobile device division, reportedly said that, contrary to industry speculation otherwise, Samsung will not unveil a phone based on Google's Android platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

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Like the majority of its fellow electronics companies this week, Samsung today posted a loss for the fourth quarter of 2008.

The South Korean CE maker renowned for its displays and responsible for the much of the growth in the flash memory market lost $14.4 million for the quarter ending on New Year's Eve.

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Samsung announced today that it will split itself into two parts, with one new division to focus on consumer electronics items such as mobile phones and TVs and the other on semiconductors and LCDs.

The two new divisions will be led by executives with hefty experience in the two respective areas. Choi Gee-sun, now in charge of the new consumer products unit, headed up Samsung's mobile phone operations for the past two years.

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A roundtable panel on Thursday afternoon at CES was one of the show's briefer events so far, but we picked up some interesting tidbits from the forthright Samsung executives present. We have highlights of the stuff we would have loved to have heard during yesterday's big event, but better late than never:

- Ding, dong, the DLP is... Samsung is one of the last two companies to offer DLP televisions. (The other is Mitsubishi.) The Digital Light Processing technology was quite clever, using microscopic mirrors rapidly repositioning to create the image, but that battle was won by LCDs. But after hanging in there for years, Samsung is out, according to Senior Vice President SangHeung Shin, who told reporters that "We've already internally made the decision to drop the [DLP] line." Sets will most likely continue to be available for some time.

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In addition to its standard bevy of monitor upgrades, this time with LED backlighting, Samsung rolled out a trio of new monitor products with interesting capabilities.

First up is a 22-inch display that is compatible with Nvidia's 3D vision graphics card. At a price tag of only $349, we don't expect a super high quality screen, but the Samsung 2233RZ is a useful offering for 3D modeling and some video games. If sports a resolution of 1680x1050 pixels, 300cd/m2 brightness, 160 degree viewing angle and 5ms response time in 2D.

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