Articles about Samsung

It's bad enough that Apple uses patents to bully competitors. Now the company threatens retail partners, demanding they remove two Samsung devices from store shelves. Apparently, court orders aren't good enough for Apple, which also ignores one of them.

Apple, through its army of lawyers, has sent a letter to an unknown number of retailers and carriers selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Last month a US court issued temporary injunctions against both devices, but temporarily lifted the one against Galaxy Nexus.

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If you’re a U.S. resident and want to buy a phone today, there’s a one-in-two chance you’ll get a smartphone.

According to a recent report from Nielsen, 54.9 percent of U.S. phone subscribers owned a smartphone as of June 2012. By comparison, in February 2012, smartphone adoption was at 49.7 percent, which can only mean one thing: feature phones are slowly going away and smartphones are here to stay.

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Last April, Samsung released the list of its smartphones and tablets that would receive an upgrade to Android 4.0. The list included the polarizing, is-this-phone-too-big-to-be-a-phone, Galaxy Note.

This update would normally be unremarkable, especially since Google yesterday released the AOSP version of Jelly Bean, but because the Galaxy Note is stylus-friendly, the update includes some feature upgrades to the Galaxy Note's S Pen peripheral in the form of the "Premium Suite."

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Today, UK Judge Colin Birss confirms what Apple fans have claimed for years: Samsung isn't "cool enough" to copy the trendy fruit-logo company. But the result is opposite their meaning about copying badly. Birss ruled that Samsung's Galaxy Tab family of tablets do not imitate iPad, meaning violate Apple's registered design -- they're not "cool enough" and "do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design".

The court gave the win to Samsung by stating that Galaxy Tab 10.1 is different enough to the iPad, being thinner and with a detailed back cover. Apple spokesman Alan Hely doesn't agree, saying: "This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property". This is what happens when you lose and can't do it with dignity.

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It seems that Samsung didn’t get the memo about the financial crisis, and they apparently seem to be unfazed by it. The South Korean company is the best-selling phone manufacturer in the world right now, according to Gartner, and today they collect the benefits for all their efforts, reporting huge profit gains, up 79 percent year over year.

Soaring Galaxy S smartphone sales have helped Samsung become the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world as well, beating Apple in the process. This was bound to have an effect over Samsung’s profits this year and the results are starting to show already in their second quarter profits.

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The patent is mostly a good thing, right? It is a way to show recognition for all the work an individual puts into developing something completely new. It’s useful in determining who creates and who copies. The system may have its kinks, but it’s a good one overall. We revolve around it each day whether we know it or not.

A patent is an easy way to make money, but these days not so much for inventing things but inventing concepts to patent. To make money from them, usually someone has to get sued. The process involves a considerable amount of money, starting with paying lawyers, paying court costs, paying for transport, hotels, meals, and so on. All these things add up and they account for every cent as to what a trial would and does cost.

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The Galaxy S III is a wonderful beast, whose 8-megapixel stills camera can also shoot video in full HD (1920x1080). So is this a triumph of technological democratisation? Is the Galaxy S III all you need to challenge the dominance of the Hollywood Studios and their ridiculous $200m budgets? After all, some movies are made on Digital SLRs these days. Read on to find out.

The answer is a definite, well, maybe. As I’ve noted in my review, the S3’s pictures are surprisingly good, and while it would be a stretch to say you could shoot "The Avengers" on a smartphone, there is a lot you can do with this tiny camera. It could certainly be a terrific little helper for blogging, web-reporting and almost anything else you might want to put on the Internet, or produce for home or office use. Obviously it has limitations, even when compared to dedicated camcorders of the same price point, so here are a few suggestions and tips for getting the best out of it.

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I'm ashamed of Apple, and myself for giving anything to iPhone today. To celebrate iPhone's fifth anniversary, I asked BetaNews writers to offer missives based on their experience using the handset. We published Wayne Williams' story on Wednesday, another by Chris Wright early day and my own this afternoon. Two other stories are in the queue. We'll run them over the weekend, however, instead of today. There's no longer any sense of birthday celebration in these halls.

Today, US District Judge Lucy Koh gave Apple a great gift for iPhone's fifth, that I see as anything but. Apple's preliminary injunction against the Samsung-manufactured, Google-branded Galaxy Nexus is an outrage and demonstrates how far fallen is Steve Jobs' company from the innovative spirit that brought iPhone to market. The original set the smartphone market ablaze and brought Apple to unimagined success as seen from 2007. There was a time when Apple innovated rather than litigated and up-ended so-called copycats by making bold, breath-taking successor products. But that Apple is gone, buried with Jobs, who sadly left this world last year.

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Apple's ridiculous patent assault against Samsung finally hits Google, which suddenly looks genius for choosing Asus to manufacture the Nexus 7 tablet. On Friday, US District Judge Lucy Koh issued a preliminary injunction against Galaxy Nexus, which is Google's flagship, stock Android smartphone. Days earlier she barred Galaxy Tab 10.1. For the preliminary injunction to go into effect, Apple must first put up $96 million.

What timing. To preview Android 4.1 Jellybean, the company gave one to each of more than 5,000 developers during Google I/O earlier this week. The new OS releases to Motorola XOOM tablets and Galaxy Nexus in mid-July, making the smartphone the first to get the important upgrade. The preliminary injunction would somewhat stymie Jellybean distribution ahead of iO6, which Apple is months from releasing. New features include voice response, that in BetaNews testing smoke Apple's Siri. If you're thinking about buying Galaxy Nexus, don't wait!

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Now that Samsung's Galaxy S III is kind of available here in the United States, it's past time to discuss the inevitable iPhone migration. Hey, this is the iPhone 4S killer, right?

Samsung generated a little buzz over the weekend about one tool, Media Mushroom's Easy Phone Sync. The app extends capabilities already offered by the developer's free and paid iTunes offerings. Easy Phone Sync grabs non-DRM music and videos, contacts, calendars and messages -- provided there's a backup on your PC or Mac. Near as I can tell, and someone using the app can correct me, this thing isn't iCloud friendly.

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I got my shiny new Galaxy S III about ten days ago -- my first phone upgrade for quite a while. Although I’ve been watching smartphone developments with great interest, I used my Nokia N900 for nearly three years. Nothing out there really looked much better. But suddenly the flagship phones of this generation seem to be a significant improvement over their predecessors.

So was it worth the wait? Absolutely. There are plenty of reviews which give you all the numbers. This is a personal account of what it’s like to use the beast for real (with my contract committing me to it for two years).

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Editor's Note: This is the first of two reviews we will run over the next day, as the first Galaxy S IIIs go on sale here in the United States. However, these reviews cover the international models, which offer faster processors but no LTE.

Starting at the end of May, Samsung is in the process of launching worldwide its new flagship smartphone, Galaxy S III, or i9300 as it's designated internationally. Customers in Europe get the HSPA+ (21Mbps download, 5.76Mbps upload) model, while those in the United States and Canada will get the LTE variant. So what’s it like to live with a Samsung Galaxy S III? Just awesome. I know that's a spoiler, but you must have expected it.

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In the world of Android-powered smartphones, Samsung is the reigning king. It sells approximately 40 percent of all the Android smartphones going to consumers today, and Forrester Research predicts proprietary Android builds (such as Samsung's TouchWiz) will actually surpass Google's Android ecosystem within three years. Of course, this fragments the market and causes trouble for developers and enterprises looking to create and deploy software for Android.

Monday, Samsung unveiled a new brand that will be applied only to Android devices that have been approved for enterprise use: SAFE, or "Samsung Approved for Enterprise." It's similar to Motorola's line of Enterprise Android devices called Motorola Business Ready, which debuted earlier this year.

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Hidden away in the middle of the concourse walkway between South and West halls of the Los Angeles Convection center sits this little corner display booth. Most people pass it by not knowing how big it might be to the future of gaming but as soon as I see who is there I have to stop and ask questions.

Gaikai is a service that started just two years ago -- at first thought of as nothing more than phantom console level vapor it is one of the two companies to announce "Cloud Gaming"; PC gaming via virtualization. Its first demo shows off high-end games from producers / developers EA and Red Project for titles like Mass Effect 3 or The Witcher 2. Using a web page Java applet client it runs on any Windows, Mac, or even Linux machine.

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In the crowd of hungry tired worn-out journalists at the Showstoppers Tech and Gadget showcase event at the Icon LA Ultra Lounge, right next to a Hooters, across the from the Los Angeles Convention Center, Samsung, like everyone else, isn't showing off anything new. But the particular bobble they have that catches my eye is the Samsung 830 series solid-state drive, released back in October of 2011. It is a sleek little gun-metal black drive thinner than 1/5 of an inch and no weight to it whatsoever. The case is a gun metal brushed aluminum with only the silver raised logo of Samsung emblazoned on it.

This is when I strike it up with Chris Geiser, senior product management at Samsung. Geiser is passionate about the product. He lets it drop that, "Samsung is now spendings $12 billion a year on memory research". Every SDD samsung makes is 100-percent Samsung made parts, from the NAND storage memory to the controller.

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