Is Samsung interested in buying HP’s PC business? Not according to Samsung:
The recent rumors that Samsung Electronics will be taking over Hewlett-Packard Co.’s personal computer business are not true.
We hope this clarifies any confusion that may have occurred.
Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and 3D glasses maker XpanD have announced that they’re working together to design a specification for Bluetooth-enabled 3D glasses that will be compatible with HDTVs from all the above makers. They intend to ship them in 2012, and the glasses should work with existing 3D-capable TVs as well as new ones. It’ll eliminate the current hassle of having to buy glasses made by your TV’s manufacturer, and will presumably help to drive down prices for the specs.
To which I say: GOOD! GOOD! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?
Last Thursday morning, as I packed for a three-day trip to San Diego for Comic-Con, I couldn’t decide whether to take my trusty first-generation MacBook Air, or use the trip as an excuse to review Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook, which I’d just received. So I didn’t decide–I took both.
And then, once I’d arrived at the airport, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring the Air’s AC adapter. The Blogging Gods clearly wanted me to try the Series 5, one of the first commercially-available devices that runs Google’s Chrome OS.
The notion of using a laptop purely as a window to the Web–which is the Chrome OS proposition–isn’t inherently unappealing to me. (In fact, I tried to do just that back in 2008, in a project I called Operation Foxbook, long before Google announced Chrome OS.) Using Google’s first Chromebook, last year’s experimental CR-48, had left me more skeptical about Chrome OS rather than less so. But I still want to be impressed with a truly Web-centric computing device. Sadly, my time with the Series 5 at Comic-Con was frustrating in multiple ways. Google and its hardware partners are selling Chromebooks to the public at prices which aren’t lower than those for similar Windows laptops, but the Series 5, like the CR-48,still feels like an experiment.
Samsung may be onto something with the TouchWiz interface that it plans to release for the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
A new promotional video for the tablet shows off what Samsung is calling “Mini Apps” — a collection of utilities that can be launched on top of other Android applications. These include a notepad, calendar, task manager, clock, music player and calculator. They’re the kind of utlities you’d find on a desktop OS, coming in handy for other tasks.
Tablets need more of this. One of my big frustrations with current tablet software is how inconvenient it can be to perform one task that requires two programs, such as taking notes off a web page or adding up numbers from an e-mail. Switching between apps can be a chore if you have to go back and forth several times.
My friend Seth Weintraub of 9to5 Google (and 9to5 Mac) makes a coherent case for choosing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1″ over the iPad 2. (Sure, there are at least as many arguments for choosing the iPad 2, the biggest by far of which is LOTS OF GREAT TABLET APPS–but Seth does a much better job than most of summarizing why you might opt to choose a non-Apple tablet.)
On Thursday evening, AT&T and Samsung announced the Infuse 4G, an Android smartphone with a massive 4.5-inch screen. But several websites are reporting an even bigger development: the Samsung Infuse 4G will allow apps from outside the Android Market.
Sideloading, as it’s known in tech jargon, has been absent from all AT&T Android phones to date. Prohibiting non-Market apps “minimizes the risk of malicious apps harming customers and provides more protection to the customer’s private data stored on the phone,” AT&T explained last June.
Although AT&T hasn’t announced any policy changes, several bloggers who attended the Infuse 4G announcement on Thursday confirmed the “unknown sources” option in the phone’s settings. Users must check this box to allow non-Market apps on their phones. Samsung’s Philip Berne said his retail boxed Infuse 4G also contains the “unknown sources” option.
The other shoe–the Samsung-suing-Apple shoe–has dropped.
So Apple is suing Samsung, accusing it of imitating Apple products with its Galaxy phones and tablets. The most startling thing about the news may be that the two companies weren’t already in court with each other. Over the past few years, the mobile industry has been so rife with suits and countersuits that if every complainant managed to sue every subject of its ire out of business…well, there’d hardly be a mobile industry left.
I had trouble remembering the precise details of the umpteen cases that have made headlines–as well as some related relationships, such as Microsoft’s licensing agreements with Amazon and HTC–so I decided to document them with a handy-dandy infographic, as much for my own edification as anyone else’s.
Do Samsung products such as its Galaxy S phones and Galaxy Tab tablets imitate Apple’s iPhone and iPad? Yes, of course they do. So, to greater and lesser extents, do nearly every smartphone and slate-type computing device on the market today. Is that legal? I guess we’ll find out: Apple is suing Samsung, saying that it’s violating multiple patents and trademarks.
I haven’t seen Apple’s suit, but it sounds like it relates to look-and-feel issues more than do most of the umpteen lawsuits that tech companies have filed against each other recently. In a statement to All Things Digital’s Ina Fried, an Apple spokesperson even complained about the boxes that Samsung products come in being too Apple-esque:
It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.
If Apple has a case, you gotta wonder who else it’ll sue and where all this ends. HP’s upcoming TouchPad tablet, for instance, is promising–but it’s even more strikingly iPad-like than Samsung’s tablets to date. Is it vulnerable? And given that Archos is just about the only company that can honestly say it would be making tablets even if the iPad had never existed, does Apple have a legally-justified beef against the entire category?
I’ve always been made uneasy when one company unimaginatively cribs another’s designs–when I attended Mobile World Congress 2009 it felt like a blur of faux iPhones–but I don’t like the idea of one company essentially having a monopoly on a product category or a form factor. More thoughts to come as details emerge, but for now, what’s your take?
Ready for some 4G hotspot goodness? Verizon has begun selling its Samsung LTE router on its website, available for $99.99 after a $50 online instant rebate and with a two-year service plan. The device is 3G backwards-compatible, so in areas where Verizon’s LTE network is not available yet you’ll still have data access.
Up to five devices can share a connection using the MiFi-like device, and it supports 802.11b,g, and n. It’s also VPN capable.
The unit is not the first to allow the sharing of Verizon LTE data connections via Wi-Fi–that honor goes to the HTC Thunderbolt. However, in order to use the data feature you’re going to need to have a plan that supports it, increasing the monthly cost of ownership.
Of course, the price of admission onto Verizon’s LTE towers isn’t cheap. The Samsung hotspot requires a data plan at $50/mo, which gives you 5GB of bandwidth each month. But if you’re truly using this as a hotspot, that cost spread out over several devices sounds more reasonable.
