Apple is reportedly readying a 8GB iPhone 4 which will probably be launched at a lower price point than the current iPhones. It is very common to launch a cost-reduced variant of a product when cheaper alternatives of components are available on the market. This redesigns give an extra slack of margin and enable price reductions when competition becomes tougher. But, in this case, the reduction of storage capacity wasn’t necessary because 8GB Flash chips are as [...]
As lawsuits will have a major influence on the future of the mobile industry and the situation is becoming overly complex, I wanted to share with you this great overview of the situation created by Thomson Reuters, below. As we can see, Google could look quite spared from lawsuits, except the Oracle who is suing Google for its use of Java in Android. But if you look at the green dots, you see that Apple [...]
Yesterday Google announced that they were acquiring Motorola for its patents. This 12.5 billion acquisition is not only a huge deal, it will also have a big impact on the phone industry. A few weeks ago, Google lost the Nortel patent deal in favor of Apple and Microsoft, creating a serious threat for its mobile operating system, Android. But apparently, this wasn’t the only ongoing battle for the mobile OS dominance. As Business Insider revealed today, [...]
This post is the last of a series of 3 posts about the current situation of the TV manufacturing industry. You can find the 2 first post here: Back to a tough reality and The lost 3-D illusions And now? What’s next for the TV manufacturers? And, if 3-D never gets traction, what can be the next technology that drives customers to the shops for a new TV. No short-term innovation seems able to disrupt the TV image [...]
Samsung just announced a new version of its super star smartphone, the Galaxy. This new version can resist water and dirt, and is dubbed Samsung Galaxy Xcover. Ever used your phone next to a swimming pool? Do you bring your phone on the beach? Didn’t you ever drop a glass? Then, this phone may be for you because it is water and dirt-proof. And this is not just marketing: the phone is IP67 certified. The Ingress [...]
After a delayed launch in Australia, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is banned from Europe for copying the iPad 2 design. Apple just won a big battle in its patent war against Samsung. The Landgericht (district court) of Düsseldorf granted Apple a preliminary injunction against Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for infringing on its design copyright and copying parts of the iPad 2. Even if the judgement was made in Germany, Samsung is asked to stop selling [...]
As we’ve discussed earlier today, selling a 3D TV isn’t as easy as expected for the TV vendors. And, when comes the time to choose a 3D TV, one of the trade off is to decide between a passive or an active system. In an attempt to make the active 3D TVs more attractive, the 3 main manufacturers, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony teamed up with Xpand to create a new active 3D TV glasses standard, dubbed the [...]
This post is the second of a series of 3 posts about the current situation of the TV manufacturing industry. You can find the first post here: Back to a tough reality. The lost 3-D illusions 10 years ago, the key advantages of flat-screens compared to the old tubes were obvious: it takes less space in the living room even for very large screens; it’s ready for the switch to digital broadcasting; and the image was [...]
This post is a first of a series of 3 posts about the current situation of the TV manufacturing industry. Back to a tough reality Nowadays, after ditching their old tubes for high-quality flat-screens a couple of years ago, most consumers can’t find a good reason to buy a new TV. And after a few years of LCD euphoria, the situation is becoming critical for TV manufacturers. The forecasts of LCD TV sets shipments went [...]
As he promised last week when he announced his hack of Macbook batteries, Charlie Miller revealed more details about hi hack today. In Las Vegas at the Def Con 19 conference, Miller how some Apple mistakes helped him a lot in accessing the firmware of the MacBook battery and change it. He indeed found out that Apple forgot to change 2 of the default passwords of the Texas Instrument battery processor. These password which give [...]
As HTC says on their Facebook page, they listened to their customers and provided them with a way to unlock the boot loader of their Android phones. First of all, quick reminder about what a boot loader is. It’s a small piece of software stored in a non-volatile memory component like Flash which is responsible to load and initialize the main software, the operating system in most cases. So, it’s a critical piece of software [...]
A few days ago Sony announced that its Playstation Vita would miss Christmas. But Sony may have found a solution to avoid to loose too many sales: enable customers to pre-order the console. Here is a quick reminder of the specs as the Playstation Vita as it was announced a few months ago already: a ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor, 5-inch OLED touchscreen with 960 x 544 resolution, 2 analog sticks, 3G and WiFi connectivity, GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, [...]
