Author Archive: Gareth

Mobile Tech Addicts Podcast 175: A Game of Cat and Mouse

Gareth is joined by James to debate the recent announcements of BlackBerry and the outcome of the Apple vs Samsung/Google in the patent war. There is an ingenious solution to all your problems with the Nexus 7 and cracking a competition!

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Apple take down Google and Samsung in the patent war

In a stunning decision late Friday, Android (and especially Samsung) has been dealt a potentially serious blow by the on-going patent wars with Apple. US District Court Judge Lucy Koh rendered a decision in favour of Apple’s injunction to block sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the United States. The patent at issue has to deal with database mining capabilities in Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Here is a quote from the Judge’s ruling,

"Apple has shown that the ‘604 Patented feature is core to Siri’s functionality. Accordingly, the court finds that Apple has adequately established the requisite causal nexus between Samsung’s alleged infringement of the ‘604 Patent and Apple’s risk of suffering irreparable harm. In sum, Apple has shown a likelihood of establishing both infringement and validity."

This is the second time this week that Judge Koh rendered a decision in favour of Apple’s injunctions versus Samsung. Earlier in the week, Judge Koh also ruled in favour of Apple’s injunction to stop sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the United States. In that case, Apple already posted a $2.6 Million Dollar bond to block sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. This is done to pay for legal costs and potential damages in case Apple’s injunction loses on appeal.
In this patent infringement case against the Galaxy Nexus, Apple must post a $95.6 Million dollar bond before the phone is blocked for sale in the United States. That will likely happen sometime early next week.
Here is a quote from the Yahoo article detailing responses from both Google and Samsung,

What we expect from Google I/O

Google’s developer conference, Google I/O, will begin tomorrow and there are some high hopes for this one. The conference has become just as much of a PR media announcement hub for Google as it is a tool for developers. Not only that, but it keeps getting bigger. This year, the conference will go on for three days instead of the two days of previous events. The stakes are high for Google’s Android, especially in the tablet arena. Smartphones using the OS have risen to dominate the world market, but Android tablets have struggled against Apple’s iPad. Still, Google I/O is more than just Android, and there are a host of other interesting things we expect to see from Google. In fact, we thought it might be interesting to share a list of the many things that could conceivably show up at the conference this year. We’ve done our best to cull as much info from the web as possible to highlight everything that we might see. Some of it could simply be wishful thinking, but some of it has already been rumoured for quite some time. Here’s a taste of what might potentially be at Google I/O this year.

The Nexus 7 Tablet leak

The next, highly anticipated, tablet on the radar is Google’s offering known as the Nexus 7 tablet. For sometime the rumour mill has been muttering that Google is planning to release a tablet that bears the Nexus branding and Asus is touted to be the manufacturer. An announcement is expected to come at Google I/O this week.

Gizmodo Australia claims to have obtained a training document for the Nexus 7 tablet. The document gives us a nice rundown of the specs in question. As the name suggests, the Nexus 7 will have a 7-inch IPS display with a 1280×800 resolution, 1.3 GHz Tegra 3 processor, GeForce 12-core GPU, 1.2 megapixel front camera, 1GB of RAM and NFC support. Sounds good? It all comes in at a rather tasty price starting at $199 for a 8GB storage model and $249 for a 16GB model. Nexus 7 will run the next version of Android called Jelly Bean, Android 4.1.

Those specs might be quite hard to stomach with that price tag attached and there is much scepticism that this cannot be correct, however bear in mind that Asus have been selling their Transformer devices at cost and gaining the profits from the added peripherals released alongside. This as proved to be an interesting and successful move especially when compared to Samsung’s premium mark-up on every tablet.

With a Google branded tablet out in the wild receiving updates as soon as Google is ready to push them out, lacking manufacturing and network tinkering, we might be seeing something of a hit right here and there will be little excuse for a household not to have one. In saying that, Asus will no doubt see a dip in sales of their own devices or could this be the main reason we have not seen the release of a 7″ tablet from Asus just yet?

Posted by: Gareth

The ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TJ700 debuts

Asus has been pretty busy of late creating the long-rumoured Nexus 7 tablet (to debut at Google I/O next week), the ASUS Padfone, and the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700.

Each one of the devices is exciting in it own right. The Nexus 7 is obviously generating the biggest headlines at the moment as there is a lot of mystery and speculation regarding it’s release. ASUS and bloggers have given up a lot of info about the Padfone and there are plenty of videos and opinions of their phone/dumb terminal combination. The third device hasn’t really settled on a radar yet, until now. As yet the Infinity has no official information about an upcoming launch. However, a presentation video for the TF700 just surfaced, giving us hope that the launch of the sleek transformer is indeed just around the corner.

The unlisted video was leaked by a redditor, who calls it a “launch video”. Not exactly the most reliable source, but the video does fit nicely with the other information we got so far on the TF700.

The Galaxy Tabs to get ICS?

Great news for Samsung Galaxy Tab owners. sammobile.com has reported, allegedly, that the Android 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich update schedule for the Galaxy Tabs is due. It looks like most of the current versions if not all of them will start receiving the rollout of ICS next month! Here’s a quote directly from their site with all the details:

Good news, after long waiting Samsung will finally start with the Android 4.0 updates for the Galaxy Tab 7.7 – 8.9 – 10.1.
The updates will start in July but the most updates are planned for August.
According to our insider the update will improve your battery and speed.
Samsung Canada posted a schedule also when we will see the first galaxy Tab updates.
Even they say in July / August.
Another good thing is, when we have the first Android 4.0 for the Galaxy Tab 7.7 we will start making our review about the Galaxy Tab 7.7
If you want to see our first Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 WIFI review please stay tuned.
That review is planned to come online this month.
The next tablets will receive an Android 4.0 update.

• GT-P6210 Galaxy Tab Plus 7.0 WIFI
• GT-P6200 Galaxy Tab Plus 7.0 WIFI + 3G
• GT-P6810 Galaxy Tab 7.7 WIFI
• GT-P6800 Galaxy Tab 7.7 WIFI + 3G
• GT-P7310 Galaxy Tab 8.9 WIFI
• GT-P7300 Galaxy Tab 8.9 WIFI + 3G
• GT-P7510 Galaxy Tab 10.1 WIFI
• GT-P7500 Galaxy Tab 10.1 WIFI + 3G

Source: SamMobile

Posted by: Gareth