Yandex, Russia's biggest search company, today is making two key moves to ramp up Yandex.Disk, its foray into cloud storage services. Today, it is announcing that Samsung will preload Yandex.Disk on to its Series 5 range of Ultrabooks, starting in Russia. And on top of that Yandex is adding English-language support to the service -- an indication that Yandex is now setting its sights on taking Yandex.Disk international.The Samsung deal will see consumers who buy the new Ultrabooks before December 31 get access to 250GB of storage. (The Ultrabooks go on sale this week.) This is a big premium on the regular amount of free storage that Yandex.Disk has been offering users to-date: since the service first launched in April, Yandex has capped free storage at 10GB. read more..
Thursday, 23 August 2012
Cloud Storage-Samsung-Yandex-Russia
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Industrial Design-Sony Style-Influence-Samsung-Iphone
The battle royale begins in a California courtroom today, as jury selection begins in the case of Apple vs. Samsung. As part of the last-minute legal maneuvering before the trial started, Samsung attempted to show how certain iPhone prototypes were influenced by Sony designs. However, Judge Lucy Koh ruled yesterday that Samsung's lawyers could not bring up the topic in opening arguments. AllThingsD's Ina Fried reported on the decision on the eve of the beginning of the trial. Samsung wanted to have ex-Apple designer Shin Nishibori testify in the case, although Nishibori insistence that he will not appear as a witness. Nishibori made a mockup of a Sony-inspired iPhone (nicknamed "Jony" in honor of Apple's Industrial Design Senior VP Jony Ive) during his time at Apple, and Samsung wanted to use that design as proof that the iPhone design is not unique. The Sony-like design may be a moot point anyway, as Apple revealed a design code-named "purple" (seen in the image at the top of this post) that pre-dates it by several months. Purple looks surprisingly like the iPhone 4 design -- according to court documents (PDF document), Nishibori testified in regard to the "Jony" design "that the design exercise was to be an 'enjoyable' side project and that he merely applied details, 'buttons and switches,' to express the Sony style on a model phone Apple had already developed." In case you're confused about all of the courtroom craziness that has gone on so far, Fried has produced a "cheat sheet" that will hopefully make sense the insanity surrounding the case.#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }Continue reading Court rules Samsung can't show Sony's influence on iPhone; Apple reveals 2005 prototypeCourt rules Samsung can't show Sony's influence on iPhone; Apple reveals 2005 prototype originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Dram Market-Samsung-Elpida-Apple-Hynix
Digitimes' poor track record has been thrust into the spotlight in recent days, but that hasn't stopped one of the Taiwanese news site's reports from having a major effect on stock prices for Samsung and Hynix. The report from earlier this week claims that Apple has placed "huge" orders for DRAM chips with Elpida, soaking up half of the capacity at the firm's main plant in Hiroshima, Japan.
1 GB of Elpida DRAM in third-generation iPad (Source: iFixit)
As noted by Reuters, the rumor has had a significant effect on fellow DRAM manufacturers Samsung and Hynix, with Samsung losing $10 billion in market value today in a 6% stock decline. The smaller Hynix was down nearly 9%"It looks like Apple doesn't want to see Samsung and hynix dominate the chip market. Apple wants to maintain its bargaining power by keeping Elpida running," said Choi Do-yeon, an analyst at LIG Investment & Securities.Elpida filed for bankruptcy in late February, and Micron has emerged as a likely acquirer for the company. The combined Micron-Elpida would be a strong competitor in the DRAM market, sparking concerns for others in the competitive industry.
DRAM, the volatile memory used to hold active applications and other data for use while a device is in operation, is a commodity in the consumer electronics market, with Apple routinely sourcing from multiple suppliers and shifting orders to achieve the best pricing. read more..
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Patent Infringement Case-Unofficial Apple Weblog-Intel Provide Source-Patent Battle
Apple has some unusual bedfellows, Intel and Qualcomm, in a patent infringement case that it's fighting with Samsung in Australia. According to a Bloomberg report, Intel and Qualcomm agreed to provide the Australian court with source code that'll prove Apple isn't infringing on patents held by Samsung. The trial is slated to begin July 9 and will run through October 12. The Sydney Federal Court is expecting the trial to be a blockbuster affair and may assign a second judge and a court-appointed expert to serve at the trial.Qualcomm, Intel provide source code in patent battle originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Android-Galaxy-Moxie
Know what I love about Android hackers? They’ve got moxie. Take a look at these folks on the XDA-developer forums: a user named itsjusttime put up a bounty post offering cold hard cash to whoever could get AT&T’s Galaxy Note I717 up and running on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. Now, just over two weeks later, a solution has been found, and it’s surprisingly easy to pull off if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. read more..
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Changewave Research-Corporate Buyers-Tablets-Ipads
Apple's going to need to keep those supplier factories in China running 24/7 just to meet the demand from corporate buyers. A new ChangeWave Research survey of 1,604 corporate buyers shows that not only are about one in five companies planning on purchasing tablets for employees, but of those companies a whopping 84 percent say that they plan to purchase iPads. That last number is up seven percent from the previous survey, which was done in November of 2011. With the Apple number going up, logically the share for other manufacturers will be declining. ChangeWave's numbers show that the percentage of companies planning to purchase tablets made by Apple arch-rival Samsung is a distant 8 percent. The results are even worse for companies like Lenovo and Motorola, which are the choice of only 2 percent of respondents respectively. ChangeWave also asked the corporate buyers which wireless data carrier they planned to use for the new tablets. The results were split nearly 50-50, with 30 percent of respondents hitching their tablets to the AT&T wagon and 29 percent following the Verizon path. Only 4 percent said they'd choose Sprint -- which doesn't currently carry the iPad -- and 11 percent said they'd forego a wireless plan. The rest of the respondents? They really weren't sure. [via The Loop]Survey: iPads the choice of 84% of companies buying tablets originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Software Patents-Ferguson
In case you haven't seen it yet, the fourth episode of Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" series went live in mid-February on Ferguson's site. As in the previous three episodes in the series, Ferguson examines modern attitudes toward "intellectual property" and how these attitudes rather counterintuitively stifle creativity rather than fostering it. Part 4 of "Everything is a Remix" deals largely with the contentious subject of software patents, a subject we've covered many times here at TUAW. According to Ferguson, 62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software patents, and he estimates the total wealth "lost" (read: siphoned off from "infringing" companies and individuals towards patent holders and their lawyers) at half a trillion dollars. Apple has found itself on both sides of the software patent trench warfare, as both target and aggressor. Ferguson makes it pretty obvious that Apple is just as guilty of hypocrisy as everyone else when it comes to software patents; he points out that Steve Jobs from 1996 proudly stated "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," while Steve Jobs from 2010 said he was going to "destroy Android, because it's a stolen product" and was "willing to go thermonuclear war" on Google and its allegedly copycat product. As Ferguson points out, "When we copy, we justify it. When others copy, we vilify it. Most of us have no problem with copying as long as we're the ones doing it." The question remains, however, where to draw the line between copying as a necessary portion of innovation and copying as an admission of a failure to innovate. Some might say all Samsung has done with its many riffs on Apple's products is "remix" the iPad and iPhone, but even after viewing Ferguson's series I'm not wholly convinced of that. On the other hand, Apple itself has long been accused of "copying" innovations at Xerox PARC for the first Mac OS -- something Ferguson himself addressed in an earlier episode of his series -- so the demarcation between "remix" and "shameless knockoff" isn't always easy to find. Ferguson's entire series is very well put together, and is itself only possible because of the very "remixing" he discusses. If you haven't caught the earlier episodes, I'd highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch all four parts back-to-back.'Everything is a Remix' examines software patents originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Supermodel Adriana Lima-Marvel Superheroes-School Teacher-David Beckham-Scrimmage
The 2012 Twitter Ad Scrimmage pitted Marvel superheroes against David Beckham, M&M characters and supermodel Adriana Lima. But Samsung's "Thing Called Love" ad, featuring the upcoming Galaxy Note, was this year's Twitter favorite, taking home the title of 2012's favorite Super Bowl ad. read more..
Urgent tweet in Kenya village: Help, sheep missing
When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher's home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled. read more..