Displaying items by tag: Samsung

Apple rested their case today in the Samsung V Apple trial currently underway. Apple’s last big hurrah was parade their licensing chief in front of the jury. From looking at the testimony it was an attempt to show how much Apple tries to cooperate with the competitors. We are not sure that their effort was successful though. The primary focus was to put in a value on the “infringement” that Apple claims Samsung is guilty of.

When we got into the lab this morning and started checking things out we stumbled across something that was simply shocking.  At appears that Judge Lucy Koh has decided to bar testimony of the Samsung designer that started their move to more simple designs. Her claim is that because she did not design any of the phones that Apple claims are infringing her testimony will not be of value: “The risk of undue prejudice to Apple outweighs the probative value of Ms. Park’s testimony”.

Details about Samsung’s next generation mobile processor have been exposed. The Exynos 5 is based on a 32nm SoC technology and brings two Cortex-A15 cores working at 1.7 GHz. The Exynos 5 supports resolutions up to 2560x160, has full 1080p @ 60 fps hardware acceleration and 3D graphics. It will be also compatible with USB 3.0,SATA 3 standards, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and have support for wireless displays.  With a 30% savings in power consumption it will be up to two and a half times more powerful than Tegra 3.

In following a trial as big as the Samsung V Apple trial there are small things that popup over the course of a case this large and this public. We have already found out that both Samsung and Apple tend to release the number of units “shipped” to investors rather than the number of units actually sold. This is not an uncommon item as when product is shipped to a company like Best Buy or Target they are still listed as a unit “sold” for many companies. But there are other items that come out as well; one of these is only visible if you look closely. This is the strength of the actual claim(s) involved. Although both sides often object just to make things annoying for the other what we have noticed is that Apple appears to want considerably more real data and evidence blocked than Samsung.

We heard a great story this morning surrounding the Samsung V Apple case. So far we have counted four sites that have repeated the analysis that takes massive liberties with data and also blurs the lines between the words “shipped” and sold. As we all know every quarter companies like IDC and Gartner release their estimates based on the number of units shipped to through the channel. They do this for most devices and are used to help predict growth and also to help investors. These reports us classify shipments in the following way “Shipments include shipments to distribution channels or end users. OEM sales are counted under the vendor/brand under which they are sold” this makes them somewhat unreliable to say the least.

Although Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 has just hit the market the device has already been rooted by the team at RootGalaxynote.com. This actually should come as no surprise when you consider that the Note 10.1 is probably very similar internally to the original note and other Samsung products currently on the market (and also the fact that it comes with Ice Cream Sandwich). As of right now the root only works for the European and Saudi Arabia/UAE versions and we have no word on when the US or other Firmware versions will be rooted, but we except it to happen very soon.

Rumors are fun things, but in the end a good deal of them can be counted out with little more than common sense (and a little research). An interesting rumor that popped up in the past weeks is one that is trying to claim that AMD is a prime target for acquisition. Right now the potential buyers are listed as Samsung and Qualcomm, but does any of that make sense? Is AMD really a prime target for acquisition and are they ready to be bought out by someone else? Let’s take a look at these rumors and see if they hold any water.a

As we continue to follow the Samsung V Apple trial we happened upon something rather funny today that is about the case, but also shows something much wider in scope that a battle between Samsung and Apple. We have talked about how the market pushes products and how people tend to identify items with one brand or another. There are many examples of this that we can talk about and they are often welcomed by the companies in question as it puts their brand name out there more than anyone else’s. We can point you to many examples of this; Band-Aid, Kool-Aid, Kleenex, Ziploc, Xerox, Ditto, Zippo, Superglue and yes iPod, iPhone and iPad.

If there is one thing I really cannot stand, it is blatant spin (well, two things since you can also throw in FUD). These two items are becoming rather rampant in the technical media (almost as bad as in the TV news). There are some who have claimed it is because the technical press has become a big business now and is no longer concerned with the facts or anything close to them. What they want is entertainment.  There is another factor to this that many might be missing; technical sites are capable of spreading FUD and spin on a massive scale. If a company wants to get the word out they can “leak” information to a few chosen sources and it will spread faster than bad news.

Apple has a plan for the possibility that they might lose and lose badly in their war against Samsung.  This was something that they always knew was a possibility given the somewhat flimsy evidence they were throwing around and the way that the press caught on so quickly (and not just the pro Apple press). No, Apple knew that they needed to work hard to sever as many direct ties with Samsung and Google and the faster the better.