Daryl Baxter.

The S III, the first phone designed by lawyers?

Well, it definitely doesn’t look like an iPhone this time.

Which brought me to this:

Why should Samsung care about what Apple thinks? Well for one, there’s the aforementioned legal goon squad, and for two, Apple is one of Samsung’s biggest customers. Not for phones - walking around Apple campus with a Galaxy phone sounds like a good way to get fired - Apple is one of Samsung’s biggest customers for components. Samsung makes all sorts of phone and tablet components: CPUs, RAM, flash memory, displays, and more, and they want Apple to buy them - and they do. The iPhone 4, for example, owes about 25% of its component cost to Samsung. Apple sells a lot of phones, so that’s a lot of cash in Samsung’s pocket. The iPhone/Galaxy battle is a win/win for Samsung, and they would like to keep it that way.

That’s right, the entire phone design revolves around not pissing off Apple.

Source.

At least they tried to be original this time. But even so when it comes to their software, like ‘S Voice’ and its similar UI to Siri, they’ve a long way to go.

Pirate Bay must be blocked by all UK ISP’s.

Controversial ruling set a few hours ago:

Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site.

BPI’s chief executive Geoff Taylor said: “The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

“Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them.

“This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else.”

Even though it’s a step in the right direction, someone could use a proxy to circumvent this, and use Pirate Bay anyway.

To someone inexperienced with tech-speak, i’m sure someone could google ‘unblock Pirate Bay’ and they’d be lead to a guide to achieve this.

If there was some way to fine the site and give that back to the artists, filmmakers etc, great, but it seems to be a long, complicated road until something like that is achievable.

The original ‘Google Phone’ in 2006.

Another interesting story from the Oracle vs. Google case ongoing:

At that time, touchscreen support wasn’t a requirement — in fact, the baseline specs required two soft menu keys, indicating that touchscreens weren’t really in the plan at all. 

Back in 2006, Google had Android working on TI’s OMAP850 processor “in three form factors,” and functional apps included the dialer, home screen, messaging app, contacts, and an early example of Android’s ubiquitous WebKit-based browser; implementations of Google Talk, Gmail, Calendar, MMS, “chat-based SMS” (presumably a threaded messaging app), and POP email were expected for Q3 of that same year. That’s a lot of functionality considering that it would be another year and a half before we’d see the first Android prototypes on display.

All told, Google expected Android to be certified by carriers between June 1st and August 31st of 2007, at which point it’d be released to manufacturers. Of course, it wasn’t until October of 2008 that the G1 hit shelves.

Pictures can be seen in the source link.
I wonder why they changed to make the touchscreen the focus of the phone?

Source.

Apple and Samsung CEO’s to face off in court.

In a court filing late on Monday, both companies agreed to the settlement conference. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Tuesday then referred the companies to a San Francisco-based magistrate judge who will lead the talks.

Along with Apple chief executive Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Choi Gee-sung, both companies’ general counsels will also participate, according to Koh’s order.

The two companies are engaged in a bruising legal battle that includes more than 20 cases in 10 countries as they jostle for the top spot in the smartphone and tablet markets. In the case before Koh, trial is currently scheduled for July.

It’s Rocky VII.  Will be interesting to see how Tim Cook gives his view of Samsung stealing their design in front of a judge.

Surreal times ahead!

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