Judge rejects Crackberry trademark.
Rim got some good news in the courts today as they heard that the Judge rejected a trademark submission for 'Crackberry'. The website Crackberry.com wanted to start selling branded merchandise but their trademark submission was rejected on the grounds that the word 'crackberry' is already synonymous with the Blackberry brand. The examples of why the filing was rejected are that 'crackberry' is already a recognised term for the Blackberry phones of people who are addicted to their blackberry devices and the word is already in the dictionary! (Maybe it's an American thing?)
But, on the plus side it does seem that there is a small amount of sense in the patent world, well done to the judge!
Uh-uh Google's new privacy policy breaches EU law!
Ok so I'm in Britain and I know there are lots of political differences over whether we should be part of the EU or not, but on this one we should all be relatively pleased because the EU is looking out for us all.
The commission has decided that Google's new privacy policy does not meet EU laws for tworeasons; firstly it doesn't meet transparency requirements and secondly it gives your personal data to third parties.
Maybe simplifying their policy wasn't quite as simple (Get it!) as they Goog thought it would be.
MWC conclusions.
So MWC is all but over for another year; yep all the announcements came on Sunday and Monday and I was rushed off my feet! I covered pretty much every big announcement apart from the Sony ones, sorry but lets be honest they got trumped by ZTE, Huawei and HTC.
And it's the first two I wanted to give a special mention to. These companies are growing; they've started the way HTC did, by making phones for networks and then branching out. Huawei in particular really really really impressed me with their designs, they make insanely good looking phones, ZTE not so much so but they're doing a solid job nonetheless. If these two carry on the way they're going they really could pose a threat to the Motorola's and the Nokia's of this world who have dominated the mobile market for years, there just isn't the brand loyalty there used to be in the technology market.
HTC also really impressed me; they promised they would refocus this year and they certainly have with 3 phones each targeted at a specific price bracket and all rocking ICS (with Sense), when these ship they should really help HTC out, they are great phones and I'm seriously impressed how quickly HTC managed to refocus themselves and push out new products with serious appeal!
HTC also really impressed me; they promised they would refocus this year and they certainly have with 3 phones each targeted at a specific price bracket and all rocking ICS (with Sense), when these ship they should really help HTC out, they are great phones and I'm seriously impressed how quickly HTC managed to refocus themselves and push out new products with serious appeal!
The second thing I wanted to mention was tablets. My Advent Vega was my tablet of choice; £200, Nvidia Tegra 2, 10.1" screen, Honeycomb rom, and the battery lasted about 5 hours. That price and spec blew me away last year but this year I am left severely disappointed. The reason I mentioned my tablet is that it smashed in a car accident over christmas and I have been looking for a replacement and I was waiting until MWC for the best of the best and ohhh my goodness I could not have been more underwhelmed.
Let me start with Samsung; the best way to describe their Galaxy Tab 10.1 2 (yeah the name isn't a great start) is poor; average specs (1Ghz dual core processor (Cough my Advent Vega had that)) and the rest of the specs are solid and decidedly mid-range. The biggest update on last year is ICS! Which is so infuriating because that is never going to eat into Apple's marketshare! Again Huawei and ZTE's tablets lack what their phones had.
The only tablet maker I was impressed with was, again, Asus, they brought us the MEmo tablet (yep it has a capital M and E, it's not a typo) and they brought us the Transformer Pad 300, which is the Transformer with a standard IPS screen (Not IPS+) and slightly less storage (starting with 16GB not 32Gb). AND they had the Padfone, which is just an exciting concept if nothing else. Asus know what we want from tablets; we want power and a spec sheet which means we can word process, browse the internet quickly and easily and genuinely have a device which could replace our computer if it were to break for a few days. That is what frustrates me most about the tablets I saw at MWC and from Samsung in particular; people could have done a great job, but they didn't and the iPad 3 (2S maybe) will be announced next week (March 7th) and if the rumours are right, it's Retina display will wipe the floor with this years MWC tablets except for Asus' line up.
MWC this year was great for phones and Android in particular (Nokia.... meh) but Android tablets are still behind in the tablet game and with Windows 8 and a new iPad on the horizon, it might get a lot harder for them to succeed unless they have Transformer in their name.
(Please bare in mind these are just my views, I'm not slagging anyone off, I'm saying it how I see it, if you disagree or agree with me leave a comment below!)
