In Other News: 13/03/2013.

• U.S. District Judge, Denise Cote, has granted the request to make Apple CEO, Tim Cook, testify in a four hour slot regarding accusations against Apple of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices!
  Via Reuters.

• French law enforcers are giving tech companies a hard time at the moment, today a Paris court banned seven Apple Stores from making employees work night shifts! This was a response to national labour union requests. Apple are also obliged to pay €10,000 in damages to the unions and there will be €50,000 fines for any future violations of this ruling!
  Via TheVerge.

• Samsung supposedly spend $401 million on advertising their devices in the US last year! This was about $70 million more than Apple who only spent $333 million, it's no surprise then that HTC is getting left behind!
  Via WSJ.

• Vevo-TV is now live! This is essentially a new music TV channel which you can watch on a variety of devices so long as they have the Vevo app or website! Check AndroidPolice here for more details!

• Amazon are now offering their Kindle Fire 8.9 HD in the UK! The device will set you back £229 for the 16GB model or £259 if you want 32GB! The device is now available throughout Europe and Japan too! If you're a US customer the price has now been reduced to $269 and you can buy it here!
  Via AndroidGuys.

• Netflix have announced a new feature which will let their 27 million American subscribers share the video and TV shows that they've been watching via their Facebook pages!
  Via Reuters.

• Samsung supposedly expect to shift 10 million Galaxy S4's in the first month that the device is on sale! We'll find out the full details tomorrow!
  Via SamMobile.

• Huawei's 6.1" beast, the Ascend Mate, has been put up for pre-order on the German Amazon page for €499 (£433 or $647). That's in the same ball park as the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 which will cost you in the region of £445 new!
  Via UnwiredView.

• HTC have announced that a developer version of the HTC One will be landing on US shores with 64GB of storage and fully unlocked! It will cost $649 and will otherwise remain unchanged! You can find more details direct from HTC here!
  Via Slashgear.

And finally, The Times has published a list of the 10 most annoying things which you can do on your social networks! Check the full list out here!

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24/09/2012

Intel announces it's working on dual-core and LTE!

   Intel’s is hard at work making their Medfield chips the mobile world's finest. They have LTE-capabilities and multicore versions in the pipeline. The first fruits of this labour are due before the end of this year!

   The company said Intel will be “shipping some LTE products later this year and ramping into 2013″ according to director of product marketing, Sumeet Syal. The director was speaking with TechCrunch, and he also confirmed the company is hard at work making more Android apps play nice with the x86 architecture.

   The company said for the moment we're looking only dual-core Medfield chips but in the future they are looking to create more potent quad-core Atom chipsets! Although, the company explains why they are hard at work on single-core processors at the moment:

   “You have to take a look at how many instructions per clock can the architecture handle — our belief is that others are throwing cores at the issue in terms of getting more performance.  We make that determination based on our architecture so we felt very comfortable coming out with a single core dual-threaded for our first product, and as we’re able to get more and more performance in the right implementation of the architecture we believe putting in dual-core would be the right thing for our next generation product” Sumeet Syal, Intel

A bit of Apple news:

• Apple announced this morning that they sold 5million iPhone's in the first week of the phones availability. That definitely makes Samsung's 20million Galaxy S3 sales in 100 days look a bit average!

• Apple has announced that they've updated 100million devices to iOS6 since it's launch last Thursday!

• iOS6 was jailbroken on launch day!

• If you're a disgruntled iOS6 user and you simply must have Google Maps back there's a nice little hack to bring it back! But, it's still being worked on because it has a tendency to crash! In the meantime why not just use a browser alternative such as Nokia Maps or even the on-line version of Google Maps?

In other news:

• Netflix for Android has had a nice little overhaul which makes it look like a more tablet optimised app! It's a nice little update and well worth a download if you use the service!

• Nintendo's upcoming Wii U console will be region locked! So wait until it's available in your region instead of trying to get one early because otherwise you'll be importing games too!

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20/08/2012

Jolla to introduce Android app compatibility and some more news on their phone!

   We've covered Jolla mobile quite a few times here on TheTechFella and regular readers will know that the company are in the middle of creating a MeeGo powered phone. One of the fundamental problems with MeeGo or any new OS, is that there is a severe lack of apps. Apps recently have become one of the key selling points to any phone buyer.

   Jolla seems to appreciate this and, according to ArcticStartup, the company plans to utilize Android's app ecosystem to ensure there is a lot of apps for their future buyers. This information comes from a recent interview between Jussi Hurmola, the CEO of Jolla and Tero Lehto from Finnish 3T publication, where the latter asked the former how he plans to tackle the problem of building an app ecosystem for a phone. Hurmola reportedly said he plans to use Android apps (but he didn't want to officially announce that yet) as well as Qt and HTML5-applications all through OpenMobile's ACL (application compatibility layer). 

   Hurmola also promised a new UI which is 'more modern' than both Android's and iOS' so if they can live up to that then they may have a challenger on their hands! Another tasty little tidbit was that the device will have a screen larger than 3.5" so everything is sounding promising at the moment!

   Given the huge support MeeGo generated when Nokia announced their N9, Jolla may well have a chance. But, it'll be interesting to see what their device looks like when it gets announced later this autumn, that device will literally make or break this company!

In other news:

• As part of the restructuring of OnLive, the streaming gaming provider has laid off half of their workforce and OnLive all of tyheir their assets will now become part of 'a newly-formed company'. This will mean that HTC's infrequently mentioned $40 million investment will be lost and that'll be another round of bad news for the companies accountants!

• 500,000 Android users in China have been infected with a malware called SMSZombie. Thankfully for those of us outside of China this isn't too big of an issue because the malware exploits a vulnerability in China Mobile's payment systems so it shouldn't affect people in other parts of the world!

• Apple and Samsung have almost finished testifying in their cases and the jury is poised to start deliberating, but the pair were given one last chance to talk it out. Guess what! There was no agreement so far, but Bloomberg believes that the CEOs of both companies, Tim Cook and Kwon Oh Hyun, will hold a telephone conference call to see if any resolution can be agreed before we give full power to the jury. 

•  LG's Optimus Vu will soon be heading outside of Japan and South Korean and will land in the USA and 'select countries' in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. The 'phablet' will be refreshed with a Quad-core Tegra 3 processor for most people but the US version will have a 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S4 processor. All we know about availability or pricing is that these will be ready for September!

• Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note 10.1 has been taken apart by iFixit and they've decided that should anything go wrong with the device it'll be nice and easy to repair! Unlike the new Retina Macbooks and the latest iPad, both of which iFixit criticised for the low likelihood of a successful repair.

• Netflix has been on a recent world wide march lately as they've rolled out there service throughout some Western parts of Europe and announce Scandinavian availability is coming soon. And it seems that this is coming good for the company because they've announced today that they have already managed to rack up a million subscibers throughout the UK and Ireland! Not bad going!

• On a similar theme Barnes and Noble have announced that they too will be bringing their lines of eReaders and content to the UK starting from this autumn. Their address will be nook.com.uk if and when they get their storefront up and running!

• And finally, the Galaxy S3-esque device pictured below is supposedly te upcoming Galaxy player and a full list of specs is available on the picture below! And hopefully the device will make an appearance at IFA in a couple of weeks!

 

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15/08/2012

HTC promises to come back!

   There's quite a few mobile phone companies who are facing a tough time at the moment. The most obvious two are RIM and Nokia, but HTC is having a bit of a crisis at the moment after they lost all moment half way through last year when they released a huge group of decidedly average device. Unfortunately HTC's One Series wasn't quite good enough to steal mindshare back from Samsung and Apple; there were issues with small battery capacities in the One X and some dodgy ceramic work on the One S. 

   It's been reported today that the companies chairman has sent out an email to all their employees in a bid to rally the troops! Chou has laid out how his company needs to “kill bureaucracy” while improving communication; “We have people in meeting[s] and talking all the time but without decision, strategic direction or sense of urgency. Bureaucracy crept in without clear ownership. We agreed to do something but we either didn’t do it or executed it loosely.”

   He continues on to comment on his disappointment that the company’s sales have fallen despite the huge growth in the overall smartphone market. “Our competitors can leverage their scale, brand awareness and big marketing budget to do things which HTC could not do. The fast growth from the last two years has slowed us down.”

   But fear not Chou is confident in the company and promises “We are coming back.”

In other news:

• It's been reported today that Amazon's updated Kindle Fire has slipped through the FCC so hopefully we'll be hearing some sort of official announcement soon!

• Nokia has today reiterated their commitment to Windows Phone 8 and Stephen Elop didn't deny that the company could announce a new set of devices on September 7th, so not too long to wait now!

• Netflix has expanded their service to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland!

• Samsung Vs Apple: Today Samsung has argued that Apple's designs are always 'obvious' and so they should not be patentable, we'll see whether people agree with that, it seems reasonable.

• Adobe has confirmed there will be no more Flash releases for Android, only security updates and from today you won't be able to install a copy on any devices that don't have it! Unless, that is, you have such a huge desire to find the APK and install it yourself from 'untrusted sources'.

• LG has managed to sell 5million LTE phones worldwide in the last few years! Not bad going now all we need is some updates LG!

And finally is this 5.5" (14cm) screen and bezel combination that of the upcoming Galaxy Note 2? Keep it locked here for all the news from IFA as it happens!

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