Looks like some of the Skype crew might’ve had a sleepless night to please owners of the Nexus S 4G. If you’ll recall, June 30th saw a major update to its Android app enabling video chat on four devices; although the Nexus S was part of the club, its door was locked for Sprint’s 4G variant. That’s quickly changed, however, as the team’s set loose a hotfix to grant it access — this despite initially stating we’d have to wait for a “future release.” You can grab the app from the Android Market if you haven’t yet, and be sure to let us know how it goes in comments. Oh, and for those anxious Thunderbolt owners? We’d recommend not holding your breath until after the 4th of July holiday.
Back in April, Samsung slapped back at Apple’s claims of patent infringement with a healthy helping of ten claims of its own. Now Bloomberg is reporting that Samsung quietly dropped its countersuit against the Cupertino-based company on June 30th, in an attempt “to streamline the legal proceedings.” Of course that doesn’t mean the saga is over: Apple’s smartphone infringement accusations stand, as do legal battles in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Samsung says it will also continue to fight Apple’s accusations in the US in the form of a counter-claim. One down, one to go?
Update: To clarify, this does not mean that Samsung has abandoned its own infringement claims against Apple. Those claims have been rolled into counter-claims in the original suit.
Toshiba has officially recalled select Sandy Bridge based notebooks, after Intel admitted a silicon flaw in the 6 Series Cougar Point chipset could lead to degradation of SATA 3Gbps connectivity. Over thirty Toshiba SKUs – across the Satellite, Portege and Qosmio lines – have been affected, with the company asking customers to “return the product to the place of purchase for a full refund.” Meanwhile, HP has delayed a new product launch because of the issue.
According to a statement from the company’s PR company, HP “are postponing the business notebooks briefing on Feb. 10 as the availability of HP products will be impacted.” Intel has increased its estimate on how much the Cougar Point problem might cost to remedy, with the figure now hitting $1bn in missed sales and fixing costs.
Samsung and NEC have also been affected, with Samsung saying it will offer refunds on certain machines and NEC delaying releases of four new models. The full list of Toshiba models affected can be found below:
Satellite A660 See note below
Satellite A665 S5176, S5177, S5182, S5183, S5184, S5185, S5187, S5189, S6100
Satellite A665 3D Edition 3DV10, 3DV11, 3DV12
Satellite E305 S1990
Satellite L655 S5161, S5161BN, S5161RD, S5161WH, S5162, S5166, S5166BN, S5166RD, S5166WH, S5167
Satellite M645 S4116, S4118
Portege R835 P50, P55, P56
Qosmio X500 Q930
Qosmio X505 Q8100, Q8102, Q8104
Note: If you purchased a Satellite A660 from Toshiba Direct, with a Core i7 2630QM quad-core processor, you will be contacted directly by Toshiba.
Look, let us just sum up the Galaxy S 4G for you: it’s a Vibrant with Froyo, a front-facing camera, and Inception. After reading through the new details T-Mobile’s outed on its latest HSPA+-equipped Android smartphone today, that’s really the best way to describe it… and let’s face it, Avatar (which, you might recall, came bundled with the Vibrant) was getting kind of old and played out anyway. Naturally, like T-Mobile’s other video call-capable devices, the front-facing camera will make use of Qik; other preinstalled third-party apps will include Kindle, doubleTwist with AirSync, and T-Mobile TV for streaming content from ABC, Fox, PBS, and others. You’ll also get a slight battery capacity bump from the Vibrant to 1650mAh, undoubtedly to counteract the effects of the beefier radio. Revolutionary, no; evolutionary, quite! We don’t have a date or a price yet, but the carrier says we can expect it this month. Follow the break for the full press release.
If you were to prepare a list of most under-served smartphone form factors, portrait QWERTY ranks high on the list; few manufacturers have dared to dabble in it so far, despite the fact that there would seem to be a treasure trove of potential users in the BlackBerry realm who live and die by the Bold / Curve layout. Motorola has given it the most high-publicity shot so far with entries like the Droid Pro, Charm, and Flipout, and it looks like Samsung might be prepping a head-on Droid Pro competitor for Sprint thanks to some shots that have emerged on PocketNow today. We have precisely zero details on the hardware specs, the possible launch time frame, or really anything else at this point, but we’ll keep an eye out.
Yesterday, Intel stopped shipments of its 6 Series support chip, used in personal computers, because of a design flaw. Today, Samsung announced it will issue refunds or exchange for products containing the chipset. Intel will be paying for the refunds and replacements, so the move will not affect Samsung financially.
The faulty chipset affects the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD drives. The chipset is used in PCs with Intel’s latest Second Generation Intel Core processors, aka Sandy Bridge.
There is one PC lineup affected by this chip in the US, and 6 in South Korea.
could in turn affect the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD drives. The chipset will be used in PCs with Intel’s latest Second Generation Intel Core processors, also known as Sandy Bridge.
It’s hardly been a good week for Samsung. Not only has the company been forced to backtrack on its Galaxy Tab sales figures, admitting it was counting vendor shipments rather than end-user purchases, but return rates are also said to be far higher than expected. Considering the Galaxy Tab has been the poster child of Android slates so far, it’s an embarrassing showing against the nigh-unstoppable Apple iPad. Question is, was it Froyo that scuppered the Tab – a smartphone OS asked to do tablet duties it simply couldn’t fulfil – or is 7-inches simply the wrong size? And, with Honeycomb fast approaching, can Google’s new OS turn the tide?
It’s fair to say that Froyo – Android 2.2 – was never intended for tablets; even Google confirmed that. Back when we first reviewed the Galaxy Tab we praised Samsung for the work it had done on creating custom apps for the slate, replacing the native calendar, address book and other software to suit the 7-inch display and 1024 x 600 resolution. It went some way to disguise the feeling that the Tab was an oversized phone, certainly, though it was nowhere near perfect.
Still, we’ve seen a gradual flow of tablet-centric apps for Android, including some high profile launches from the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. They’ve targeted Tab owners and borrowed design cues from iPad apps to make the most of the resolution, carving out a 7-inch niche where even Google didn’t think there was potential.
However, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. In the most recent SlashGear poll we asked readers to vote for what tablet screen size they were most interested in, and – as of writing – a full 50-percent of over 3,000 respondents told us they were looking for a 10-inch scale slate. In contrast, a little over a quarter preferred a 7-inch model, like the Galaxy Tab (or, indeed, RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook).
Now, we didn’t ask for justifications of each selection, so we can’t say exactly why more people prefer a larger slate than a smaller one, but there are some common reasons we’ve been hearing since the Tab was first rumored. One is a basic preference for bigger-scale web browsing, with smaller tablets not perceived as offering a big enough leap in screen real-estate over a smartphone. Another is portability; while the Galaxy Tab can fit into a coat pocket (or even your jeans pocket, if you’re not a fan of skinny fit), how many people actually do take it out with them?
The absence of phone support undermined Samsung, with carrier wariness of potentially cannibalized handset sales leaving North American Tabs unable to make regular voice calls. Whether the target audience for an Android tablet – more likely, perhaps, to already have a smartphone – would bother carrying both around sapped some of the slate’s portability potential. We’ll have to wait until European sales and return figures for the Tab emerge, given versions there allowed for voice calls and thus it could fully replace a cellphone, to see what sort of impact that artificial crippling had.
Should Samsung have waited, or avoided the contentious 7-inch size altogether? It’s perhaps telling that, of all the big-name Android slates launched at CES 2011 last month, the vast majority had displays in the 10-inch range. Dell’s Streak 7 mimicked the Galaxy Tab, but with an 800 x 480 display that’s rightly being criticized in reviews; it also misses out on Honeycomb, at launch anyway, despite having a dual-core Tegra 2 processor at its heart.
The others – Motorola’s 10-inch XOOM, LG’s G-Slate with what’s believed to be an 8.9-inch screen – plumped for more direct iPad-rivalling scale, and indeed Samsung is expected to bring a 10-inch Galaxy Tab, with Honeycomb in its sights, to Mobile World Congress in just a few weeks time. From what we’ve seen of Android 3.0 so far, it’s a vast improvement over previous iterations when it comes to accommodating a big touchscreen. It’ll work on 7-inchers, of course, just like it will work on smartphone-scale devices, but it’s pretty clear Google had 10-inch tablets in mind throughout development.
We’ll know more after Google’s Honeycomb event tomorrow, where the Motorola XOOM is expected to take center stage, and with the Android team expected to outline not only what makes 3.0 special but the longer-term vision for the platform. Honeycomb on the Galaxy tab could well be the reboot the 7-inch slate needs.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab situation thickens, with the company now insisting that rather than admitting customer sales of the 7-inch tablet were “quite small“, executive Lee Young-hee said they were “quite smooth.” According to Samsung, mishearing of Young-hee’s comments have led to confusion over whether Galaxy Tab shipments have proved disappointing or not.
Samsung has even snipped out the relevant section of the financial call to illustrate it (you can find the whole thing here) and it certainly does sound like “quite smooth” to our ears. You can find that in the video below.
Still, it doesn’t address claims made by researchers today that the Galaxy Tab has seen significant return rates, reaching as much as 16-percent in the US following the holiday period.
Samsung has already had to backtrack on its Galaxy Tab performance figures, admitting that sales have actually been “quite small“, and now new research suggests that returns rates are also high. ITG tracked sales in the US from the November launch of the Tab through to January 15, the NY Post reports, and found that 15-percent were returned.
Based on numbers from the nearly 6,000 stores ITG monitored, from November to December 2010 the return rate was around 13-percent. Unfortunately, holiday sales seem to have resulted in some unwanted gifts, with the rate rising to 16-percent in the subsequent period to January 15 2011.
In contrast, the iPad return rate to Verizon stores since its retail debut there has been around 2-percent. The figures are blamed in no small part on Android’s suitability for tablet-scale devices, at least in the pre-Honeycomb versions Google has released so far. The Galaxy Tab launched running Android 2.2 Froyo complete with some custom apps of Samsung’s own making; we’ll have to wait until Google’s Honeycomb event on Wednesday to see exactly what v3.0 brings to tablets.
The Super Bowl is this weekend marking the only game of the year that a lot of folks will watch and the only time of the year when we actually want to see commercials. If you are rocking an old and small TV set, that just won’t cut it for the big game. It’s not too late to upgrade though and Best Buy has some really good deals on Samsung gear for the game.
Best Buy is offering a Samsung 55-inch LED backlit HDTV that is 3D ready and more for $1999.99, which is a giant discount of $1,300 off the normal price. If that is too large for you, a 46-inch LED backlit 3D TV with 240Hz refresh rate for $1,899.99. That is a discount of $1,030.
Best Buy is also offering up a free Samsung WiFi ready Blu-ray player with the purchase of some Samsung TVs. Best Buy also promises to give you 50% of your money back on your TV if you trade it in on a newer set within four years of purchase.
Looks like some of the Skype crew might’ve had a sleepless night to please owners of the Nexus S 4G. If you’ll recall, June 30th saw a major update to its Android app enabling video chat on four devices; although the Nexus S was part of the club, its door was locked for Sprint’s 4G variant. That’s quickly changed, however, as the team’s set loose a hotfix to grant it access — this despite initially stating we’d have to wait for a “future release.” You can grab the app from the Android Market if you haven’t yet, and be sure to let us know how it goes in comments. Oh, and for those anxious Thunderbolt owners? We’d recommend not holding your breath until after the 4th of July holiday.
