Google strikes back at Apple and Microsoft’s anti-Android patent consortium

It hasn't taken long for Google to strike back in the latest patent world war. GigaOM reports that Google this week has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar, a consortium backed by Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry that has filed lawsuits against Google, Samsung and other major Android vendors. Rockstar is suing the Android vendors for allegedly infringing upon Nortel patents that the companies teamed up to buy back in 2011.



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Posted in 2013 at 09:30PM, December 25

Google hits Amazon where it hurts with Cloud Platform

Google's Cloud Platform just got a major enhancement that hits Amazon and other major cloud players right where it hurts. The company on Monday evening announced the general availability of Google Compute Engine, which had previously only been accessible to a small group of testers. Google's Apps Engine already competes directly with Amazon's popular cloud services by allowing developers to host web apps on remote servers that Google manages. Now Compute Engine will compete directly with Amazon's popular EC2 hosting service, offering "virtual machines that are performant, scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at rest," according to Google. The service supports numerous operating systems, comes with 24/7 support and promises 99.95% uptime. More details can be found in Google's blog post, which is linked below in our source section.

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Posted in 2013 at 09:30PM, December 03

Great news for Microsoft: Lumias start to break through in the U.S.

One nugget buried within Nokia's less-bad-than-expected earnings report released Tuesday was that the company's Windows Phone-based Lumia devices may finally be breaking through in the United States. As AllThingsD points out, Nokia sold 1.4 million Lumias in North America in the third quarter this year, which is triple the number of Lumias it sold in North America in Q3 2012. While those numbers aren't anywhere close to iPhone or Samsung Galaxy figures, Microsoft has to be happy that Nokia phones are showing some momentum just as it's planning to buy up the company's handset division and use it as its own mobile device design shop.

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Posted in 2013 at 09:30PM, October 29

Samsung issues apology, promises to fix buggy Galaxy phones in China

It has been a season full of ups and downs for Samsung. On one hand, the Korean tech company managed to outsell Apple last quarter and topped customer satisfaction ratings. On the other, the Galaxy Round exists. The latest dip on this rollercoaster month is a familiar one: some Samsung devices are malfunctioning. Earlier this month, Galaxy S4 return rates in Germany jumped after an issue with the batteries began killing phones.



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Posted in 2013 at 09:30PM, October 24