In latest news from the Samsung vs. Apple patent case, Samsung on Wednesday filed an emergency motion with presiding Judge Lucy Koh to halt Apple’s damages retrial.
Why the halt? Because according to court documents, the US Patent and Trademark Office has suggested that Apple’s “pinch to zoom” patent (which much of the patent trial revolves around) might not actually be valid.
It might have been the unsaid mission statement for quite some time, but now top executive Shin Jong-kyun has puts his cards on the table, telling analysts that after overtaking Apple in smartphones, Samsung aims to be the world leader in tablet computers, too.
Shin noted that Samsung tablet sales will exceed 40 million units this year — more than doubling the sales in 2012.
“Samsung tablet shipments started to grow remarkably since the second half of last year,” he said.
He may have been misquoted about disliking the new iPads, but Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently had something else to say which might prove even more controversial: that Apple and Google should work together.
“Sometimes I say ‘Go to Joe’s Diner’ and [Siri] doesn’t know where Joe’s Diner is,” Woz told the BBC’s UK technology program Click — adding that, “Usually I find out that Android does.”
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un might be an Apple user, but that doesn’t mean that North Korea’s state-run computer agency doesn’t see the value of launching a tablet of its own.
Costing around $250, the Korea Computer Center’s Samjiyon SA-70 has a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB internal memory, and a card slot equipped with an 8 GB micro SD memory card. There is also a 2 mega pixel camera, microphone, gyro sensor. Currently there’s no way to connect to the Internet, although there is an extendable antenna for receiving state television signals.
Following on from the news that Samsung shipped 2.6x the number of smartphones that Apple did last quarter, new figures released by research firm IDC show that Samsung tablet shipments grew by 123% to 9.7 million tablets over the same period. While Apple still leads the way with 29.6% of the tablet market, this is down considerably from the 40.2% share the company captured during this same quarter last year. Samsung meanwhile holds a company record 20.4% of the market, while Asus holds 7.4% (representing a 53% year on year increase). The two biggest growth companies for tablets are Acer and Lenovo — with their shipments increasing 346% and 420% respectively to represent 0.9% and 1.1% of the overall market.
