Apple looks set to request that the courts ban certain Samsung smartphones or tablets from sale in the United States, with a final hearing set to take place towards the end of September.
Although this particular chapter in the Apple vs. Samsung battle has come to an end with a nine person jury ruling in the majority of the instances that were brought before them, that Samsung were indeed guilty of infringing on patents that were owned by Apple Inc. The case was rather peculiar in the fact that until the jury actually came out of deliberation and announced their decisions, nobody could really tell which way the outcome was going to sway, but with Samsung now liable for $1.05 billion in damages to Apple, there is no longer a doubt.
The purported iPad Mini has been circulating in the rumor mill for several months, and the device - now thought to be releasing a couple of weeks after the next iPhone - will certainly ramp up the pressure on competitors already struggling to to match Apple's 9.7-inch model.
Apple suing Samsung, Samsung suing Apple back, Google buying Motorola (and its patent portfolio) and suing Apple, the patent wars are really starting to heat up again!
Considering Facebook is the largest social network in the world with over 900 million registered members, you could be forgiven for thinking they would place significant emphasis on, and pump huge resources into ensuring the mobile experience of their users was second to none. Unfortunately, any Facebook user who has accessed their account through the iPhone or iPad app will know that the experience is less than satisfactory, something that we know occurs due to the app being built for rollout across multiple platforms.
When Google eventually took the plunge and pushed out the Chrome browser to the iOS App Store during the second day of their I/O conference in San Francisco, it answered the prayers of thousands of iPhone and iPad users who had been longing for a worthy competitor to the native Mobile Safari browser which Apple ships with the operating system. Chrome for iOS immediately jumped to the top of the App Store download charts and has remained there ever since with users loving the simple and elegant design with great features such as the Chrome Omnibar and gesture integration.
As powerful as Apple's iOS is, some users will always disagree with the way certain things are implemented throughout the system, meaning there will always be a place for jailbreaking in the iDevice ownership world. One of the much discussed areas of concern in iOS is the way in which users can see what is running in the background and invoke apps from the multitasking part of the OS, something that Apple added as one of the major new features of iOS 4.
If you happen to be the owner of a touch-screen tablet like the iPad or something similar, and also a big fan of Microsoft's Office suite of programs, then you probably live under an umbrella of disappointment and are aware of the fact that the Redmond software giants don't offer any native Office apps for the iPad. There's been talk of the iPad App Store receiving some official apps from Microsoft, but up until now nothing has come to fruition, leaving some users extremely disappointed and having to look for alternative solutions to satisfy their need to create and edit documents on the go.
Rumors and reports of a smaller, more portable iPad have been in the air since 2010, but their frequency has increased significantly this year thanks to the success of smaller, cheaper tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7.
Jailbreaking an iOS device is an excellent way to introduce additional functionality to the already fantastic user-experience which Apple packs into their mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod touch and extremely popular iPad tablet. As well as introducing new feature sets to the device, users can install packages, tweaks and enhancements that alter the way the operating system functions and change substantial parts of it to suit their own tastes and usage methods. Of course, it isn't all about tweaks and system changes, some users just love to alter the visuals of the device rather than make do with Apple's own aesthetic vision.
