With Thanksgiving day, followed by Black Friday, and inevitably, Christmas, the consumer electronics market will be abuzz with savings, as each vendor and retailer looks to attract additional custom at this most lucrative time of year.
Like the idea of Project Glass but prefer a little more Redmond in your toys? If a patent filing is to be believed, you may well be in luck. Google's Project Glass is undoubtedly a typically Google affair. Proposing to turn our glasses into full on video recorders and heads-up displays, Project Glass is the brainchild of a company that prides itself in thinking not just outside the box, but also outside the box that houses that, err, box.
Using an Android phone is no east feat, I tell you. Apart from the fact that if you’re a fond of playing around with the intricate workings of your operating system, and consequently flash a new ROM every week (can be even day, in extreme cases), one major annoyance that you’ll feel is the battery, which essentially drains faster than any other smartphone OS that I’ve played around with. It’s not really necessarily the device’s fault – a simple code inspection actually establishes that it’s how the AOSP is built which causes the battery to drain faster, and perhaps it’s Google’s acknowledgement of this fact that they’ve decided to take up Project Roadrunner after the successful implementation of Project Butter with Jelly Bean.
First-person shooters offering rich, immersing multiplayer experiences are recognized mostly as suited to the PC, as well as consoles like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. However, the rise of mobile as a respectable gaming platform has seen many popular titles gain significant fan bases on iOS and Android. Dead Trigger and Archetype are prime examples of multiplayer games you can enjoy online, on the fly, and joining them today comes another great offering in the form of SHADOWGUN: DeadZone.
For the majority of the world, the Black Friday sales have yet to commence, but thanks to the varying time zones, some countries have already begun to see one-off discounts on a range of products. Naturally, we're focusing on the savings in the technology field, and although the sales have yet to begin in the USA and other nations, those in Australia and New Zealand are already capitalizing on Apple's Black Friday offers.
Many of us view our ringtone choice as a reflection of us, and as such, we find ourselves spending hour upon hour in deliberation, meticulously selecting one that adequately takes our fancy. Although we appreciate the production that goes into our favorite music tracks, we tend to see ringtones as little more than random jingles, but as Nokia has kindly demonstrated, much work is put in behind-the-scenes in order to create these complex alerts.
We have seen instances in the past of resourceful developers throwing together various pieces of work and technologies to create clever ways of controlling lighting levels at home or office as well as creating make-shift home automation systems that may not have the same power as a premium system, but still gets the job done. The SiriProxy-Hue project is yet another example of how community driven projects can interact with Apple's own software and hardware to create a usable system for the average user.
It was approximately ten days ago when Apple and HTC announced that they had come to a global settlement that would eventually see their ongoing legal dispute come to an extremely welcome end. Both Peter Chou and Tim Cook expressed their delight in reaching the agreement that they hoped would see their respective companies focusing in innovation and customer satisfaction rather than pumping endless resources into fighting one another in a courtroom. Although both HTC and Apple refused to publicly reveal the intricate details of the agreement, a US based Magistrate judge has ruled that Apple will be required to let Samsung in on the bigger picture and inform them exactly what deal has been reached between Apple and their Taiwanese rivals.
It may have been relatively quiet on the patent front in comparison to the no-holds barred playground that we have been used to over the last twelve months, but Samsung is ensuring that the litigation surrounding alleged patent infringements will continue well into next year. We all remember the major Apple victory earlier this year in a San Jose courtroom, but it appears that Samsung is now going on the offensive side by ensuring that a number of Apple's recently released products are added through a court filing that should see the two technology powerhouses duking it out once again in another bitter legal battle.
The September 14th ruling that saw Samsung ordered to pay Apple a cool billion dollars may be set for review by the ITC, but that hasn't stopped one of Samsung's top men letting loose with a volley that is sure to sting many at Apple HQ. According to the head of Samsung’s mobile and IT division, Apple's iPhone would be impossible if Samsung didn’t license its patents to its fierce competitor.
