If you like to keep up with your technology news, the talk of the next iPhone will have been pretty hard to escape. In fact, such is the nature of an upcoming Cupertino product, the speculation regarding the smartphone has featured in most news outlets, tech-orientated or otherwise, and there's a recurring theme with regards to what's on offer.
The Apple vs. Samsung court case has vacuumed the lion's share of the blogosphere's attention over the past couple of weeks, and with the key figures of both companies now getting involved, it's simply impossible to to be intrigued by the constantly-moving sequence of events. Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software and regular speaker at the WWDC keynote speeches, testified in the case last week, and now NetworkWorld has latched on to some intriguing information mentioned by Forstall months ago.
Another bout of the popular Call Of Duty series is almost upon us, with Black Ops II set to hit stores this November, and the Activision-published franchise will be looking to topple the success of the first Black Ops, which was - and still remains - the fastest selling game of all time.
Windows 8 has always been highlighted as the point when Microsoft's main products would unite as one, with desktop, tablet, smartphone and gaming all intertwined in one way or another by the new operating system. With that in mind, it should be of no surprise that Microsoft has based the structure of gaming on Windows 8 around the flagship Xbox platform, and the built-in games within the upcoming version of the Redmond company's operating system will be branded as "Xbox Windows."
As Apple and Samsung's legal teams gear themselves up for another hard day in court, we sit patiently to see what little gems of information are next on the agenda to be released into the public domain. We have already seen Apple reveal prototype design information about the design iterations they went through in the early iPhone and iPad development stages, as well as a testimony from Phil Schiller and Scott Fortstall about how the company actually decided to design and build the two mobile devices.
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has been something of a revelation among those using Google's mobile operating system, since it's the first time Android has seemed as though it can compete with Windows Phone and iOS in terms of smoothness. Ice Cream Sandwich was a vast improvement on Gingerbread / Honeycomb, but even with some devices packing in quad-core processors, Android smartphones and slates were still susceptible to more than their fair share of lag.
While from the outset, it does appear that Apple and Samsung are fighting over the design of “black rectangles”, newly released evidence from the courts shows just how blatantly Samsung copied Apple’s design ideas*. Check it all out after the jump.
Yesterday, Apple seeded iOS 6 Beta 4 to developers. It features a bunch of tweaks throughout the OS and its included apps, removes YouTube* as a stock app, and now, we’ve learned that Apple has added new cities from North America and Europe to its Maps app’s 3D feature. Check out the details after the jump.
Although both Apple and Samsung legal representatives are spending most of their working days locked in a Californian court room battling out their difficulties, it hasn't stopped the two companies putting plans in place to make an assault on the smartphone industry. After all, business is business, and although the two largest smartphone vendors in the world clearly have issues. With Apple planning to entice users over to the fruity side with the announcement and release of the next-generation iPhone sometime next month, it seems that Samsung have their own plans for market domination.
As minor a detail as it may seem, it'll be the packaging you see at every electronics store for the next 3-4 years, and images of the retail Windows 8 packaging have leaked into the wild courtesy of TheVerge. In-keeping with the general theme of the operating system as a whole, the boxing of Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro both have a clear reference to the Metro interface, with the Pro edition coming in a charcoal gray color contrasting the whiteness of the standard edition.
