A surprising Korean report this afternoon emphatically states that Sharp, the leading company in the small & medium-sized LCD panel market, is starkly changing its supply strategy. After inviting investments from Samsung, the Japan-based company is strengthening its cooperation with Samsung. According to the industry on May 8, Sharp stopped the production of LCD panels for iPad as of January this year and started supplying Samsung with small & medium-sized IGZO panels instead.
Samsung is at it again. Within a new patent application published by the US Patent Office today, Samsung is found presenting some new user interface ideas for their touch display devices covering page turning effects and a new screen-unlock feature. Yet one of their so-called new ideas is one "borrowed" from Apple. It's the iOS app-dock that's like a glass shelf reserved for your most used/favorite apps. Samsung's patent figure is illustrated in our cover graphic above. Samsung's oh-so creative engineers just couldn't resist borrowing yet another Apple user interface element.
A new milestone for Apple was reported on today. Apple has made its first foray into the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list, replacing Silicon Valley's previous top-10 tech entry, Hewlett-Packard, which fell steeply while recording the biggest loss of any company to make the list in 2013.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Adobe Systems has officially decided to pull the plug on most of their packaged-software business and double down on delivering its popular design tools through the online service they introduced a year ago called "Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe, known for their industry leading graphics software for illustrators, photographers and publishers believes that creative professionals prefer features of the online service including the fact that it is constantly updated with new features.
Earlier today, Intel announced a number of new systems coming to market later this year. They touched on Silvermont, Bay Trail, Haswell and Xeon processors shifting to 22nm technology. The latter will provide Apple's Mac Pro users with a nice power boost upgrade if Apple so chooses to stay with this processor this fall. Their all-new Silvermont is unlikely a processor that Apple will use but it could always slip into a lower priced Mac mini if Apple so chose to entertain expanding the OS X market. Last week Intel illustrated that next generation Ultrabooks, premium notebooks like the MacBook Pro and high-end desktops like the iMac with Haswell could experience a huge leap in graphics power, as in 100 to 200% depending on the configuration chosen.
Although Patently Apple was one of the first to report on an iPhone for emerging markets, a new report out today provides us with an understanding as to why an economical iPhone makes a lot of business sense.
According to a new Chinese report this morning, Apple's noisy supply chain is at it again. The new report claims that supply chain manufacturers have begun to receive component parts for the new iPhone, supposedly named the 5S. The supply chain sources claim that it usually takes two months for the production process to reach the assembly stage for Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) which would translate to assembling the next iPhone beginning in early July.
Samsung doesn't like the trend that's putting Apple's iPhone back on top last quarter and so their marketing attack dogs thought it was time for another Galaxy vs. iPhone ad. The trouble with their ad is that it could be shooting themselves in the foot. Making executives look stupid for the sake of gaining jobless grads is a dumb idea. But hey, this is Samsung who thought that the ditsy housewife stereotype was their target market last quarter. The only ditsy ones here appear to be Samsung's own marketing team.
This week we discovered that Mozilla is working on high-end gaming for the Firefox browser. Our report provides you with a few photos and a link to a game-demo to try out on your Mac, and hopefully your 27" iMac in full screen. And while high-end gaming is a positive experience, there's also a downside when it comes to the digital revolution, especially for the iPhone and other smartphones. Our report presents you with one tale about the dark side of download madness that onepsychotherapist frames as being the equivalent to cocaine addiction.
Boy, Business Insider's Jay Yarow doesn't mince his words; he really doesn't like Google Glass and goes out of his way to slap it around. In short, Yarow points out that Google Glass has terrible battery life, it's disorienting, it doesn't work in a brightly lit environments, you can't tweak any settings, the voice controls are buggy, it doesn't fold like normal glasses so storing it is awkward and the list goes on and on.
Attention to all U.S. iPhone owners: HTC wants your business. If you switch and buy their new HTC One smartphone by Sunday May fifth, HTC will reimburse you with $300 or more for your iPhone 5 or $200 or more for your iPhone 4S.
According to a new DigiTimes report this morning, new rumors have surfaced that Apple is on tap to test market a new low-cost iPhone later this year. The report states that "Apple plans to launch an inexpensive model targeting emerging markets with initial quarterly shipments of only 2.5-3.0 million units to test market response." Although this rumor sounds interesting, it doesn't sound like it's a move that Apple would ever make.
