It was one of those classic Jobs moments Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman will never forget. He was in a middle of a conference call with venture capitalists as Steve Jobs called in to offer a word of advice regarding a takeover bid from Google. In hindsight, Jobs wanted Yelp to stay independent as Apple had big plans with iOS 6 Maps and Siri that included Yelp...
Dispelling a notion that rivals are taking Google to court out of frustration over their inability to slow down the Android freight train, patent expert Florian Müeller makes a point in a post over at his FOSS Patents blog that a collective market capitalization of the various corporations suing Google is approximately $1.06 trillion versus Google's $188 billion market cap.
More important than that, he says, "the companies who claim that Google's Android infringes on their intellectual property are too diverse to believe in a conspiracy". Müeller also notes that the Japanese giant Fujifilm, which mostly played defensive role in litigation, has also sued Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility for Android's alleged infringement of four of its patents...
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, an annual retreat Apple CEO Tim Cook also attended, that it was always Google's intention to make its own hardware though he didn't go as far as to call the search giant a hardware company. But in reality, Google more than just dipped its toes in hardware..
Proponents of the idea that Apple won't make an "iPad Mini" due to the lack of demand for smaller tablets, may want to rethink their position. Several major retailers are reporting lightning fast sellouts of Nexus 7 stock.
For those who came in late, the Nexus 7 is Google's recently-unveiled 7-inch slate. And between its high-end components and $199 price tag, some folks believe that it could pose a serious threat to Apple's tablet marketshare...
Google's seven-inch tablet Nexus 7 is starting to crop up at resellers ahead of a mid-July release (yes I want one, too), but the search giant might run into trouble with Apple's lawyers over its embedded magnetic display shut-off feature. A developer posted a video yesterday that doesn't bode well for Asus, the maker of the Google-branded device. As vividly shown in the video included below, the magnetic sensor sits down near the tablet's lower left-hand side. Wanna hear the funny bit?
The iPhone-friendly carrier Sprint, the nation's third-largest telco, today filed amicus brief (a legal opinion) with the Federal Circuit concerning a sales injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone sought by Apple. Sprint is arguing that no party, Apple included, should be allowed to leverage a sales ban as "a staple of the smartphone wars".
The carrier paints itself as an "unwitting victim" of the large-scale Apple-Samsung legal wrangling, saying it just wants the issue to be fully resolved without an immediate ban...
In line with all of the recent speculation regarding the rumored "iPad Mini," one developer decided to see how such a device would stack up against other popular tablets.
What you see above is a comparison between the screen sizes of various slates, including the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7, the current iPad, and the purported iPad Mini...
Making good on its promise it made last month at its I/O conference, Google has updated its Google+ app with full iPad support. The app has been optimized for Apple's tablet, and looks great on its Retina display.
Other new features in the update include a new Events section and the ability to start and join Hangouts. Keep reading for the full rundown...
Remember when Google was caught with its hands in the jar, overriding privacy settings of both desktop and iOS Safari users' privacy settings in order to better track their web browsing activity? The issue snowballed into a privacy scandal as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in April it would investigate the practice. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the FTC and the search Goliath are now close to finalizing a settlement that will see Google pony up a whopping $22.5 million to settle the privacy issue, FTC's largest ever fine...
VoiceSearch is a relatively new jailbreak tweak that allows you to perform Google voice searches from anywhere using a simple Activator action.
Obviously VoiceSearch can't replace all of the functionality that Siri brings to the table on the iPhone 4S, and upcoming iOS 6 update for the new iPad, but it is a somewhat decent holdover for non Siri-enabled devices...
Despite being only one millimeter thicker, Google's upcoming Nexus 7 slate is more repairable than the new iPad, a teardown analysis by iFixit has concluded. Its components are assembled using standard tools, unlike the new iPad's innards which are glued together.
A simpler assembly makes servicing the Google tablet fairly easy with standard plastic opening tools that make "cracking the Nexus shell like cutting through butter"...
Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive (1981-1990), the founder of the BeOS computer operating system and former PalmSource chairman, had a word of advice for Nokia, the struggling Finnish cellphone vendor. Hiring Stephen Elop as its CEO was an expensive mistake, he argued, as this former Microsoftie has basically destroyed Nokia's software platforms before new devices reached the marketplace. At the rate of cash bleeding going on at Nokia, I wonder how long the company can afford to ignore its cardinal mistake and keep Elop on board...