Summary: Samsung is still playing with software patents and it is now turning Android devices into restrictions devices, similar to Apple's
APPLE 'news' sites are trying to elude the fact that Android is a real headache to Apple. Here is gross spin from pro-Apple sites along with a report from a former Microsoft booster (who worked for a pro-Microsoft site). One pro-Apple site says that "Apple's smartphone marketshare continues to ease downward despite record sales for the company's latest handsets, while rival Samsung's share of the Android ecosystem is being squeezed in key markets, according to new analysis covering the fourth quarter of 2013."
Samsung is not Android. Pro-Apple sites are desperate for some positive angle for Apple and negative for Android.
Samsung, as we noted in 2007,
began supporting Microsoft's patent assault on Linux and was one of the first companies (for embedded devices at least) to do so. We spent
years drawing attention to this problem and here we are 7 years later with Samsung as some kind of "champion" thanks to Android. Samsung -- like LG -- is not championing Android, it is helping Microsoft assert 'ownership' and hence it is endorsing extortion.
This morning we came to discover that Samsung
is boosting patents again, this time with Google. To quote the Head of Samsung’s Intellectual Property Center (notice the propagandistic terms): “This agreement with Google is highly significant for the technology industry...Samsung and Google are showing the rest of the industry that there is more to gain from cooperating than engaging in unnecessary patent disputes.”
This is nonsense. We don't need this kind of public endorsement of patents, with or without so-called "peace" (only for large patent holders, such as IBM and Microsoft, or even Apple and Microsoft).
There are also technical and practical reasons to avoid Samsung, never mind the patent policy. Samsung is hoping to conquer the Android market with lots of new devices, not just phones [1], and based on reports such as [2,3], Samsung is now doing exactly what Apple has done, making devices jails for their users and taking control over people's devices. This is bad and one way to say "no" to this behaviour is to avoid, as a matter of principle, anything from Samsung.
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Samsung has revealed plans to expand its smartphone and tablet portfolio in 2014. At the company’s conference, Executive Director Hyunjoon Kim announced that Samsung will first “create a new tablet category” that will be aimed at businesses with a high-end, “high-resolution,” large screen tablet around 20-inches. He added that the company will produce many variants by modifying their Galaxy Tab series.
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A number of users are claiming that the Galaxy Note 3 KitKat update breaks compatibility with some third-party accessories. The accessories affected are unofficial versions of Samsung's S-View Flip Cover, a case with a window over the top half of the screen. A working S-View cover will turn the screen on and trigger a special display that shows the time and notifications through its window. In the previous update, Android 4.3, unofficial S-View covers could trigger this special display mode as well, but after the update to 4.4, the phone will only recognize Samsung-made products.
