Good year for Chromebook

According to the IT analysts at Gartner this will be good year for Cromebook. Sales will increase and so will the profits, looks like Google and partners have a hit product on their hands.

In Gartner report Cromebook sales will reach 5.2 million devices sold by the end of this year. This will be a 79% increase from the last year, huge increase in only one year. However Chromebook sales are not distributed equally around the globe. Almost 82% of their sales are in North America and 85% of that is to education sector. Seems like Google Chromebook is primary an education device, will see if that changes in 2014.

As the biggest reason for their increase in sale, is the low price for Chromebook. PC market is down and tablets are not that cheap, at least not the good ones, all of this makes Chromebook a very competitive device. As you now Google is not a hardware company so you have to look at the manufacturers. Samsung is still the leader with 64%, fallowed by Acer 21%, Lenovo and HP have 6% each.

This year want be the only good year for Cromebook. Sales are expected to increase in the fallowing years as well. By 2017 their sale results will triple as the total number of sold units will reach 14.4 million.

There are still many complaints abot these devices, like the one when your Internet is down Cromebook becomes useless. But regardless to the complaints, sometimes well justified, Google has another operating system that is becoming more and more popular. That is if you can say that Chromebook has an operating system.

Android is ruling the smartphone market with the increase in sale year after year, and now when the PC market is going down, Chromebook sales are going up. People at Google must be feeling pretty good about this report.

Source gartner.

Microsoft vs Samsung Court Battle

If this title said something like Apple vs Samsung there wouldn't be much surprise there, those two companies have been going at it in court and outside of court for years. But this time is not Apple that is having problems with Samsung, another IT giant has decided to sue them, this time it's Microsoft.

In case you didn't know Android is not free, well it is for the user but not for the company that wants to build smartphones with that operating system. Android is using a number of Microsoft patents, so if you want Android on your smartphones you have to pay royalties per-device to Microsoft. Redmond based company has been making a lot of money in the past years from these royalties.

Sumsung however stopped paying royalties ever since Microsoft bought Nokia's hardware department, according to them this was a break of their IP agreement. Of course Microsoft doesn't share this opinion so it looks like another patent war in court is about to happen.

David Howard from Microsoft had this to say : “After spending months trying to resolve our disagreement, Samsung has made clear in a series of letters and discussions that we have a fundamental disagreement as to the meaning of our contract.” and he added “We are simply asking the Court to settle our disagreement, and we are confident the contract will be enforced,”

Considering Samsung is the world biggest manufacturer of Android based smartphones, this would mean a big loss for Microsoft if they just stop paying royalties. Who knows maybe this is just Microsoft's way of saying, hey if you are going to build Android smartphones it's going to cost you. But if you want to build Windows Phone smartphones you can do that for free. Guess if you are a huge company and you want to build millions of smartphones, this kinda makes sense.

According to various analysts and the speed of the courts, this is one lawsuit that could take years to end. Guess by now Samsung is use to being sued.

Source Microsoft.

Oculus Rift With a Smartphone Display

Oculus Rift, probably the most anticipated gadget of the year, or is it maybe next year, we still don't know the release date. People all around the world can't wait for this device to hit the stores, but it looks like they will have to wait a little bit longer. So far only developer versions of Oculus Rift are available.

Company got famous after they gathered 2.4 million dollars via Kickstarter, then to the disappointment of many they were bought by Facebook for 2 billion dollars. Of course people are not delighted that Facebook will have accesses to their VR and nobody definitely wants to see adds right in front of their face. Still 2 billion dollars of founds, probably more considering Facebook isn't bad with money, is great to have when your technology is still in development.

Lately there have been a lot of rumors around Oculus Rift and Samsung, something about those two companies working together. People at iFixit tear down the lattes developer version of Oculus and confirmed those rumors to be true. Samsung's OLED display is located in the VR device.

According to iFixit, Oculus Rift is using Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 display for the screen. So what is Samsugn' angle, what are they getting in return. Possibly they are getting paid for the hardware the are sending out, but there are also rumors that the South Korean company might be getting accesses to software developer kit that is used to create virtual reality.

This doesn't mean that the Oculust Rift market version will have the same screen as the developer version. Will just have to wait and see.

Source ifixit.

Tizen Smartphone Delayed Again

Samsung has been trying for some time now to launch their own operating system named Tizen. Their best hope was Japan but it seems like that has been delayed and the hole future of the OS is very uncertain. Japanese carrier announced that they will not support Tizen because the market is not big enough for another operating system.

“The market is not big enough to support three operating systems at this time,” official statement from the carriers representative.

South Korean company was planing to launch Tizen smartphone last year but that was delayed and now more bad news. According to Samsung the new operating system is bringing some new features that will push it ahead of the competition and it is all running on HTML-5. Tizen is supposed to be used as multi platform operating system, it would run on everything cameras, smartphones, laptops, tablets and tv's.

Samsung is the worlds top seller of  Android devices, leading the sales in smartphones and tablets. Their biggest competition is Apple and looks like they want to take a page from their book and control both hardware and software, which is a pretty good idea. Samsung feels responsible for the growth of the Android operating system and they want to do the same thing with Tizen.

According to the rumors we should see the first Tizen smartphone on Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Source WSJ.

Curved Smartphone from Samsung

Curved screens for smartphones, you know that technology that almost every company is talking about but no one has yet released a phone with a curved screen. Well Samsung is planing to change that. D. J. Lee form Samsung has announced that the company is launching their first curved smartphone next month.

“We plan to introduce a smartphone with a curved display in South Korea in October,”

This isn't the first curved screen from Samsung, because they are already selling OLED TVs with a curved screen. Curved OLED TVs are still pretty expensive so will have to wait and see what price will the curved smartphone have. South Korean company didn't say anything else about this smartphone so we are still in the dark about specifications and just how flexible will the smarphone be.

People from Samsung also announce that they are launching a new series of smartphones the F series, maybe the F series will be the curved screens lineup.

Apple and Samsung Working Together

Almost everybody knows about rivalry between Samsung and Apple. They been publicly accusing each other of different things, they have been a few law suits and much more.  It's easy to say that these companies are not in best of terms. But what most people don't know is that these two companies are working together.

Apple has been looking for someone to take production of A7 chips away from Samsung but they just can't find anyone at this time. The new iPhone 5s has an A7 chip that is being manufactured by Samsung. So I guess it's gone be some time before Apple finds somebody good enough that can take the manufacturing of their A series chips away from the South Korean company.

However Apple is not totally relying on Samsung to manufacture components for their devices. They had better luck finding someone for the M7 chip that is also in their new iPhone 5s. M7 is being produced NXP semiconductors a company from Netherlands.