Not so long ago, it was pretty hard to watch online streaming video on anything but a personal computer. It was a big deal that Apple’s iPhone came packed with an integrated app for YouTube. Last year, the walls came down, as video services and device makers rolled out new native applications for one machine after another, from phones and tablets to smart TVs and set-top boxes.
I love this kind of gadget news. I lived off it writing for Gadget Lab last fall. But shiny apps and feature wars are one thing—whether viewers actually use these services and how they interact with them is very different. Bit by bit, the data is starting to come in.
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Post-PC TV: how and where we watch Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube
The touchscreen smartphone revolution continues to shake up the mobile phone industry, with Apple displacing Nokia as the top smartphone vendor in the world. In fact, Apple has also displaced longtime mobile industry players like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to become the number four mobile phone vendor globally. But Apple’s rival Samsung, holding the number two spot in both mobile and smartphone market share, is poised to take both crowns if its massive sales growth can be maintained.
The overall mobile phone market grew just over 11 percent year over year for the second quarter of 2011, for a total of 365 million units, according to market research firm IDC. Growth has been slower than expected, perhaps due to a 4 percent drop in feature phone shipments. That’s the first decline in feature phone sales since the third quarter of 2009.
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Apple, Samsung top smartphone sales as feature phones decline
Building a solar farm isn’t hard if you have the money; you just pay contractors to show up, install electrical service, build the solar panel support infrastructure, and truck in the panels. But if you want to do it cheap, you could buy some land from a friend and set up your own fabrication shop, spending an entire summer welding together 50,000 pounds of structural steel and pouring concrete around 20,000 pounds of rebar to save serious cash on the infrastructure.
Connor Field, a Michigan resident who built the largest solar farm in the state this way in late 2009, said drily, “I would not do that again.”
“Do you know how to weld?” I asked him when we met recently in Ann Arbor to discuss the project.
“I do now.”
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How one undergrad built the largest solar farm in Michigan
The Motorola Droid line of phones has arguably been one of the most successful to carry Google’s Android OS. But the standard Droids are members of an increasingly rare breed—phones that give users the option of a physical keyboard. While the Droid 3 packs some decent internal hardware, most of the commendations belong to its OS, Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Since Gingerbread is available on many other phones that offer a better feature package, the primary reason you’d opt for the Droid 3 is that keyboard. Unfortunately, we found it a bit of a hassle to use, and the phone’s lack of 4G and other small problems don’t help.
The Droid 3’s body is a minor revision of the Droid 2, and the basic form factor—slide the screen up to get at the physical keyboard—is the same. A sleep switch is centered at the top of the phone, as is a headphone jack. A volume rocker is on the right hand side, micro-USB and mini-HDMI ports on the left, and an 8MP camera with flash on the back is capable of taking 1080p video (we found the detail in shots to be good, but the color was lacking a bit). A front-facing VGA camera sits next to a blinking indicator light on the front.
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Physical keyboard, but at a price: Motorola Droid 3 review
Australians who want to buy Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 will have to wait a little longer thanks to Apple. The Cupertino company argued its patent case against Samsung in front of Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett on Monday, accusing Samsung of violating 10 patents and asking for an injunction to bar Galaxy Tab sales in the country. According to Bloomberg, the injunction was issued and Samsung has agreed to comply: the company will stop advertising the device in Australia and won’t sell it there until the court gives its green light.
Apple’s counsel had argued that the injunction was required because Samsung had been advertising the device in Australia since July 20. Samsung, however, said that Apple was basing its claims on the US version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and that the Australian version was “different.” Exactly how “different” is unclear, but the South Korean company agreed to send Apple three copies of the Aussie Galaxy Tab 10.1 at least seven days before it plans to begin selling the device in Australia. A hearing is currently scheduled for August 29, at which time a trial date may be decided.
Ever since Apple fired the first salvo against Samsung in April of this year, the two companies have been going back and forth in both the US and overseas over whose product is violating whose patents. Apple made arguments to the Australian Federal Court similar to those it has been making in the US: namely that the Galaxy Tab violates 10 Apple patents relating to the physical and UI designs of the iPhone and iPad. And although Samsung has agreed not to sell the device in Australia until it gets court approval, Apple has agreed that it will pay unspecified damages to Samsung should it lose its suit in Australia.
Update: Samsung has finally released a public statement on the matter. Posted by Ausdroid.net, the statement says that Apple raised an issue with a variant of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that was never slated for release in Australia, so Samsung agreed not to sell it.
Second-generation Apple TV users will no longer be limited to streaming rented TV shows from iTunes or purchased TV shows from their computers thanks to a software update released on Monday. The update, which is already showing up for the latest version of the Apple TV, allows users to stream their purchased TV shows directly from Apple just like they would a rented show, with streaming access to shows purchased in the past as well.
The original Apple TV allowed users to purchase TV shows and movies from iTunes directly from the device, with a backup copy being downloaded to the user’s iTunes account on his or her computer. The second-generation Apple TV, however, could only access TV shows and movies that are available to rent on iTunes—users could still purchase nonrentable TV shows on their computers and stream them to the Apple TV, but those shows weren’t directly available to the Apple TV itself.
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Second-gen Apple TV gains iTunes purchasing ability, Vimeo app
