To understand the importance — and irony — of last week’s court victory by Apple, it’s necessary to go back to 1979. It was 33 years ago that a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to the Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), a research and development facility in Silicon Valley owned by Xerox. Xerox Parc is renowned for having
Browsing: Samsung
Last week a US court ruled that Samsung Electronics had to pay US$1bn to Apple for patent infringement. Samsung made a cool $6bn profit in the second quarter of 2012 on revenue of nearly $50bn, so $1bn, in the final analysis, is pretty manageable. But that’s not the point. The Apple-Samsung patent war
A California court has ruled in Apple’s favour in its patent-infringement case against Samsung. Slapped with a fine of US$1bn, and facing the possibility of having some of its products banned in the US, Samsung will almost certainly appeal against the decision. But with Apple’s own history of pilfering ideas, is an iron-fisted
The Apple-Samsung trial had been running in the San Jose, California, federal court for four weeks, although the saga has been brewing for a lot longer with the two companies going at each other hammer and tongs for years now. The verdict, handed down on Friday, is by far the
It sounds trite, but in the growing litany of lawsuits between the world’s major consumer electronics manufacturers, the only real winners are the lawyers. Although patents have a place, particularly in the early days of any new technology, they’re ill-equipped to deal with one of the inevitable consequences of innovation: the best
Nokia and BlackBerry handsets continue to dominate the SA market but worldwide the picture is very different. A new report from Gartner shows Samsung Electronics is pulling further and further ahead of Nokia and Apple in terms of unit sales. Moreover, Google’s Android operating system
Although Nokia and BlackBerry are slipping in developed markets, both brands continue to be wildly successful in SA. This is according to a market research report released this week by World Wide Worx. The research shows Nokia remains the most popular cellphone brand among SA’s urban residents
Samsung’s awkwardly named Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is the Korean manufacturer’s follow-up to the hugely successful Galaxy Tab 10.1, the device that presented the first real competition to Apple’s market-leading iPad. However, its follow-up not only fails to match Apple’s latest offering but only incrementally improves upon
It’s hard to think that just 15 years ago, Apple was staring bankruptcy in the face. What followed, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, has become one of the most celebrated turnaround stories in modern business. At more than US$550bn, Apple today is the biggest listed company on the planet by market value
Criticism in the US media about the state of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) is “one-sided” and “one-dimensional” as the company continues to do well in many emerging markets, including SA, Indonesia and Mexico. That’s the view of Alexandra Zagury, newly appointed Research in