Hasta La Gadget!

Lenovo must have struck a chord with schools looking for some rough-and-tumble ThinkPads, as it’s bringing out the ThinkPad X131e even while teachers are still drafting their course plans for the fall semester. The new model keeps that better-than-military ruggedness in an 11.6-inch laptop while freshening the choices of AMD E-series chips or their Intel-made Celeron and Core i3 challengers. Dolby Advanced Audio even gives the speakers boost when it’s not a matter of all work and no play. Educators, in turn, get the usual options for extended support or customizing the laptops with a little school pride. There’s a premium to pay for putting classrooms on the cutting edge, however: at $499, the new systems are $70 more costly than the launch price of the X130e portables they replace, which leaves quite a bit less money for notebooks of the paper variety.

Continue reading Lenovo unveils toughened ThinkPad X131e for education, hikes price to $499

Filed under: Laptops

Lenovo unveils toughened ThinkPad X131e for education, hikes price to $499 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week Twitter made more than just a tiny mistake in banning one of their more famous members in an effort to keep him quiet on speaking out against NBC’s coverage of the London Olympics. This fellow was (and is) Guy Adams, a journalist who writes for the BBC, and his supposed crime was pointing out the email of NBC’s Olympics president, saying that he was responsible for the Olympics being broadcast with a time delay so that they might reach prime-time audiences across the USA. Adams alleges that NBC didn’t see this tweet until Twitter informed NBC of it, and once NBC complained, Twitter banned him – Twitter disagrees.

Twitter thus far has released a statement on the situation saying, “it was company policy not to comment on individual users” for privacy reasons. However, it had said it did “not actively monitor users’ accounts”. This may satisfy those wondering whether the company will be admitting to monitoring Adams, though it does not speak to the fact that they may simply have been watching the most popular topics. As Adams’ tweet was re-tweeted many thousands and thousands of times, Twitter very well may have caught wind of it and blocked his account without NBC being involved at all.

UPDATE: Twitter General Counsel, Alex Macgillivray, has made a rather long apology and explanation for the events that went on over the past few days. Have a peek at a bit of it here:

“That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.

As I stated earlier, we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is — whether a business partner, celebrity or friend. As of earlier today, the account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again.” – Macgillivray

But as Adams now says, Twitter has emailed him saying, “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request…” This seems to shed a bit more light on the situation – that Twitter officials don’t want the company to seem at fault for pushing Adams out. NBC Sports also released a statement right after Adams had been initially blocked, saying:

“We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives. According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline.” – NBC Sports

Of course those well in the know on how to use a search engine would have been able to find this “personal email” as NBC Sports alleges was not public. Adams spoke up between here and there saying that the email was indeed available on the NBC Sports webpage and could be found by “anyone in possession of 30 seconds of free time and access to Google”.

And now it’s all right, yes? We shall see as Adams account has indeed been re-activated and the talk of what he might do from here continues. What do you think – do you think Twitter was in the wrong for banning Adams, or are they in the wrong for allowing him to come back? And perhaps better yet, was it reasonable for NBC Sports to make a request for Adams to have been banned, or did they make the wrong move?

Special note: NBC and Twitter are kind of, sort of, partnered for coverage of the Olympics this year – this could possibly factor into the situation.

[via BBC]

Twitter backtracks on Olympic NBC tweeter: Account reactivated [Update: Twitter reponds] is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In May of last year, our free ride came to an end. US carriers started blocking third party tethering apps in the Android Market. Not long after, the built in feature was turned off on most phones. Our fortune may be reversing, however. The FCC has ruled that Verizon violated the rules governing the C Block of LTE spectrum by preventing consumers from using any application of their choice. The end result: Big Red will have to open up its airwaves and allow customers to circumvent its $20 a month tethering plan using apps from the Play store — so long as you’re on a “usage-based pricing plan.” Though it’s not explicitly stated, we assume that means those of you lucky enough to be grandfathered in to the unlimited data plans are left out. In addition to unblocking apps such as PdaNet and Barnacle, Verizon must pay a $1.25 million settlement to put an end to the investigation. For a few more details of the plan put in place to ensure compliance with the ruling, check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Verizon to stop blocking tethering apps, settles with FCC for $1.25 million

Filed under: Wireless, Software

Verizon to stop blocking tethering apps, settles with FCC for $1.25 million originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today the first shots were fired in the high-profile U.S. patent war between Apple and Samsung, beginning with Apple’s opening statements.

And no punch was pulled — Apple’s lawyer made a few hard-hitting claims in the courtroom, providing documents that show Samsung thought the iPhone was “easy to copy.” Harold McElhinny (Apple’s lawyer) also showed documents prepared by a Samsung executive that claim that the company was in a “crisis of design” because of the iPhone.

The presentation also included images of Samsung’s design evolution between pre-iPhone time and now.

But despite the evidence, McElhinny’s most crushing blow may have come in the form of a simple and well-known tech adage: “As we all know, it is easier to copy than to innovate. Apple had already taken the risks.”

However, just saying the hardware is easily copied isn’t proof of copying it, which is why McElhinny returned to evidence introduced in pre-trial, depicting Samsung’s phones before 2007 and their phones after the iPhone’s debut.

Take a look:

According to McElhinny’s argument in court (via Reuters), the main question the court would have to answer was how Samsung went from the phones on the left to the phones on the right.

Apple argues that 22.7 million devices sold by Samsung are in violation of patent infringement, and that the company is seeking up to $2.525 billion in damages. Samsung will follow up in its opening statement later this afternoon.

In the second half of Apple’s opening statement in the United States-based court case that’s having the computer giant face off against rival company Samsung, Apple’s lead attorney Harold McElhinny suggested he knew what Samsung would be bringing to the table. One of the main items Samsung will speak about, McElhinny suggested this morning, is that Apple’s design patents represent the only way to make functional products. He noted, “I think of this as the ‘Devil made me do it defense’”, according to Ina Fried of AllThingsD sitting in on the case.

In these opening arguments for Apple, they listed all of the patents at hand, one of them being the rubber-band scrolling or “bounce back” feature that users work with in iOS for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Earlier in the set of this morning’s statements, McElhinny suggested that Samsung literally spoke about this feature early on in the design process of the device and decided to copy it for themselves with their Galaxy S line of smartphones.

McElhinny went on to speak about several double-tap to zoom patents and a patent which distinguishes between one and two finger scrolling and zooming. McElhinny noted as he went through these patents, once again, that he believed Samsung would soon describe each of them as trivial innovations in their own right. He went on to note that these items also supposedly came up in Samsung’s customer surveys as important to the success of the iPhone, appearing then soon after on the Galaxy S line of smartphones.

One of the more important battles Apple will be fighting in this case is the “trade dress infringement” they’ve claimed against Samsung. McElhinny contends that it is the following, amongst other features, that make people recognize a product as an Apple device:

• Metallic bezel around a flat clear surface
• Rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners
• Narrow black borders at the sides
• Larger Bezels at top and bottom of product’s front face
• Icon rows including dock at bottom of icons that doesn’t change

Also according to Ina Fried, McElhinny suggested that whenever a customer looks at a product with these characteristics, they think they are looking at an Apple product.

McElhinny reiterated the numbers we’d heard before on how much Apple believes Samsung has damaged them for in this whole process. He suggested that Samsung has sold 22.7 million infringing phones and tablets, this resulting in $8.16 billion dollars in revenue for Samsung and taking away $2 billion in profit from Apple.

Keep an ear to SlashGear as we continue to cover the case as it expands upon us with great fury over the next few weeks. We’ll see more from both Apple and Samsung as they let the court know what they feel they are owed in the long run and in the very, very short run if one wins over the other in a massive way – we shall see!

Apple suggests Samsung will use “Devil made me do it” defense is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.