Hasta La Gadget!

Apple and Samsung have been raging a legal war against each other over the past several months, and while Samsung lost a $1 billion lawsuit earlier this year, the company may be in for even more hurt. Samsung might be facing a serious blow from the European commission for trying to get Apple products banned in Europe.

Essentially, Samsung could face a $15 billion fine for using “standard-essential” patents in its attempts to ban Apple devices in its ongoing patent battle with Apple. The European commission could tack on a massive fine of up to 10% of Samsung’s global turnover following its investigation into Samsung’s use of these standard-essential patents. Samsung’s revenue totaled $148.9 billion in 2011, so fines in Europe alone could reach $14.8 billion.

These standard-essential patents basically mean that Samsung has made a formal commitment to license these technologies to all parties that wish to utilize them for a fee, but if fees cannot be agreed upon by the parties involved, a price must be set by a court. Apple had offered to license the patents in the past, but it was unable to strike an agreement with Samsung.

However, Samsung isn’t the only company that may be facing big fines. Google-owned Motorola Mobility might face similar fines for trying to get Microsoft’s Xbox 360 banned in Europe by using their standard-essential patents. While Apple has tried to have Samsung’s products banned too, Apple has used patents that are not part of any standard in legal proceedings. Apple offered to pay a licensing fee on the patents owned by Samsung, but they ended up refusing the offer.

[via The Guardian]

Samsung may face $15 billion fine for attempting to ban Apple products in Europe is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

By Billy Steele, Sarah Silbert and Christopher Trout
Illustration By ILoveDust

While planet Earth has yet to meet its demise, the end of 2012 is nigh. It was a year of lengthy legal battles and shifting power dynamics in the tech industry. It brought with it great advancements and great failures — and, for some, the promise of the end of days. We’ve combed our archives to bring you just a few of the stories that made the biggest impact on our reporting this year. Herewith, an abridged look back at the year that was.

Continue reading 2012 Year in tech: A timeline

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Cameras, Displays, Misc, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Household, Laptops, Tablets, Transportation, Wearables, Wireless, Networking, Science, Internet, Software, HD, Mobile, Alt

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Smartphones make reasonably adequate cameras, especially if all you want is to capture some photos of your family and daily life. However, one thing that iPhonetographers will quickly find limiting are the optics included in their cameras. There’s not much you can do about improving them, unless you use some sort of add-on lens or filter.

After having made a pretty useful lens filter case, which was also successfully funded through Kickstarter, Trygger is back with a clip-on filter for your iPhone 5. Unlike their previous design, this camera clip is pretty small and can easily be removed and carried in your pocket. It’s designed to help balancing out colors and improve overall image fidelity using an adjustable polarizing filter. Here are some example images with and without the filter in place (left image is the stock iPhone, the right is with the Trygger).

The image on the right definitely exhibits fewer blown-out areas, and is more pleasing to the eye. In addition to improving color and hotspots, the lens filter can all but eliminate unwanted glare off of reflective surfaces. The result is pretty impressive from the looks of this example:

The Trygger camera clip was launched as a Kickstarter crowdfunding project, and they’ve currently amassed about $2,000 out of a $10,000 goal, with about a month to go to reach their funding goal. You’ll have to pledge $30(USD) to get yours.

[via Ubergizmo]

Seeing how dominant cable companies have been over the past couple of years with their popular all-in-one packages, especially their high-speed Internet plans, satellite subscribers tend to feel like a more educated group as they take their TV watching more serious and know a good deal when they smell one. But a new price adjustment by DirecTV is set to raise its subscribers’ rates this February, and that doesn’t smell like a good deal to me.

According to a recently released card released by DirecTV, rates will be increasing for the average customer by 4.5 percent on February 7, 2013. The reason for the increase isn’t new technology that allows you to watch any playoff game during a light drizzle, but instead will go towards programming costs which have gone up by eight percent. DirecTV still claims it has managed to keep its annual price increases lower than cable on average.

If an increase like this means we get to have more shows like The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, then we’re completely OK with it. Television has come a long way in recent years and even though reality television is still quite popular these days, we do appreciate when actual good television is created and even though no one wants to pay more for anything, a 4.5 percent increase isn’t that bad.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Send Your Christmas Tree Into Space, FCC Eases Rules For Quicker In-Flight Internet Deployment,

Malware in the Google Play store is nothing new, and Google does their best to sift out most of the crap that makes its way in, but sometimes some of it sneaks through. A Google Play developer account by the name of “apkdeveloper” has released a ton of fake apps and games that are essentially rip-offs of other popular apps.

Some of the more popular titles that the developer rips off are Imangi’s Temple Run game and Glu Mobile’s Contract Killer Zombies. It appears the faux developer has put “Super” at the end of each app name, which should throw a red flag up right away as far as if it’s a legitimate app or not. Plus, all of the icons for all the apps are the same, rather than unique icons for each individual app or game.

Since many people won’t even dare to install these fake and malware-infested applications, we’re not quite sure what the malicious code might be capable of exactly, but several reports suggest that it delivers unwanted ads to several parts of your device. While doesn’t seem like a huge deal, it’s still annoying, and you never know what could be going on behind the scenes.

As always, be careful when downloading apps and make sure you’re not downloading a fake app that’s filled with malware. Usually, though, it’s all about common sense — check the name of the developer, check the reviews, check the descriptions and make sure you’re always downloading from legitimate sources. And if you come across a fake app, report it to Google.

Developer releases dozens of fake apps in Google Play store, user beware is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.