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Techie-Buzz grabbed some shots of the California Theater where Apple is holding its new iPads/Macs event tomorrow. The venue looks a lot bigger on the inside (below).
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“I made it through the whole video without cracking up.” -No one.
The Sydney Morning Herald just posted a video of Samsung’s new Syndney store:
- Everything from the store layout to the sales staff to the products and even the packaging and promotional material is uncannily Apple-esque.
Samsung’s shop is just a block away from Apple’s Sydney store. Despite the ongoing U.S. trial against Apple, as SMH noted, the South Korea-based company is certainly not quelling accusations that it is a Cupertino copycat.
(via Daring Fireball)
Update: The tactic worked. Facing disclosure to a jury that both Apple and Samsung failed to uphold document retention laws, the two companies struck a deal to keep the matter private.
Bloomberg reported today that Samsung chief Kwon Oh Hyun and Apple chief Tim Cook will speak on the phone today ahead of jury deliberations in the ongoing Apple v. Samsung trial in San Jose. Another update in the case comes from paid blogger Florian Mueller (most recently funded by Microsoft and Oracle), who reported a previous ruling from Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal, to only provide an adverse inference jury instruction against Samsung, was overruled by Judge Lucy Koh in a decision late yesterday.
Therefore, instead of the jury hearing only a statement regarding Samsung failing to preserve evidence, jurors will also hear the same statement related to Apple. According to Mueller, Samsung claimed that “Apple’s duty to preserve email must have arisen no later than Samsung’s duty.”
Samsung pointed out that Apple neglected to provide emails from former CEO Steve Jobs mentioning the patent trial from 2010 until his resignation and death in 2011. That was apparently enough to convince the judge.
The instruction the court plans to give the jury before deliberations on Wednesday —unless Apple can get Koh to change her decision in a hearing today— is below.
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After execs from both companies could not come to terms in an attempt to settle, both Samsung and Apple take the stand in a San José, Calif., court room this week. Apple and Samsung will face off for allegedly stealing each other’s patents. Apple also claims that Samsung’s Galaxy devices “slavishly” copied its beloved iPhone and iPad. The same type of trial already played out in many countries across the pond. It will be interesting to see where this all goes, especially after the injunctions against Samsung’s products we have already seen.
Samsung Chief Product Officer Kevin Packingham recently sat down with the folks at Wired to answer a few questions on the recent legal matters, shedding more light on Samsung’s view of the whole legal fiasco. First off, Packingham answers a question regarding the separation between Samsung’s component business that supplies necessary parts to Apple and the product team that Apple thinks is a bunch of copycats. Packingham answered: “There are times when I’m absolutely appalled that we sell what I consider to be the most innovative, most secret parts of the sauce of our products to some other manufacturer — HTC, LG, Apple, anybody…But you know, we also use Qualcomm components, and we source from other component manufacturers as well.”
Apple, of course, gets a ton of parts from Samsung, and it even partnered with Samsung on a factory in Texas to make A4 and A5 chips for the iPhones and iPads.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV3DlISVfao]
MercuryNews was told by the San Jose Police that using Siri while driving is illegal. The San Jose Police Luitenant said that the actual act of talking to Siri isn’t illegal, but it’s the part when you use you’re hands to navigate through its functionality when things start getting setup for a nice ticket.
“It’s legal to talk to Siri, as long as the phone’s not in your hand,” says San Jose police Lt. Chris Monahan. “But if you have to push the phone to activate her, or if you ask for directions and she puts them up on her screen for you to read, then California’s hands-free law says your’re breaking the law.”
Where it gets murky is that the iPhone is also a GPS device and it isn’t illegal to use your fingers to use GPS devices, especially one that is mounted to your dashboard. Let’s just say: keep it safe.