HUA HIN, Thailand - Apple notched up
a victory in its ongoing battle with competing
tablet manufacturers this week when a United
States court ruled in its favor to ban sales of
Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the country. The two
companies have been firing patent infringement
claims at each other for several months; this one
finally went Apple's way.
US district
judge Lucy Koh stated, "Although Samsung has a
right to compete, it does not have a right to
compete unfairly by flooding the market with
infringing products."
Apple claimed that
Samsung had "slavishly" and "blatantly" copied its
designs for the handheld device.
Samsung
wasted no time filing an appeal against the injunction
and it is unlikely that
the sales ban will notably hurt the South Korean
company's bottom line. It does, however, set a
precedent in the industry in acting against the
appearance of a competing product rather than
against infringements of technology copyright. It
is probable that a replacement Galaxy Tab will hit
the shelves soon with just enough variance to keep
Apple's lawyers at bay ... for the moment.
Apple has been aggressively using patent
litigation to stifle the growth of Android,
Google's rival operating system, which runs on
Samsung's tablets. Less than a week ago, a federal
judge in Chicago dismissed Apple's claims against
Google's recently acquired Motorola Mobility
division, stating that a ban on Motorola
smart-phones would harm consumers.
Competition and rivalry in the tablet
market is heating up and Apple, being the first to
enter it and secure a solid foothold, is not
pleased. Only last week, Microsoft unveiled a
device dubbed Surface that could rival the iPad
and MacBook Pro at the same time (see Microsoft
surfaces with tablet, June 23, 2012). PC
manufacturers are already grumbling about Surface,
which could well put another dent in their sales
figures.
Microsoft claimed that tablets
will outsell desktop computers in 2013. "Touch is
coming to PCs and that's going to change the way
UIs [user interfaces] are designed very
dramatically, just like the mouse did."
This week Google announced a new, low-cost
tablet at its I/O developers conference in San
Francisco. The search giant has teamed up with
Taiwanese computer company Asus to produce the
Nexus 7 tablet at only US$199, half the price of
Apple's lowest specification iPad. The device is
expected to go on sale in July.
The
seven-inch Nexus is aimed at Amazon's successful
Kindle Fire, also the same size; however it boasts
a higher definition screen and superior graphics
chipset. Further hardware specifications have yet
to be officially confirmed though it is likely to
sport a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and 1GB
of memory.
Google is sourcing new ways to
tap into the tablet market which, according to
Gartner Inc, may double this year to 119 million
units. Despite dominating over half the
smart-phone market it wants more exposure for
Android on tablets, Android-powered tablets still
have a way to go to catch up with Apple's iPad,
which has a projected 61% market share this year.
Tablet apps remain the problem for
Google's Android as developers have yet to embrace
it; Apple's App Store on the other hand has
225,000 apps designed specifically for the iPad.
Apps aside, the Android army marches
forward regardless. Google announced this week
that over a million Android-powered devices were
activated every day. The company also announced a
new version of the mobile operating system dubbed
"Jellybean". Loaded with new features and
performance tweaks, Android 4.1 is likely to be
the default operating system for the Nexus 7 and
any new high-end tablets and smart-phones released
by hardware partners such as Samsung, LG and HTC.
Included in the upgrade is a new feature
called voice typing which allows users to dictate
paragraphs to the handset which will type it out.
Sticking with the voice theme is voice search, a
feature similar to Apple's Siri which will act as
a personal assistant. Also included are
enhancements to the predictive keyboard, battery
life management, screen manipulation, photo
sharing and notifications.
Other
announcements at the Google conference including
upgrades to its search platform and social network
Google+; a dare-devil skydive stunt was performed
with Google Goggles, though little other
information was revealed about the high-tech
specs, and a new multimedia streaming set-top
device called Nexus Q was unveiled.
The
Google of today has many challenges on many
different battlegrounds, and with high-hitting
rivals including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and
Facebook and products including tablets, search
engines, social networks, operating systems,
mobile phones, music, maps, books, cloud services,
TV, and above all, advertising, it may be in
danger of stretching itself too thinly.
Much to the chagrin of Apple, more tablets
on the market means more choice for the consumer,
so may the competition continue.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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