Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle file antitrust complaint about Android

Legal 109 Comments
After Microsoft's extortion racket has failed to stop Android, and after Oracle's crazy baseless lawsuit failed to stop Android, and after Nokia adopting Windows Phone failed to stop Android, Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle are now grasping the next straw in their fruitless efforts to stop Android: they've filed an antitrust complaint with the EU, claiming Google unfairly bundles applications with Android.
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January sales show continued rough tides for the Wii U

Games 30 Comments
The Wii U isn't doing well. "We're told by someone with access to the NPD's data that sales for January were 'well under' 100,000 units. By our estimates, sales were somewhere between 45,000 and 59,000 units for the month, which is lower than any of the three previous-generation home consoles sold in their worst months, with the possible exception of a recent performance by the original Wii." All that is old will be new again.
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Why aren’t you buying HTC phones?

Wireless 105 Comments
The reviews are universally positive, and virtually everyone seems to agree: the HTC One is one heck of an Android device, and quite possibly the best phone currently on the market. Outstanding build quality, great design, fast - and just like the One X before it, it looks like to me it's a far better phone than its Galaxy counterparts. Why, then, is no one buying HTC phones?
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Microsoft’s tricky strategy to strike back at Apple, Google

Microsoft 26 Comments
"After years of domination, Microsoft is finally facing serious threats at the cores of its business, Office and Windows. Consumers and businesses alike are largely purchasing devices based on their capabilities and form factors rather than the software contained within. Windows is slowly becoming commoditized and Microsoft's traditional allies are looking at Android and Chrome OS as viable alternatives, a trend that threatens the Windows monopoly. Microsoft faces a tricky balancing act as it faces a future that's very different from its existing business." Good article by Tom Warren.
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Does WebKit face a troubled future now that Google is gone?

Internet 25 Comments
Peter Bright has summarised some of the post-fork discussions on the WebKit mailinglists. "Now that Google is going its own way and developing its rendering engine independently of the WebKit project, both sides of the split are starting the work of removing all the things they don't actually need. This is already causing some tensions among WebKit users and Web developers, as it could lead to the removal of technology that they use or technology that is in the process of being standardized. This is leading some to question whether Apple is willing or able to fill in the gaps that Google has left." There's a clear winner and loser here.
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X to release Y competitor

In the News 13 Comments
Sigh. First it was the Apple TV. Then it became smartwatches. Now we're moving on to Google Glass competitors. People, this is all bullshit. Made-up nonsense to get hits. Headlines like 'X to release Y competitor' score a double whammy; X blogs will get excited about it, Y blogs will complain about X being a copycat. So, with one made-up story you score double the amount of hits. It's a variant on the old but now rarely used 'X to release Y killer', where 'Y' was usually an Apple product.
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Google, Red Hat, others ask FTC, DoJ to address patent trolls

Legal 11 Comments
Google, EarthLink, BlackBerry, and Red Hat have joined forces and asked the FTC and the US Department of Justice to address the harm caused by patent trolling. "Our comments today also focus on a worrisome trend: some companies are increasingly transferring patents to trolls - and providing incentives to assert those patents against their competitors. These transfers can raise rivals' costs and undermine patent peace. This trend has been referred to as patent 'privateering': a company sells patents to trolls with the goal of waging asymmetric warfare against its competitors." Big figures: patent trolls cost the US economy $30 billion per year.
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Alienware unveils Ubuntu gaming PC

Hardware 41 Comments
AlienWare (so Dell) has just unveiled a gaming PC running Ubuntu and Steam, designed to be hooked up to a TV - essentially a Steambox. "With over 25 gaming titles available and more being added, users can access Steam For Linux to play online games, including your favorite titles like Team Fortress 2 and Serious Sam 3." Everything starts out small, but with Valve going full throttle with this, expect this library to grow.
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Microsoft ridicules concerns over always-on for next Xbox

Games 131 Comments
More and more evidence is pointing towards the next Xbox requiring an always-on internet connection in order to play any games - i.e., once you lose your connection, you can't play any game at all. Three minutes after losing your connection, "your" game will suspend itself and stop playing. Microsoft's Adam Orth took to Twitter to defend this anti-consumer practice, but he did so in the most ungraceful of ways.
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Google forks WebKit, unveils Blink

Google 103 Comments
It's apparently browser engine day today. After Mozilla and Samsung announcing Servo, Google has just announced it's forking WebKit into Blink. Like WebKit, Blink will be open source, and it will also be used by other browser makers - most prominently, Opera has already announced it's not using WebKit, but Blink. Update: Courtesy of MacRumors, this graph illustrates how just how much Google contributed to WebKit. Much more than I thought. Also, Chrome developer Alex Russell: "To make a better platform faster, you must be able to iterate faster. Steps away from that are steps away from a better platform. Today's WebKit defeats that imperative in ways large and small. It's not anybody's fault, but it does need to change. And changing it will allow us to iterate faster, working through the annealing process that takes a good idea from drawing board to API to refined feature."
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The untold story behind Apple’s $13000 operating system

Apple 24 Comments
"Thanks to 35-year-old documents that have recently surfaced after three-plus decades in storage, we now know exactly how Apple navigated around that obstacle to create the company's first disk operating system. In more than a literal sense, it is also the untold story of how Apple booted up. From contracts - signed by both Wozniak and Jobs - to design specs to page after page of schematics and code, CNET had a chance to examine this document trove, housed at the DigiBarn computer museum in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, which shed important new light on those formative years at Apple."
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MATE Desktop 1.6 released

Gnome 34 Comments
"The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE." Look at those screenshots. This is what GNOME is supposed to be: elegant, understated, to-the-point. I should try this.
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Mozilla, Samsung collaborate on new browser engine

Mozilla, Gecko 51 Comments
Big news from Mozilla and Samsung today: the two have been working on a new browsing engine together, developed from the ground-up to be completely new, and it's written entirely in Rust, a new safe systems language developed by Mozilla. "Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability. It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is safe by default, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms." The work is on-going, but of course, all code is out there right now.
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‘iOS 7 running behind, to have significant visual makeover’

Apple 21 Comments
MacRumors has collected a few interesting quotes from people in the know about iOS 7. John Gruber: "What I've heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it." It's going to be a "significant system-wide UI overhaul". It will apparently make people who love rich textures "sad". I honestly can't wait - I wonder what Apple's designers've got cooking for us.
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Google changes the way it counts Android version adoption

Google 9 Comments
Google has changed the way it's counting devices running particular Android versions. "Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers. We believe the new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem." The change does actually make sense - reflecting the kind of usage developers are interested in - but the fact that this also makes Jelly Bean jump from 16% to 25% surely played an important role here too. This means that Ice Cream Sandwich and later now account for about 54% of Android devices in use.
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