Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Sony paraded out its lineup of independent game developers at its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press briefing in Los Angeles today. Their games will make their console debut on the PlayStation 4, and they’ll be viewable in the recently introduced Indie Section of the PlayStation Store.

The company wants “to continue to lead the console space as the most open and inclusive platforms for developers,” said Adam Boyes, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s vice president of publisher and developer relations. Indie developers will be able to self-publish their own content on PlayStation systems, including the PS4.

Sony confirmed 10 developers whose indie games are coming to the new console, which launches “later this year.” The first is puzzle game The Witness from designer Jonathan Blow, who made Braid.

Supergiant Games, the creator of the hit game Bastion, is also working on its next release. Turn-based strategy title Transistor is hitting PS4 early next year. Director Amir Rao and writer Greg Kasavin took the stage to show off the world of Cloudbank.

In addition, Klei Entertainment, responsible for Shank and Mark of the Ninja, is bringing its open-world survival game Don’t Starve from PC to PS4.

Another indie, Tribute Games, is delivering the Metal Slug-esque Mercenary Kings to PS4. It features the same style of pixel graphics that we saw in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, another one of Tribute’s titles.

Young Horses is adapting Octodad: Dadliest Catch, a weird, slapstick game where players (try to) control an octopus passing as human. And from Switchblade Monkeys comes Secret Ponchos, a spaghetti western with shooter elements.

Developer Ragtag Studios, comprised of three industry veterans, is making a stealth-action puzzler where you command a zombie army. It’s called Ray’s the Dead. Another veteran-based developer, Red Barrels, is releasing the single-player horror game Outlast, which it also designed for PC.

Plus, Oddworld Inhabitants is working on a full remake of the first Oddworld title and dubbing it Oddworld: New N’ Tasty!.

Finally, 17-Bit Studios (maker of Skulls of the Shogun) is creating the side-scrolling open-world shooter Galaxy.

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July 9-10, 2013
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Are people trading in their iPhones for Samsung’s new Galaxy S IV?

SellCell.com reports that iPhone trade-ins were up 194 percent in the month preceding last week’s Samsung Galaxy S IV launch, compared to the month before its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S III, was launched in 2012.

This is bad news for Apple, and it’s not just due to increased volume in the market either. Galaxy S III trade-ins actually declined in the same period, sagging 4.8 percent. And in the day following the S IV launch, iPhone trade-ins were up 42.2 precent compared to the already relatively high preceding two Fridays.

“Based on feedback from our partners and the news of several big product launches from HTC, BlackBerry and now Samsung, we get the feeling that the luster of the iPhone line for Apple fans may be waning a bit,” SellCell’s managing director Colin White said in a statement. “Our data bears this out as more people trade-in and search for iPhone quotes on the site than other product lines, an effect that we believe is from the introduction of new smartphones and features that iPhones don’t have.”

Apple occupies the entire top five spots in SellCell’s trade-in list right now, with the low-end iPhone 3G fetching only $40, while the much more recent iPhone 4 16GB brings in almost $190. And while iPhones, like Apple laptops and desktops, have traditionally held their value very well, Samsung devices are starting to do so as well.

“In particular, the growing, fierce rivalry between Samsung and Apple extends to the trade-in world as the GALAXY line of phones is beginning to hold value like the iPhone, which has traditionally been the best smartphone investment as it depreciates the least,” White said.

Although the Galaxy S IV price has not yet been revealed, SellCell has already assigned it a trade-in value of $550.

July 9-10, 2013
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I’m going way out on a limb here, and cutting it off behind me.

But I have a theory. The more Samsung “adds value” to Android by customizing a version of it for the Galaxy line of phones, as it’s doing with its new Galaxy S IV, the more it will suck.

This is, of course, the company that sold 400 million freaking phones last year. And 57 million smartphones in just one quarter of 2012. Samsung seems, more than any other, to be the company that has shaved a few hundred billion off Apple’s share price.

But companies, like people, do best when they stick to what they’re good at. Better yet, what they’re great at.

And let me tell you, there’s no way that Samsung is great at machine language translation. And facial/eye recognition to drive smart document scrolling. And building app stores for hundreds of millions of global users. And tying Kinect-style hand gestures to phone functionality navigation. And building a personal health/self quantification system. And programming a voice-controlled smart personal assistant. And implementing a ticket-and-card aggregating Apple Passbook clone. And any of a thousand other software-based features Samsung is adding to its phones and laying at the pagan feet of the ruthless god called product differentiation.

No bloody way.

Not as good as Google, for the features that Google chooses to build, and are amenable to machine learning and improvement. Not as good as Fitbit or Up or other companies whose livelihood is self-quantification and health. Not as good as Kinect, or Leap Motion, which are focused on gesture control.

“Some of the features definitely didn’t seem to work all that well,” analyst Avi Greengart, who Samsung pre-briefed about its phone, told me today. “For the hover feature … you have pick the exact right distance from the screen for it to activate, and you select things you weren’t intending to select.”

Other features worked better, like a camera app that puts you in the picture while you take the picture, Greengart said, though he was most concerned about the sheer quantity of new features overwhelming consumers.

“A lot of it will drive people crazy,” he said. “But at the same time people will buy the phone so they can check it out.”

There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that Samsung is not a software company, in much the same way that Intel, though it employs thousands of software engineers, is not a software company. Another is that ancillary features added by a company that is primarily focused on using those features to sell more of that product are seldom as good as the features created by companies that focus on those things exclusively.

But the big one is that Google is getting frightfully good at software. Partly because it learns a million times a minute as customers interact with its solutions, and data drives its decisions, but also partly because it gets mobile in a way that few other companies do. Google currently has five of the top six apps in North America on any platform.

Do you really think Samsung can build a better mobile user experience than Google?

I haven’t yet handled, played with, or slept beside a Galaxy S IV. But the early reviews on that cool eye-tracking technology that auto-scrolls documents for you? It works “better in theory than they did in practice,” according to CNet. And that neat gesture phone control technology? It seems to “work intermittently.”

ZDnet wonders if this is innovation or gimmicks, and Gizmodo hits the nail on the smartphone head:

Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren’t things you’ll ever use. Which is really the S IV’s biggest problem.

In other words, Samsung’s over-the-top Broadway launch for the Galaxy S IV might be the perfect metaphor for a phone that has everything you don’t need: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

Now, we’re talking about unreleased hardware and software, and there are bound to be improvements before Samsung ships the Galaxy S IV to customers. But putting together a coherent, excellent operating system with well-integrated features is hard. Google went through multiple iterations before finally starting to get it really right perhaps a couple of years ago. Microsoft went through hell for years, trying to find its way in mobile operating systems.

Is it likely that Samsung, which is building on the Android foundation but chipping away at every piece of Google’s fingerprints it can while doing so, can get it right?

I think not.

“Look at the Samsung Galaxy S III,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen told me. “Everything that was good about the software came from Google, and everything that was annoying came from Samsung.”

Others that I’ve talked to agree, but still see a role for Samsung’s innovation.

“I agree that some of the software is buggy,” Rocky Agrawal, an analyst and mobile consultant who also writes for VentureBeat, told me. “If they would stick to the non-core things that they’re adding it could make sense … but to go in and mess up core stuff like keyboards and error correction, that’s just innovation for the sake of innovation. You should differentiate on things that matter.”

We have seen this movie before, during the 90s and 2000s, in a different industry: the PC market. Much as Android is to iOS what Windows was to Macintosh, Android vendors are to each other what HP was to Dell was to Compaq was to every other faceless PC manufacturer: a clone trying to be an individual.

And with every vendor trying to deliver unique value, a unique product, and a unique brand in a by-nature commoditized market, they get desperate. The result: software that adds a line item in the product comparison chart and a bullet point in the marketing blurb, but is really just crapware.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been that crapware vendor, sad to say, bundling a solution into HP’s, Asus’s, and even Intel’s offerings.

And my money’s on something similar happening here.

(Oh, and these user interface issues will be at the heart of our discussion at the Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the mobile industry’s leading players. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of ecosystem from Google, Samsung, Facebook across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and disruptive private companies.)

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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What kind of commercial do you run if you’re constantly locked up in legal battles with your major competitor? If you’re Samsung, you fork over a dumpster full of cash and avoid alluding to Apple devices like you’ve done in the past.

The 120-second commercial was intended to have its global premiere during the fourth quarter of this year’s Super Bowl. However, Samsung decided to post the entire video on YouTube earlier today.

Just like we saw in earlier teaser videos, the commercial features celebrity funny men Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen being interviewed by Bob Odenkirk about doing a “Next Big Thing” endorsement ad for Samsung. NBA star athlete Lebron James makes a cameo on a tablet at the end, but not before lots of banter and ridiculous ideas for what to do in the commercial.

In addition to the estimated $15 million cost of airing the ad during the big game, Samsung also had to pay four celebrities and the commercial’s director, Jon Favreau (of Iron Man 1 & 2 fame). That’s a ton of cash for a commercial that, while funny, isn’t nearly as piercing as its ads teasing Apple about its customers being clueless old people.

We’ve embedded the video above. Let us know your thoughts on it in the comment section below.

So is Samsung, apparently.

The Korean consumer electronics giant’s tempestuous legal relationship with Apple is well known, as the two companies fight for global dominance of the smartphone and tablet markets. But it doesn’t mean that Samsung can’t have any fun with it.

Just like this:

Samsung is teasing their big Super Bowl ad, of course, but it’s also poking a pretty big finger at an unmentionable competitor with rounded corners and a design language that it fiercely protects against all comers.

I wonder if Apple is amused?

photo credit: elviskennedy via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Android smartphones have already taken the sales crown with 75 percent share and 57 million shipped by Samsung alone last quarter. It seems that the tablet market will soon follow suit.

Sales of Android-powered tablets have grown faster than iPad sales in six out of the last eight quarters. That fact, along with other trends in the tablet marketplace, mean that Android-based tablets will out-sell iPads in either the second or the third quarter of 2013, according to analyst Sameer Singh.

iPad market share dipped precipitously to just 50.4 percent in the third quarter of this year, but that was an aberration, says Singh, based on rumors and anticipation surrounding Apple’s new midsized tablet as well as shipping slowdowns due to the impending product refresh.

However, while the fourth quarter numbers should be much better for Apple with the new iPad mini and the unexpectedly refreshed fourth-generation iPad, the long-term trend is clear: iPad will not always be the market leader.

Source: Tech Thoughts

Tablet market share

Android’s last dance with majority share was last Christmas season, when Amazon flooded the market with its inexpensive Kindle Fires, causing Android tabs to come within a few million of Apple’s sales numbers. However, we are currently seeing much broader-based growth, according to Singh: more tabs from more vendors at a greater variety of price points, all of which combines to offer more sustainable sales growth.

On the positive side for both Apple and Google, the total volume of sales should continue to rise, meaning both Android and iOS sales will grow.

photo credit: @superamit via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Samsung is bringing a new addition into the Galaxy family of Android mobile devices. The Galaxy Premier (which sounds like an awesome name for a Star Trek: The Next Generation starship, if you ask us) is a skinny, sleek model that aims to bring users a premium experience at a reasonable price, Samsung said in a release on the new model.

The company said its new phone builds on the design provenance of the Galaxy S II and III. The company has outfitted the smartphone with a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display at a 720 x 1,280 resolution. The Galaxy Premier will ship with Android 4.01, Jelly Bean.

The phone also features face detection, voice activation for apps, and media-sharing features such as S Beam for fast file-swapping.

Internal memory varies between 8 and 16GB with support for microSD, bringing the memory capacity up to 32GB.

The fairly standard high-end-smartphone cameras include an 8 megapixel main cam with LED flash and backlight and a 1.9 megapixel HD front-facing camera. The Premier can record and play video at 1,080 pixels at 30 frames per second.

Here are a few product pics of the phone, courtesy of Samsung’s Ukrainian press site:

The Galaxy Premier will start selling in November 2012 in Russia and will then be made available in China, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Ukraine.

via Engadget

Top image courtesy of Naypong, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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Samsung’s Galaxy is bigger, lighter, and has a plastic back. Apple’s iPhone 4s is smaller, heavier, and has a glassy/metallic back. But these differences didn’t stop Susan Kare, the designer of the original Mac icon set, from confusing the two.

And it happened while she was comparing the two smartphones when prepping for her expert witness testimony for the Apple-Samsung lawsuit.

Kare helped create the iconic look and feel of the original Mac. So she should know a thing or two about design … and she should be adept at reading a design language … the hard-to-define but very real visual personality of a product or brand.

And yet she confused the two products, according to her testimony today in court.

Presumably, Kare was fooled by the home screen on some of the older Samsung models, where the design language is indeed somewhat similar to Apple’s iOS:

Source: http://www.blogsolute.com/root-samsung-galaxy-s-i9000-tool/9858/ and http://www.christiananimereviews.com/guides/enablejapanesekeyboard-iphone-itouch.php

iPhone vs Samsung

Similarities include a top bar for utility icons and time, an icon grid four across and potentially five down, and of course the home icons at the bottom, resting on a shelf or different colored background.

Newer Samsung Galaxy S3s, on the other hand, are almost always portrayed in official Samsung promo shots with only a few icons and fewer obvious similarities:

Testimony like Kare’s is dangerous for Samsung since the jury may, according to intellectual property expert Peter Toren, simply eyeball the two options when making a decision:

While design patents are litigated far less frequently than utility patents, and many companies do not even seek design patent protection, infringement of a design patent may be far easier for a jury to understand. A design patent protects only the ornamental appearance of an invention, not its utilitarian features. The general test for infringement for a design patent is relatively simple: Does the alleged infringer’s product design appear substantially the same as the patentee’s design?

While a patentee can buttress its evidence of the similarity of designs through the testimony, for example, of industry observers, consumers, and business partners, jurors can use their own eyes for a side-by-side comparison and decide for themselves if the products look substantially the same. It certainly does not depend on understanding highly complex technical matters.

The implication that Apple lawyers are doubtless attempting to insinuate in the jury’s mind: If a designer cannot tell the difference herself … how can the average person?

Of course, Samsung may well feel that Kare originally worked for Apple may have some influence on her impressions.

Image credit: Yuri Arcours/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
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Just how important is the U.S. market for global smartphone sales? Ask Taiwan-based handset maker HTC which today announced that U.S. Customs delays, along with sluggish European demand, were to blame for second-quarter profits falling more than 57 percent.

HTC’s unaudited net profit for April-June was $7.4 billion in Taiwanese dollars ($247.7 million), down from T$17.52 billion ($585 million) during the same period last year, Reuters reports. Analysts were expecting second-quarter earnings to approach T$8.25 billion, or $275 million, according to a Reuters survey.

June sales (including that of HTC’s One series) were T$30 billion ($1.03 billion), down 33.4 percent from the same period a year ago. The company also announced it would cut under 1,000 production line workers previously hired to handle a usually busy third-quarter.

HTC blamed the poor numbers on delays getting its new phones into the United States caused by losing a patent court case to Apple. The legal loss meant HTC phones are held up to undergo customs inspections. Also hurting HTC’s bottom line is the cratering of demand by European consumers fearing the next shoe to drop in the Eurozone financial crisis.

Samsung and Apple are also leaving little wiggle room for HTC. The South Korean Android smartphone producer and the Cupertino, Calif. iPhone maker have the high-end market to themselves, leaving HTC scrambling to find low-end buyers. The trouble is, analysts say, the Taiwan company’s phones are priced too high — particularly for the lucrative Chinese market. Couple that with the fact HTC is producing fewer phones and with slimmer margins and the company’s third-quarter results could also come into doubt, say analysts.

All of this puts even more emphasis on HTC’s new One series, a line of phones designed to counter the iPhone and the Galaxy S. Despite a profitable 2010, HTC has taken a drubbing at the hands of Apple and Samsung, the signs of which became visible in the second-half of 2011. It is uncertain whether the One will be HTC’s antidote to lukewarm sales, however. Not only is Samsung’s S III receiving positive reviews, a new iPhone is expected during the fourth-quarter with the traditional wave of consumer enthusiasm.

If all of that was not bad enough, HTC’s bad news came as its rival Samsung was announcing gargantuan profits fueled by demand for its smartphone.

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July 9-10, 2013
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Magazines on tablets, dismissed by some as a last-ditch effort to save a dying print product, are gaining steam, according to new stats released by Adobe. Tablet-magazine readers are engaged, have long attention spans, and most importantly, actually pay for content.

The company crunched numbers from the 600 publishers that are using its Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) to produce tablet content. Currently, there are 1,500 iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook, Samsung Galaxy, and other Android tablet publications created with DPS, including 12 out of the 20 top-grossing iPad Newsstand titles.

The first promising stat is that tablet publications keep readers’ attention, with 56 percent of DPS content being read for 25 minutes to 2.5 hours each month. Nine percent of readers spend up to 5 hours a month reading tablet publications. One of the reasons for these un-Internet-like attention spans might be interactivity. Tablet publications are packed with slideshows, videos, 360-degree images, and constantly updated content from the web.

These statistics show how far the medium has come in the two years since Apple first launched the iPad, and the almost five months since it rolled out the Newsstand feature — a hub for all digital publications that live on the iPad home screen. With 16 million DPS digital publications downloaded in the past year, tablets are giving hope to publishers that are hemorrhaging print subscribers.

One of the big missteps in online publishing has been putting content online first, worrying about how to make money off of it second. Most pay walls aren’t working, and online ads don’t make the amounts of money print publishers need to fund high-quality content. Tablet publications are trying to remedy that.

“When we push content online, we’re inviting people to come into the shop and steal our candy without paying,” said Declan Moore, president of National Geographic Publishing. National Geographic uses DPS to make tablet versions of its magazines. “With the app we have a cash register in place, which we didn’t have before.”

The cash register doesn’t appear to be scaring off customers used to getting things for free. Adobe found 68 percent of tablet readers were paying for their reading material: 15 percent paid for a single issue, 26 percent purchased subscriptions, and 27 percent are shelling out for a bundle of print and digital issues.

Even with these up-front payments, ad sales remain an important source of revenue for tablet pubs. Adobe found readers are engaging with ads just as much on tablets as they do in print, and one in every five tablet page views is an advertisement.

“Different mediums lend themselves to different types of ads. Online they’re in a hunt-and-gather mode, on the iPad they’re in a lean-back-and-entertain-me mode,” said Moore. He said tablet magazine ads are more suited for “brand advertising” than online direct-response advertising, where success is measure by click-through rates.

Tablet-magazine advertisements are ahead of online ads in some respects — they are attractive, have high-production values, and can be interactive without being intrusive or annoying. That makes them ideal for big companies like Lexus that are trying to increase brand recognition, not get you to click-through and buy a car right this second.

However, in order for tablet issues to be counted toward a magazine’s general circulation numbers, publishers have to follow rules from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. These regulations are partiality responsible for limiting tablet-ad innovation, and put them behind online ads in areas such as behavioral and demographic targeting.

Interestingly, National Geographic has had impressive success on non-iPad tablets. Moore explained that iPad users own their devices for a variety of purposes — watching movies, playing games, or browsing the Internet. But many Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook owners bought those tablets because they love to read.

The iPad isn’t the only tablet for magazines, and DPS isn’t the only creation option for publishers. Many magazines are using similar tools such as Mag+ (from the makers of Popular Science), Aquafadas, Woodwing, or their own custom solutions (like the New York Times) to create tablet content.

What the tablet publications have in common is they are all hoping to have finally hit on a digital business model that pays.

July 9-10, 2013
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As smartphones grow ever larger and tablets shrink, they’ll inevitably meet at some kind of hybrid, halfway point, neither entirely tablet nor entirely phone, but a bit of both.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is that midpoint, and it’s coming soon to the U.S., the company announced yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show.

With a 5.3-inch display, it’s a gigantic phone — but also a pretty small tablet. Unusually for a modern tablet, it comes with a stylus, though it works with your naked fingers, too.

To my surprise, it works pretty well. I spent some quality time with the Galaxy Note at CES 2012 today and came away impressed with its flexibility and responsiveness. The stylus was unexpectedly useful, particularly when enclosed in the larger shell that makes it into a full-sized pen. The Note ships with its own note-taking app, called S-Memo, and can even do handwriting recognition on your scribbles. The handwriting recognition was relatively accurate, in our limited testing, although it’s slow.

To emphasize its usefulness for writing notes and drawing, Samsung has hired cartoonists to draw caricatures with Galaxy Notes, and the caricatures are strewn all over the company’s display here in Las Vegas.

Samsung released the Galaxy Note in Europe in late 2011, eventually selling over a million of the hybrid phone-tablets. But it was cagey about when the Note would arrive in the U.S. Yesterday, the company revealed that it will be coming to AT&T Wireless in the U.S. early this year.

The Note sports a WXGA (1280 x 768 pixel) screen, has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and has an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front. The rear camera can record 1080p video. The Note supports Wi-Fi a, b, g, and n, as well as Wi-Fi Direct. On AT&T, it will use the fast Long-Term Evolution (LTE) 4G network.

See below for more up-close photos of the Galaxy Note.

Photos: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat. Video: Christopher Peri/VentureBeat.

For more gadget news, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
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In just a few weeks, Samsung will start shipping Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich over the air to Galaxy device owners.

“We know you have been waiting, and we’re thrilled today to announce that we’ll start serving Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II in the first quarter of 2012,” wrote a Samsung representative on the company’s mobile division Facebook page.

The rollout will start with the company’s Galaxy S II, its latest high-powered smartphone, and the Galaxy Note, a stylus-enabled gadget that’s either a huge phone or a wee tablet — the jury’s still out.

Samsung also was the chosen manufacturer for the Android 4.0 lead device, the Galaxy Nexus. For that launch, Samsung got early access to Ice Cream Sandwich and a distinct time-to-market advantage.

Other Ice Cream Sandwich-upgradeable devices are set to include Samsgung’s Galaxy S II LTE, the Galaxy R (another Android smartphone), and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, 839, 7.7 and 7.0 Plus tablets.

With the upgrade, these tablets will be some of the first to run Ice Cream Sandwich; other models boasting the slick new OS have so far been sold out or available for preorder only.

Ice Cream Sandwich’s new features include a one-size-really-does-fit-all approach that makes the OS suitable for phones, tablets, TVs — just about any connected device, according to Google. Previously, Google had offered separate forks of the OS for different devices — the 2.X line was intended for smartphones, while the 3.X line (a.k.a. Honeycomb) was meant for tablets.

And in addition to all that delicious behind-the-scenes harmony, the OS brings consumers a flashy new interface with new colors, large images, and even a homebrewed typeface, the elegant humanist sans, Roboto.

Samsung is racing Sony to the finish line where Ice Cream Sandwich is concerned. The latter company announced last month it was bringing Ice Cream Sandwich to the entire Xperia line.

July 9-10, 2013
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Samsung may be gearing up for a massive, anti-Apple offensive as the iPhone 5 release date draws nearer.

Sources inside Samsung reportedly told AppleInsider that Samsung will take Apple to court the minute the iPhone 5 is released in Korea and maintain a firm line, especially since the electronics manufacturer is not only a rival of Apple’s but also a vendor that provides important hardware components for the iPhone.

“As long as Apple does not drop mobile telecommunications functions, it would be impossible for it to sell its i-branded products without using our patents,” one anonymous Samsung executive told the blog. “We will stick to a strong stance against Apple during the lingering legal fights.”

Yet another executive said Samsung will be “taking different tactics” legally speaking, especially since the company is more positive of the strength of its position. This person noted the ongoing Apple-versus-Samsung patent warfare going on in Germany over the Galaxy Tab 10.1, saying that an eventual victory in Germany would be seen as a huge step forward.

The Samsung-Apple legal entanglements began back in April, when Apple first sued Samsung over the Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets. In typical patent law fashion, Samsung immediately countersued, stating that Apple was actually infringing on five of Samsung’s patents.

During this lawsuit, Samsung had requested to see iPhone 5 and iPad 3 units, ostensibly to continue investigation of patent infringement claims. However, the request was rejected by the judge.

In addition to the aforementioned injunction and lawsuit in Germany, Apple and Samsung are also battling it out in Japan, where Apple is trying to get the Galaxy line banned, and in France, where Samsung recently filed three patent complaints against Apple.

Image courtesy of tychay.