Maureen O'Gara

Contrary to Steve Jobs' dictum that the 9.7-inch iPad is as small as a tablet can get, Apple is testing a widget that's around eight inches and has gotten as far as qualifying suppliers for it, according to the Wall Street Journal. It's supposed to be working with screen makers AU Optronics of Taiwan and LG Display of South Korea. The device would reportedly have the same resolution as the current iPad. Apple is expected to unveil an iPad 3 next month with heightened resolution that can also run on Verizon and AT&T's faster 4G LTE networks. A smaller iPad suggests that Apple may try to broaden its worldwide market share, which stood at 60% in Q3, particularly in developing markets like China and India, and take on competition from the Android mob, which is selling smaller tablets like the seven-inch Amazon Kindle Fire, the 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note and the seven- ... (more)

HP’s Voyager Project Bears Fruit

HP Monday claimed to have the most self-sufficient line of servers, the x86-based HP ProLiant Generation 8, the first fruits of a two-year Project Voyager meant to eliminate error-prone, downtime-creating manual tasks and cut data center costs. HP says it's spent $300 million on Gen8, managing to automate 50% of a data center's manual operations such as server administration, application deployment, and power and cooling management. On average that means it can save a 10,000-square-foot data center an estimated $20 million a year. It says the Gen8 servers, previewed late last yea... (more)

Apple Wants Samsung Galaxy Nexus Banned in America

Apple wants the Ice Cream-bearing Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone that Samsung worked on with Google banned from the United States because it allegedly infringes four strong Apple technical patents - none of this squishy design stuff like before. Apple quietly asked a district court in California for the preliminary injunction last Thursday as part of a new lawsuit. Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls the patents the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." In Florian's metaphor, they might to unleash pestilence, war, famine and death on Android 4.0 as it comes from Google - no Samsung f... (more)

Wary DOJ Rubber Stamps Google-MMI Deal

Playing Tweedledum to the European Commission's Tweedledee, the Justice Department Monday followed its European counterpart in waving Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility and its patent trove through. It also approved the $4.5 billion acquisition of Nortel's patent portfolio by the Rockstar Bidco consortium including Apple, Microsoft and RIM. The DOJ said Google, Apple and Microsoft had made commitments concerning their standards-essential patent (SEP) licensing policies, meaning the Apple letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) that ... (more)

EC Clears Googlorola Merger But Antitrust Probe Could Follow

The European Commission late Monday cleared Google's proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility but it also issued a simultaneous warning that the companies could be charged with antitrust violations for abusing the fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms of MMI's standard-essential 3G patents. Google is buying MMI for its huge patent portfolio. Antitrust czar Joaquín Almunia issued an unusual statement separate from the merger go-ahead saying, "Today's decision does not mean that the merger clearance blesses all actions by Motorola in the past or all f... (more)