Tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to determine the antitrust implications of sales bans based on infringement of standard-essential patents. The FTC and Justice Department are also weighing in, in order to help determine whether patent holders should be forbidden from...
Congress debates whether it should ban bans
DirecTV and Viacom played chicken, and the customer lost: Viacom just pulled the plug on as many as 26 DirecTV channels, including MTV, Comedy Central, Spike, VH1, and Nickelodeon. As usual, the loss of service is the direct result of a contract...
Japan is yet to have a smash hit e-reader, but that could be about to change this summer. The Kobo Touch, which launches on July 19th through Rakuten, has already become the most-ordered item on the online retailer's website. Rakuten isn't giving numbers, but if the claim is legitimate it'd mean a significant response to the device from the Japanese public — Rakuten is the biggest e-commerce...
Ping / Counterping is a special feature where editors of The Verge debate issues from the world of technology head-to-head, no holds barred.
When Google and Samsung announced the Galaxy Nexus late last year, its greatness in the Android landscape was difficult to dispute: Ice Cream Sandwich was a fantastic update, and the Galaxy Nexus was the only device to run it for a long time.
But what about now? HTC, Samsung, and LG have come to the table with newer, empirically better hardware running Android 4.0 in the months since. Is the Nexus phone's early update to Jelly Bean enough to keep it at the top of the heap? Vlad and Chris sound off.
Battle of the Galaxies
Following rumors earlier this year, Huawei and T-Mobile have just announced the myTouch and myTouch Q Android smartphones — virtual twins that only differ in their offering of a slide-out landscape keyboard (the Q has one, the basic myTouch doesn't). Both models feature 5-megapixel autofocus cameras with LED flashes, 4-inch WVGA displays, HSPA+ support, front-facing cams for video calling,...
Launching with Gingerbread, believe it or not
Earlier today, Microsoft posted an in-depth overview of its File History backup manager on its Building Windows 8 blog. The utility made its debut in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and includes several usability improvements over previous versions that will help it take on Apple's Time Machine.
In an effort to make things easier for consumers, File History can be activated without having to...
Twitter set off alarm bells across the web in recent weeks when it ended its partnership with LinkedIn and reiterated its warning that it would be cracking down on the terms of its API. The company didn't offer any explanation for why it removed tweets from LinkedIn, but speaking with sources familiar with the company's plans, The Verge has learned that major changes are coming in the next few months which will move Twitter from an open platform popular among independent developers towards a walled garden more akin to Facebook.
The moves were not unexpected, as Twitter had announced in...
This past March the director of DARPA, Regina Dugan, left the research agency to join the ranks of Google. Now DARPA has found Dugan's full-time replacement: Arati Prabhakar. It's not Prabhakar's first brush with the agency, having founded DARPA's Microelectronics Technology Office during a seven-year stint at DARPA before heading the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Since 2001, she has worked in the private sector, funding green technology initiatives and start-ups as part of US Venture Partners. Prabhakar is scheduled to start her tenure as DARPA director on July 30th.
Various codenames have been flying around the BlackBerry 10 project for quite some time, and Colt is one of the earlier examples — we heard about it as a QNX device way back in August, but then later got word that it may have been canceled after the eventual renaming of BBX to BlackBerry 10. All bets are off, then, as to what the leak of mockup images at N4BB alleging to show the Colt device running a Facebook app could mean.
The renders...
Colt back out the gates?
The crowd is going insane. People are leaping into the air as though the floor is charged with electricity, screaming, yelling, cheering like they're about to burst. On the stage, Ryan Hart finds himself buried under lively bodies that aren't sure if they want to hug him, kiss him, or plunge a...
We just spent a few minutes with Huawei's Ascend Q, a low-end Android handset with one very special feature that sets it apart: it's a portrait QWERTY model, still a sad rarity in the smartphone market. Its 3.2-inch HVGA display washes out easily and has a full millimeter of gap between the glass...
Verizon has decided to lock the bootloader on its variant of the Samsung Galaxy S III due to what it characterizes as customer support concerns, but Samsung is coming to the rescue — for a price. Both CNET and Android Central are reporting that the manufacturer will be...
Google's $199 Nexus 7 tablet isn't on sale yet, but if you managed to pick one up at Google I/O, you might notice that an over-the-air software update is hitting your slate right now. We don't have a changelog for the 12.6MB update, and Google's description doesn't really help. As far as we can...
Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple's phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and...
We've been hearing lots of noise about the Samsung Galaxy Note coming to T-Mobile, from leaked images to alleged release dates, and now the carrier has added some Galaxy Note support documents to its database. As first noted by Tmo News, searching...
Google I/O 2012 has come and gone, but the team over in Mountain View has some new goodies to share with those who couldn't make it out this year. The Android developers team has just posted a huge playlist of 28 videos known as the Android Sessions. Nearly all of these videos are a full hour...
President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that changes the way the US deals with telecommunications in the event of an emergency. "A...
Angry Birds Trilogy is coming to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and 3DS this holiday season, developer Rovio announced today.
The physics-based revenge franchise will see its first retail release as a...
Earlier this year the FCC announced new measures to help eradicate unwanted telemarketing calls, and now the FTC has announced its own plans for putting an end to illegal robocalls. Unfortunately,...
In the wake of the Galaxy Nexus legal battle with Apple, Google and Samsung have been working together on a software patch that would remove universal search from the device. That update hasn't...
From today until July 30th, Barnes & Noble is again running its 50 percent discount on Criterion Collection movies. Both DVDs and Blu-rays are a part of the deal, though the savings don't extend to...
The makers of Ouya, the low-cost video game console based on Google's Android OS and designed by Yves Behar, have already surpassed their $950,000 fundraising goal on Kickstarter. The project, a $99 game console and controller that aims to adapt the mobile app business model for the TV, was officially unveiled earlier today. It took just 8 hours and 14 minutes for Ouya to reach its goal.
K...
Łukasz Kaiser, a researcher at LIAFA laboratory at the University of Paris, has created an algorithm that watches games being played, learns the rules, and then plays against human opponents.
With little more information than the size and position of the game board and what a human hand looks...
