Windows Phone 8 smartphone buying guide

Microsoft has finally unveiled all of their plans for Windows Phone 8, including when and where you’ll be able to pick up one of the latest devices running the OS. To get in on the WP8 goodness you’ll need to upgrade the entire phone, as you may recall Microsoft is only allowing a smaller upgrade to Windows Phone 7.8 on “legacy” devices such as the Lumia 900.

If you’re in the market for a new Windows Phone, there are five launch models to choose from, and the following guide will help you see which ones are available on your favorite wireless carrier and for how much. Plus, at the end of the article, there is a comparison table where you can see the differences in specifications between all of them.

UK judges rule Apple must apologize to Samsung publicly

A judge at the High Court in London had originally ruled in July that the look of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab computers was not too similar to designs registered in connection with the iPad.

The last time Apple and Samsung went head to head in a London courtroom, the judge ruled that the Galaxy Tab has its fair share of unique design traits and stated that they weren’t as “cool” because they lacked “extreme simplicity.”

Apple Hires Away Top Samsung CPU Designer to Build Custom Apple Chips

 

Apple just took a big step toward upping its chip-making game, and took a big swipe at Samsung in the process. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cupertino’s hired away Jim Mergard, a well respected and vastly experienced engineer, from the Korean company.

The move is a big deal for a few reasons. First, it signifies Apple’s commitment to designing its own chips. Its A6 chip in the iPhone 5 was its first chip to use its own custom core. While Apple had been using chips customized for its products (the A4, A5, A5X, etc.), those were built on ARM’s architecture—the Cortex-A8 and A9. In simple terms, Apple had been just tweaking things here and there with the blueprints, but with the A6, it built the chip design from the ground up using just ARM’s reference designs, not its ready-made cores. That is a very big deal in the world of chip design, and it’s what let Apple boost the A6’s performance and battery life at once.

How does Mergard fit into that? His experience includes work on SoC chips, and an AMD chip that was meant to power low end PCs. That could mean a few things. The Journal cites Patrick Moorhead saying this could be Apple moving to build SoC chips into its Mac computers (the MacBook Air would make the most sense there, probably). Or, the hire could be to bolster improvements to the custom core Apple built for the A6, to keep it ahead of everyone else.

Everyone else including Samsung. While you chase down talent wherever you can find it, Apple also probably took at least a little special pleasure in hiring away a talented engineer from Samsung. Especially after Samsung declared that chip design is something it wants to focus on.

For now, you’re not going to notice much from one chip engineer exchanging addresses. But down the road, next generation or the one after that, as Apple goes farther down the road of differentiating its chips from everyone else’s, this could turn out to be a pretty big deal. [Wall Street Journal via Cult of Mac]

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales ban lifted in the US

In a seemingly unending series of twists, turns and corporate “who has the biggest wang” contests, Samsung can now claim a victory of their own against Apple today, as Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the (albeit now older) Galaxy Tab 10.1 can now be sold in the United States after a jury found that Samsung does infact not infringe on Apple’s D’889 design patent.