TechieGroups

TABLET MAKER Asus is being sued by Hasbro over the Transformer Prime because of its name.

The toymaking company has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles asking for an injunction banning the device as well as payment of damages. Hasbro markets the Transformer action toys, one of which is called Optimus Prime. It claims that Asus is violating its trademark.

Hasbro told Paid Content, “Hasbro continues to aggressively protect its brands and products and the specific actions we are taking today against Asus underscores yet again Hasbro’s willingness to pursue companies who misappropriate our intellectual property for their own financial gain.”

The Transformer Prime is a follow-up device to the Transformer, which Asus launched in May. Hasbro never bothered to take any action over that tablet so we’re surprised that it has taken it this long.

There’s a chance that Hasbro will lose the lawsuit because the products are so different and therefore it’s hard for a consumer to get confused between them.

The Transformer Prime isn’t available in the UK yet. If Asus is forced to withdraw the device from the market this will no doubt disappoint large numbers of customers who have pre-ordered the tablet or are planning to splash out on one next year.

We’ve contacted Asus for its response to this situation but have had no reply yet. µ

CANADIAN MOBILE FIRM Research in Motion (RIM) has proudly though belatedly announced that it can now offer its users Angry Birds on their Playbook tablets.

The Playbook has been somewhat slow to impress people and has not set the tablet market alight in ways that perhaps the firm had expected.

Still, it is no doubt a lot more fun to use now that you can play a game on it that has been available on other devices for more than a year.

Three versions of the game are available on the Playbook, the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio, which was released to coincide with a film of the same name.

You know the drill, you fire birds at pigs in order to kill them and save unhatched eggs. Given that the birds you send die in the explosions it is possibly a rather self defeating exercise.

Anyway, it is in the Blackberry App store now. We could only find the US price, despite looking in the UK store, and this is .99 for each game. µ

A HACKER has rejigged Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant Siri to control a TV, with some interesting results.

The hacker, Tood Treece has posted a short blog and a video of Siri in action, which can change channels and switch the TV off with just voice commands. However, some additional hardware has been introduced for the system to make it work.

Siri responds to questions such as, “Siri, can you change the channel to the History channel?” and it responds with information about what’s playing on that channel and asks the user to confirm the switch.

We particularly like the response Siri gives after discovering Piers Morgan Tonight is on CNN. “Do you really want to watch this crap?”

The Iphone sends a command to an Arduino microcontroller via transmission control protocol (TCP) and the required information is gathered from a TV guide web site.

This project is based on the same open source proxy code as the thermostat hack we saw last month. It’s an expensive way to control your TV, but Siri type technology is looking more and more likely to be the future of controlling the home. µ

Siri Universal Remote from toddtreece on Vimeo.

THE MAN who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak has accepted a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone from Google.

According to the Telegraph, Wozniak was given a Samsung Galaxy Nexus device when he visited Google’s campus.

In November 2010, Wozniak appeared to tell Dutch paper De Telegraaf that the Android operating system was better than IOS at the time.

However, Wozniak subsequently claimed he had been misquoted and that he would never say Android was better than IOS.

Last month, Wozniak told The INQUIRER that IOS 5 bricked two of his Iphones, one of which was unrecoverable and had to be replaced.

His favourite feature of the new operating system would have been Siri, the voice activated personal assistant, if it wasn’t specific to the Iphone 4S. He also said that he enjoyed using the greeting card making app because it’s unusual.

In general he admitted to not really noticing the changes in IOS 5 and asked us to make a list of them so he could pick more easily. µ

ANOTHER HANDSET designed by Taiwanese phone maker HTC has been leaked, following the leak of the firm’s first quad-core handset yesterday.

According to BGR, the HTC Ville will be one of the company’s Mobile World Congress announcements alongside the quad-core Edge handset.

The Ville is expected in April 2012 with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and, for the first time, HTC Sense 4.0. The device will feature a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display and is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon Series 4 processor.

The HTC Ville will also have an 8MP rear illuminated camera with HD 1080p video capture support.

It will be less than 8mm thick, have Beats audio and will not feature near field communications (NFC) apparently. It will be a HSPA+ device powered by a 1,650 mAh battery.

We reported yesterday that the HTC Edge is set for a launch in the first half of next year and will have an Nvidia Tegra 3 Kal-el quad-core processor. The handset looks similar to the Titan but will run Android instead of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

The only other device we know of that will definitely come with the Tegra 3 chip is the upcoming Transformer Prime tablet and notebook that Asus unveiled today.

The Edge could also come with version 4.0 of Sense and a bunch of HTC services such as ‘Listen’, ‘Read’ and ‘Play’ for music, books and games, respectively. HTC ‘Watch’, its film rental service will offer high definition content. µ

When iPhone 4S was announced earlier this month, one of the mightiest features was definitely Apple's new voice control software: Siri. Siri understands normal speech, so you can send text messages and set alarms and so on by speaking to your phone. While Siri is purely software, Apple has limited it to iPhone 4S. Other supported devices can upgrade to iOS 5, but Siri will not be included. However, it has been widely expected that Siri will soon be hacked to run on unsupported devices – and that day has now come. 

Developers Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) and @chpwn have managed to get Siri to run on iPhone 4 and fourth generation iPod Touch (uses the same A4 chip as iPhone 4, but has only 256MB of RAM). Even without the dual core A5 chip, Siri appears to run smoothly. Troughton-Smith said that Siri runs as fast on iPhone 4 as it does on iPhone 4S. The iPod Touch has some problems due to the inferior microphone (iPod Touch wasn't designed for calling like iPhone), requiring you to talk very loudly but the actual Siri software runs flawlessly. Below is a video of Siri running on the iPod Touch.

Owners of iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G shouldn't get too excited though, as Troughton-Smith says a public release should not be expected anytime soon. There may also be legal issues of distributing Apple's code, making a public release impossible. 

SMILEY FACED FIRM LG has released a software update for its Optimus 3D smartphone that enables 2D to 3D conversion.

The software update named ‘v10k’ is available for Optimus 3D LGP920 owners now, but it is not the Gingerbread update we were expecting. The update is for European handsets and excitedly brings 2D to 3D conversion of games, according to Androidcentral.

As long as the application uses Open GL graphics it can be converted into 3D by the Optimus 3D. If not, you can still try to force the conversion but the results might not be very pleasing.

It was back in July when we exclusively revealed that the handset would be able to do this when it got an update. We were told that an upgrade to Android 2.3 Gingerbread would tip up this month, but that has yet to appear.

If you want to update then you have to do it with a cable and the LG update utility, as it is not yet available over the air. Unfortunately we’ve been unable to update our Optimus 3D because the update was not supported on our model. We don’t know why this is the case, and we’re waiting to hear back from LG for clarification on the issue. µ

FORMER CEO Leo Apotheker will pick up more than m for his 11 months at the helm of HP.

Apotheker’s 11 month reign was punctuated by the seemingly ridiculous decisions to ditch WebOS and get out of the PC business, and HP’s share price is sinking faster than the Titanic. You would assume that with such a considerable list of achievements, when HP’s board fired Apotheker he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on for compensation, but oh no.

HP’s board, which paid out tens of millions to former CEO Mark Hurd after it was found he fiddled his expenses, will now pay over m to get rid of Apotheker. That’s over m a month on top his basic salary, so it’s unlikely that Apotheker will feel the effects of the recession anytime soon.

It looks like Apotheker’s golden parachute is an advert promoting the benefits of working at HP. Not only will Apotheker get financial rewards in the form of hard currency and shares, HP will also pay for him to relocate back to Europe and cover any losses he might incur in selling his Californian property, up to the tune of 0,000.

The desperation within HP to push Apotheker out seemed to be due to the board’s concern that having Apotheker at the helm would continue to lower its share price, eventually making it a takeover target. According to Bloomberg, the company HP feared the most was Oracle, and it’s not surprising why.

Not only did ex-CEO Hurd end up as Oracle’s president, but the two firms have been in an increasingly bitter and public battle over support for Intel’s Itanium chip. Oracle’s latest move was to accuse Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy – the firm that HP is buying for £7.1bn – of lying over a meeting with Hurd to discuss a sale to Oracle first, with HP in effect becoming Oracle’s second choice.

While Apotheker won’t be short of a few bob, it’s unlikely he will twiddle his thumbs and count this cash for too long. Perhaps he could give advice to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop on how to pack a golden parachute. µ

BATTERY MAKER Mugen Power has made a double strength battery for LG’s Optimus 3D smartphone.

The HLI-P920XL battery has been tailored for the Optimus 3D and boasts a rating of 3200mAh. This is actually more than double the standard 1500mAh battery than LG provides and delivers a 113 per cent increase in power capacity.

This will be particularly good news for Optimus 3D owners or prospective buyers, as poor battery life is by far the worst thing about the handset. This caused us to lower its score when we reviewed the 3D capable smartphone in July.

The high capacity battery should mean that users will easily get a day or more of use out of the phone, something that we were unable to achieve.

The down side is that the battery makes the phone 19.15mm thick because the battery is quite fat. Mugen Power provides a ‘battery door’ case with the battery.

Mugen Power says its batteries have “better performance (higher capacity) and reliability (longevity & safety) than other brands”. It claims, “All Mugen Power batteries also undergo vigorous QA procedure, resulting in Mugen Power achieving the lowest return rate in the industry. All Mugen Power batteries are CE approved.”

The battery costs and though this might seem quite high it’s probably worth the money. µ

ONLINE RETAILER Expansys has slashed the price of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play ‘Playstation Phone’ for a second time to under £200.

The high end smartphone aimed at gamers has retailed for as much as £599, but can now be purchased for a third of that amount at £199. Expansys cut the price to £289 just over a month ago.

Meanwhile rival retailers are selling the handset for considerably more. Play has a price of £299 whilst Amazon and Clove have higher prices of £319 and £358, respectively. The Carphone Warehouse is selling the Xperia Play for £499 on pay as you go.

It is unclear why the phone has had its price plummet but we assume that the phone hasn’t sold as well as desired. After all the price tag was sky high.

We reviewed the Xperia Play back in April but didn’t find it to be as good as we had hoped, scoring it six out of ten. Although the phone is unique with its slide-out gaming controls, we found that some of them were useless and the screen had poor brightness.

At £199 the phone is somewhat more tempting because you do get a portable gaming console and smartphone in one device. µ