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Injunction doesn't harm sales of the Android-based tablet in Germany.

The decision by a German court earlier to his that forced a block on the import of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, has not yet affected the sale of the device in the country. In fact, the leading retail chain MediaMarkt is promoting the Galaxy Tab model at a new lower price of €469 this weekend.

Financial Times Deutschland confirmed that the tablet PC is to stay on sale as usual, quoting a spokeswoman for Media-Saturn, the holding company of all MediaMarkt stores.

The reason that the German retailers can continue to sell the device in the wake of the preliminary injunction, is that it only applies to Samsung. That is, Samsung cannot import the device into the country and it also cannot promote the device within the country, but that injunction does not have to be respected by firms independent of Samsung.

Apple could go back to court and name the retailers as new defendants if it so pleased, but analysts think it is unlikely to do so as those same stores are major Apple customers in Europe.

High capacity SSD brings Ultra-fast SATA Revision 3.0 interface.

Samsung announced its new PM830 SSDs, touting the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 interface, on Wednesday. SATA 3.0 offers data transmissions at 6 gigabits per second (6Gb/s). The new SSD is available in capacities up to 512GB.

Sample production of the SATA 6Gb/s 512GB SSDs began in May, with volume production initiated earlier this month. The new drives are expected to replace SATA 3Gb/s-based SSDs by year-end.

"Samsung's new line up of advanced SSDs will raise the performance bar to the next level for ultra-slim notebooks and tablets and accelerate growth of the market for high-performance SSDs," said Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics.

"The industry is expected to quickly embrace SATA 6Gb/s-based SSDs, which also will help increase market interest in 256GB and higher densities significantly."

Chinese government says it is a victim too.

When talk of cyber attacks come up, you can be sure that China is highly likely to be mentioned. That's because experts keep tracing the origins of cyber-attacks to places within China, some of which were very high profile cases that made headlines around the world.

However, the Chinese government does not admit to any involvement in such shenanigans, and has insisted that it is a victim of cyber-warfare. It claims that last year, the number of attacks against it totalled almost half a million, with the majority coming from outside the region.

The National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China reports that most of those attacks included the use of Trojan horse malware. As for where they came from, a report pointed the finger at the United States as the worst offender, linked to 14.7 percent of the occurrences. India followed in second place, allegedly sourcing 8 percent of the attacks.

The Chinese report came a week after McAfee detailed a mass on-going cyber-attacks against institutions around the world from one unnamed source. Targets included governments, defence contractors and institutions linked to the Olympic games. McAfee says the operation, which is dubbed "Shady RAT", persisted for more than five years, but it did not identify a source.

New South Wales government gives in-principle support for new rating.

The government is supporting a move to classify certain video games as R18+, which would bring some considered Adult-Only titles into the R18+ category and also some from the MA15+ category too.

"Few people would dispute the value of a classification system that helps keep adult material beyond the reach of children," New South Wales attorneys-general Greg Smith said in a statement.

"With strong classification guidelines in place, an R18+ rating should result in violent games currently rated MA15+ in Australia being reclassified as adults-only, as they already are in many other countries."

The states' attorneys-general will now draft national guidelines for the new rating. The guidelines will be reviewed by the federal government as part of a larger review of Australia's content classification scheme. The new ratings scheme should be in place by the end of 2011.

Viacom programming to stay on Cablevision apps.

Viacom had alleged that Cablevision applications were offering unauthorized streams of its content. It argued that Cablevision only had an agreement that would allow it to only distribute Viacom programming over cable TV systems.

Time Warner Cable Inc. had also targeted Cablevision for the same reason, but the case has been on hold since June. Cablevision launched its Optimum Apps for the iPad and other devices in April this year.

"Cablevision and Viacom were able to resolve the iPad matter and an unrelated business matter to their mutual satisfaction," Cablevision and Viacom said in a joint statement. "Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment."

Due to the growing use of mobile devices for viewing video content, disagreements have been brewing between content providers and cable companies over the rights to distribute programming.

Microsoft's Bing search engine is more effective than Google's, says Experian Hitwise.

The active "success rate" for Bing compared to Google, for the month ended July 31st, was 80.04 percent to 67.56 percent, a significant difference.

Success rate is defined by how many search queries with a search engine lead to an actual visit to a website.

Yahoo searches were the most efficient, at 81.36 percent, although Yahoo is now considered part of Bing.

Whilst Yahoo and Microsoft are more efficient, Experian believes all three search engines can improve: "The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine results pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information."

Experian also notes that Google's share of the search market fell to 66.05 percent while Bing-powered searches (Yahoo + Bing) increased, to 28.05 percent.

For more info, check here: Experian Hitwise reports Google share of searches at 66 percent in July 2011

Electronic Arts (EA) has now completed its previously announced acquisition of popular casual gaming company PopCap Games.

PopCap, the company behind blockbuster games like Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, made over $100 million in revenue last year and is a top social/mobile gaming outfit with around 4.3 million active daily gamers.

The final price is $650 million in cash and $100 million in EA stock.

Furthermore, if PopCap hits certain volume and financial goals by the end of the 2013, the company will earn a $550 million bonus earn-out.

The company will be melted into EA's casual gaming division.

According to the latest figures from comScore, QR code usage continues to grow in the U.S.

Over 14 million Americans, 6.2 percent of U.S. mobile users, scanned a QR or barcode using their smartphone or tablet in June 2011.

Says Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile:

QR codes demonstrate just one of the ways in which mobile marketing can effectively be integrated into existing media and marketing campaigns to help reach desired consumer segments. For marketers, understanding which consumer segments scan QR codes, the source and location of these scans, and the resulting information delivered, is crucial in developing and deploying campaigns that successfully utilize QR codes to further brand engagement.

QR codes are matrix bar codes that are readable with smartphone cameras and include info, or usually point to a web site.

The demographic for users of QR codes were predominantly male, between the age of 18-34 and with an average salary over $100,000.

Product packaging accounted for 35.3 percent of QR scanning, while another 27.4 percent scanned a code from a website on a PC and finally 23.5 percent scanned codes from a poster/flyer/kiosk.

Acer has launched the Iconia Tab A100 in the U.S. this weekend, the world's first 7-inch Android tablet to ship with Honeycomb.

The tablet runs on Honeycomb 3.2 (the latest firmware update), a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, has a 7-inch touchscreen with 1024x600 resolution, dual cameras, and weighs just 13.9 ounces.

An 8GB model sells for $329.99 and the larger capacity 16GB model will cost $349.99.

Running on Android 3.2 gives the tablet Zoom Mode, which optimizes Android's 200,000+ apps for tablets.

(Pics via PCM)

Apple, along with HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, have all been sued today over alleged e-book price fixing.

The suit claims the publishers and Apple colluded to break Amazon's discount pricing strategy with the sole intent of helping the iPad compete against the popular Kindle e-reader.

Furthermore, the suit claims that publishers, after discounting e-books for years to push adoption, feared Amazon's discounted prices would set a new (and permanent) low expectation for pricing of the books.

Says an attorney for the class-action suit:

Fortunately for the publishers, they had a co-conspirator as terrified as they were over Amazon's popularity and pricing structure, and that was Apple. We intend to prove that Apple needed a way to neutralize Amazon's Kindle before its popularity could challenge the upcoming introduction of the iPad, a device Apple intended to compete as an e-reader.

The five publishers in question control 85 percent of the most popular e-books and until the iPad's release, new releases were priced at $9.99. They now are priced in a range from $9.99 to $14.99.

Utah-based company Millenniata has made a bold claim today, stating that their new M-DISC discs will last for the next millennium.

Millenniata says standard DVDs and Blu-ray Discs only last between 3-5 years before the dyes begin to degrade and data begins to get lost.

The M-DISC, on the other hand, has "actual pits are burned into the recording medium by a laser." M-DISCS are still readable by all DVD drives.

As you can tell from the picture above (via Register), M-DISCS have the same base but are less susceptible to corruption thanks to an "inorganic and synthetic material" data layer.



M-READY drives also engrave the pits in the surface of the disc, for a rock-like surface.

Furthermore, the discs will have somewhere in the 25-50GB range for capacity, well above standard DVDs. The company has partnered with LG, who will release a Super-Multi Drive that can read/write M-DISCS, Blu-ray and DVD. No word on price, yet.

In its ongoing effort to release updates more frequently, Mozilla has unveiled Firefox 6 Final today, with those in the release channel getting access.

However, the public will likely have to wait a few more days to download the release via the in-browser update.

The company expects August 16th to be the official release deadline for the browser.

Furthermore, Firefox 7 Aurora is now available, as well.

A few of the new updates are updated Address Bar functionality, a redesigned Web Developer menu, an improved Firefox Sync and faster startup time.

You can download the latest Firefox 6 Beta here in preparation for the final launch: Mozilla Firefox v6.0 Beta 5

Sprint has noted today that it has killed off plans to release a WiMax 4G BlackBerry PlayBook, citing low demand.

RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, and Sprint, said it was a "mutual decision" to cancel the 4G tablet, which was announced in January.

The carrier will continue to sell the Wi-Fi-only model of the device and it is unclear whether AT&T and Verizon will make similar decisions to axe the 4G model.

Says Page Alves, Sprint's head of business services:

Right now the majority of tablets are Wi-Fi only. People use tablets in fixed locations.

The 7-inch PlayBook came to the market to mixed reviews, mainly due to its lack of a native email app.

After three weeks of availability, Spotify reportedly has 1.4 million users.

Perhaps more importantly, the service already has 175,000 paying subscribers, which should make the record labels very happy.

In Europe, the service commands 1.6 million paid subscribers, with a total user base of 10.7 million, so the conversion rate is a bit higher in Europe, at least for the time being.

That being said, Americans have very little incentive to upgrade, as there is unlimited streaming on the desktop version, with very little interruption and non-obtrusive ads. That will go away in six months, however, as Spotify moves the U.S. free tier in-line with Europe's, turning unlimited streaming into a limited amount of hours per month.

Read our review of Spotify U.S. here: Spotify Free for U.S., worth the wait?

Despite 5 million sales overseas (and counting), the Samsung Galaxy S II has been rightfully hyped in the U.S.

Today, the company has finally announced the U.S. launch date, August 29th, with a press event slated for early in the day.

Samsung's new "superphone" has a 4.27-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, Android 2.3.4, a 1.2GHz Samsung dual-core processor, an 8.49mm thin chassis (at lowest), an 8MP camera with autofocus and 1080p recording, NFC support, 4G, a 2MP front-side camera and HSPA+, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0+HS.

Furthermore, the device will run on Samsung's updated TouchWiz UI and weighs just 4 ounces.

It is expected to cost $200 with contract from Verizon and AT&T, and possibly Sprint and T-Mobile, as well.