Apple Inc. is believed to have played a part in raids carried out at this year’s CeBIT expo in Germany. Along with Siemens and Sisvel, Apple is believes to have been behind the forced shut down of an exhibitor’s booth at CeBIT on Friday. The unnamed company was showing off Netbooks and e-book readers.
The unnamed company is alleged to have violated patents held by the three. On Thursday, lawyers from Siemens, Apple and Sisvel reportedly had visited to the booth and levied a €10,000 fine in advance of the raid. On Friday, German police moved in and forced the unnamed exhibitor to shut down.
The raid was not the only one to happen at CeBIT this year either, according to reports. Moves such as these are common at trade shows like CeBIT, as bigger tech companies use their patent portfolios to essentially “shut up” a smaller competitor that
Result for: netbooks
It appears that the Google Nexus One smartphone may not be the only wild card the search engine giant has up its sleeve as the Washington Post is reporting that the company is creating a Chrome OS Netbook as well.
The sources say that Google is actively in talks with one hardware manufacturer about building a Google netbook, built directly to the specifications of the company. The company has even been given an RFP (request for proposal).
The netbook, if true, would hit for the 2010 holiday season and would be sold directly by Google. There will also be mobile connections, meaning it may be available with subsidy from AT&T or other carriers.
The WP article speculates that Google will move away from the Intel Atom processors found in most current netbooks and instead move to an ARM CPU, possibly the extremely powerful and not-energy-hungry Nvidia Tegra.
Result for: netbooks
According to a very detailed blog entry, Google is planning on releasing a Chrome Operating System, on that will be open source, free and that they hope will rival mature operating systems such as those from Apple and Microsoft.
The full blog post reads:
“It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System
. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
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