Tech Roundup: May 5, 2012

This week's Tech Roundup would be incomplete, as you might have rightly guessed, without talking about the next Android 'superphone' from Samsung, the Galaxy S III. Unveiled on May 3rd in the UK, the phone has met with polarizing reactions. Packing in a 4.8 inch screen (a little tiny than the phablet Galaxy Note) and a quad core processor, it runs on the Android's latest iteration Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), but with their proprietary skin TouchWiz running on top of it.

While a slew of features have been introduced (Smart Stay, S Beam, S Voice - Siri anyone?, Pop-up Play to name a few), its design has come under severe flak. Agreed the hype and hooplah surrounding the phone was considerably high, but that's no excuse for a shoddy hideous design that Samsung has opted for, which by and large apes the Google Galaxy Nexus. The various reactions to the phone can be found here in the Guardian Tech article: Samsung Galaxy S3: the latest bid to dominate the Android market. Coming in white and blue (no black version!), the phone will be available on May 29th in the Europe. As of now, I guess HTC One X can heave a sigh of relief!

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Interestingly, this year is also expecting the launch of the next generation Apple iPhone. Having left the design unchanged in the iPhone 4S, the next version is likely to be radically different. Now Forbes Tech is reporting that the new iPhone will be thinner and longer and also have a smaller dock connector. The phone is rumored to be 7.4 mm thick and likely to sport a 4 inch screen (measured diagonally). Eitherways, it will be exciting to know how Apple responds to Samsung's latest offering.

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In other news, Facebook is all set for its IPO on May 17 or 18. As per a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the social networking giant is pricing its share in the 25-35 USD range thus taking its valuation to 60-75 billion USD, far lower than the 105 billion USD amount that was quoted previously.

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Beleaguered Finnish giant Nokia has sued HTC, RIM and Viewsonic for patent infringement in the US and Germany. According to the announcement, the patents covers hardware features like antennas, radios, and power management, as well as software features like multitasking, navigation, app stores, retrieving email attachments on mobile, conversational message display, dynamic menus, and certain types of data encryption.

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Canadian based telecom company RIM has announced its new mobile operating system, BlackBerry 10, based on the QNX platform (used in the BlackBerry PlayBook). To be out later this year, the market sentiment has been rather downbeat about the BB 10 reveal resulting in pushing the RIM stocks to an eight year low.

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Google is likely to face an UK inquiry following revelations that it intended to collect internet data - website details, user names and passwords - as it compiled photos for its Street View service around the world. Though the search behemoth claimed that they were mistakenly collected, new documents show the engineer who designed the software intended to collect and analyse the data, with a view of including it in future Google products. What's more shocking is that he even carried out a test in which he tried to discover people's favourite websites from the data.

In other news:

• Nokia's 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone is all set to arrive in Russia and India this month.
• Instagram, which was recently acquired by Facebook for a record 1 billion USD, clocks 50 million users across iOS and Android.
• Gmail now automatically translates emails written in foreign languages.
• Facebook adds 'Organ Donor' status to the Timeline feature as a Life Event.
• Rovio's 'Angry Birds Space' becomes the fastest-growing mobile game reaching 50 million downloads within 35 days of its launch.