Author: Brad Reed

Congratulations, Samsung (005930) — Best Buy (BBY) is honoring you with a distinction that it’s previously only given to Apple (AAPL). Unnamed sources have told Geek.com that some Best Buy locations are planning to cordon off separate areas in their stores to exclusively sell Samsung products. Geek.com says that “this new section will be dressed in large Samsung signage and offer custom demo stations for many of Samsung’s products” and that Best Buy “will be issuing special training sessions for employees in the mobile department, focusing heavily on how to show off Samsung-specific features.” The installation of special in-house Samsung “stores” are timed to coincide with the launch of the Galaxy S4, which is widely expected to be one of the best-selling smartphones of 2013.

One of Google’s (GOOG) defining traits is its willingness to engage in big experiments aimed at disrupting established markets — think of how Google Fiber is meant to shake up the broadband market or how self-driving cars have the potential to alter the transportation industry. On Thursday, Google announced yet another of its grand disruptive experiments, this time a same-day delivery shopping service intended to change the retail industry. Google Shopping Express, which is getting an initial trial run in San Francisco, is described as “a local delivery service that we hope will make it possible for you to get the items you order online the same day, and at a low cost.” Google says it’s recruited several big retailers for Shopping Express so far, including Target, Walgreens, Staples, American Eagle and Toys“R”Us, and has also attracted a number of smaller local businesses in the Bay Area.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere may come to regret publicly slamming the “greedy hedge funds” opposed to his company’s merger with MetroPCS (PCS). The Wall Street Journal reports that the influential Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) is advising MetroPCS shareholders to vote down the proposed T-Mobile merger at their meeting on April 12th. ISS, which the Journal says “advises big shareholders how to vote in corporate elections,” claims that MetroPCS shareholders will not get fair value in the proposed merger and believes that MetroPCS still has the potential “to continue to thrive as a stand-alone company.” T-Mobile and MetroPCS received full regulatory approval from the United States government for their merger earlier this month and now must only gain approval of MetroPCS shareholders to make the deal official.

The big Businessweek profile on Samsung (005930) makes for some fascinating reading, and not just because it details Samsung’s gleeful willingness to try anything and everything when it comes to smartphone form factors. The other part that really stands out from the piece is this: Samsung executives are extremely paranoid. And in case you’re wondering, I mean that as a compliment.

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BlackBerry’s (BBRY) fourth-quarter earnings released Thursday gave the company and its fans the best possible news: It will live to fight another day. Note that being able to fight another day does not imply that BlackBerry is destined to win since the company still faces several major challenges on the road to full recovery. But before we get into those, we should step back and really appreciate the way BlackBerry has scraped its way back to profitability over the last quarter because it’s no small achievement.

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In some potentially exciting news for people who have been waiting for the second-generation iPad mini to come out, Digitimes reports that Apple (AAPL) is cutting its iPad mini shipments in the second quarter of 2013 “to between 10-12 million units.” Digitimes‘ sources also say that Apple is currently “adjusting its reserves for the next-generation iPad mini, which is likely to be released in the third quarter.” This lines up with earlier rumors we’ve heard that the second-generation iPad mini will launch this fall and will come with the same high-resolution Retina display found in the 9.7-inch iPad and the iPhone 5.

BlackBerry (BBRY) on Thursday reported a surprise profit of $0.22 earnings per share despite generating lower-than-expected revenues of $2.7 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter. All the same, the company should be pleased to turn a profit since consensus expectations for the firm were a net loss of $0.39 EPS on revenues of $2.84 billion. On the quarter BlackBerry shipped 6 million total smartphones, including 1 million BlackBerry Z10 devices, although its subscriber base shrank to 76 million from 79 million in the previous quarter. But despite the erosion in its subscriber base, BlackBerry’s return to profitability on the quarter is a significant achievement, especially considering that it posted a yearly a net loss of $646 million for the full year in 2012.

At first glance, the idea of playing Bioshock Infinite on your web browser sounds like a pipe dream. But according to Ars Technica, it’s a pipe dream that Mozilla is working very hard to make real by porting Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 onto its open-source Firefox web browser. To achieve this daunting task, Ars says Mozilla “has been working on WebGL, in order to bring 3D graphics to the browser; Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ applications into JavaScript; and asm.js, a high performance subset of JavaScript.”

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Insulting the honor of alleged Dutch spammers may not be the smartest idea. The New York Times reports that a fight between Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus and Dutch hosting company Cyberbunker has resulted in the world’s largest recorded distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which peaked at speeds of 300Gbps this week. The spat between the firms started when Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is designed to help email providers block alleged spammers. Shortly after Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker, which says it on its website that it will host any data not related to child pornography or terrorism, the anti-spam group was hit by an enormous DDoS attack that is described by Akamai Networks chief architect Patrick Gilmore as “the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.”

T-Mobile CEO John Legere strikes a rather populist tone compared to your typical businessperson and now he’s going after “greedy hedge funds” who are allegedly trying to block his company’s merger with MetroPCS (PCS). Per Bloomberg, Legere this week expressed confidence that MetroPCS shareholders would vote in favor of merging with T-Mobile “despite the greedy hedge funds that are trying to take a double-dip out of that process.” Legere went onto explain that big hedge funds who own large stakes in companies typically make a lot of noise during acquisitions because they want “to get more money” through empty sabre rattling. Legere also made headlines this week when he described rival carrier AT&T’s (T) mobile plans as “the biggest crock of s—” he’s ever seen.

Apple’s (AAPL) “iTV” is a lot like Guns’N’Roses’ chronically delayed Chinese Democracy album: Eventually the rumors about its existence will come true and it will finally be released for public consumption. The latest iTV rumors come to us from Digitimes, which claims that Apple is building a 4K Ultra HD television set with a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels that will release either in late 2013 or early 2014. Don’t worry about the iTV’s impact on the supplies of iPhones and iPads, however: Unnamed sources tell Digitimes that Apple is “banking on LG Display (LPL) to be able to mass produce Ultra HD TV panels by the second half of the year” while freeing up other Apple component suppliers to work exclusively on other gadgets.

While more patent suits may be the last thing the mobile industry needs, it seems that’s what it’s going to get no matter what. AllThingsD points us to a new study from analyst Chetan Sharma projecting that one-fourth of all patents issued in the United States this year will be mobile-related, up from just 5% in 2001. Sharma also finds that Samsung (005930) was the leader in mobile patents granted last year, which makes sense because the company has been working to boost its mobile patent portfolio to ward off more potential lawsuits from Apple (AAPL) such as the high-stakes patent suit that the company lost last summer. Sharma says that the surge in mobile patents is unsurprising since smartphones and tablets have quickly become “the growth engine of the knowledge economy,” which gives companies a lot more incentive to patent everything they can to both maximize their returns on R&D and to prevent potential suits from patent trolls.

As we’ve seen multiple times from MobileMe to iOS Maps, online services are Apple’s (AAPL) most glaring weakness. And now it seems that we can add iCloud to the list of Apple’s online service follies, because many third-party developers are hopping mad at what they describe as Apple’s failure to make iCloud seamlessly integrate and sync up with third-party application data. In a lengthy and detailed piece over at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger talks with several disgruntled developers who say, among other things, that “iCloud hasn’t worked out for us,” that “it just doesn’t work,” that it creates “issues that take hours to resolve and… can permanently corrupt your account,” and that it’s “a developer’s worst nightmare… it’s frustrating, maddening, and costs hundreds of support hours.”

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