Author: Brad Reed

If you’re the sort of person who walks into lamposts because you look at your smartphone too much, then Google (GOOG) founder Sergey Brin thinks you’re the perfect person to buy Google Glass. Speaking at the TED2013 conference this week, Brin explained that Google wanted to develop the Glass headset to free people from constantly looking down at their smartphones and declared that Glass “frees your hands and frees your eyes.”

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Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone contracts with European wireless carriers are receiving scrutiny from European officials who are probing whether they violate antitrust laws. The New York Times reports that the antitrust probe began after “a group of European wireless carriers recently submitted information about their contracts with Apple to the European Commission.” Unnamed sources tell the Times that Apple’s iPhone contracts for smaller carriers are allegedly stricter than contracts for large carriers, which if true would put the smaller carriers at a significant competitive disadvantage. The European Commission says that it’s merely giving the iPhone contracts some scrutiny and that it hasn’t decided to open up a formal antitrust investigation yet.

One thing has become clear over the past few months: Google (GOOG) doesn’t see its Glass headset as a novelty item but as a potential technological hub capable of performing several important applications and functions. Engadget has spotted a new Glass-related patent on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website showing that Google wants to give Glass the ability to control household appliances such as refrigerators and garage doors. Engadget writes that Glass could eventually use “visual identification, RFID, infra-red, Bluetooth and even QR codes as methods for recognizing controllable devices,” meaning it will be able to interact with just about any device or appliance that has a wireless sensor.

In case you haven’t noticed, things haven’t been going very well for HP (HPQ) lately and the company’s shareholders this week nearly voted to oust three members of its board of directors. As Bloomberg notes, three board members received less than 60% of the vote in the most recent shareholder referendum just one year after all of them were comfortably reelected with votes of 80% or higher. Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told Bloomberg that such high negative vote totals are rare and that HP will likely have to force some members of its board to step down if it wants to retain any credibility with its shareholders.

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Another day, another reasonably optimistic projection for BlackBerry (BBRY). Per Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum has more than doubled his price target on BlackBerry shares from $10 to $22 and is now projecting that the company’s profits will “meaningfully” increase as loyal BlackBerry 7 users rush to upgrade to BlackBerry 10 over the next two quarters. The downside, however, is that Gelblum thinks that this boost could be short-lived and that there’s still a low probability that BlackBerry will emerge as a “viable” third mobile operating system alongside Android and iOS. All the same, getting a short-term boost that helps you live to fight another day is better than outright crashing and burning as some other industry watchers have suggested, so this analysis is still welcome news for BlackBerry.

T-Mobile and MetroPCS (PCS) on Thursday announced that they’ve passed through every regulatory hurdle for their proposed merger and now must only get approval from shareholders to finalize the deal. The final regulatory domino fell on Wednesday when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States told T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom that it didn’t have any objections to the proposed merger. Now that the two wireless carriers have passed the muster with regulators, they have to convince MetroPCS shareholders to approve the merger during a special meeting on April 12th. This could be easier said than done, however, because some shareholders last year filed a lawsuit to block the merger while accusing the companies of “cheating shareholders” by “drastically” undervaluing MetroPCS’ worth. Deutsche Telekom’s full press release is posted below.

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The word “sapphire” typically conjures up images of luxury gems, but it could soon be associated with high-end smartphone displays as well. Technology Review reports that engineers at New Hampshire-based GT Advanced Technologies are working on ways to make sapphire a practical alternative to Corning’s ever-popular Gorilla Glass as a building material for smartphone screens. While Technology Review concedes that sapphire screens will likely remain much more expensive than Gorilla Glass screens going forward, the publication points out that sapphire screens would be roughly three times more durable and resistant to scratching than Corning’s displays. The key will be to get sapphire display costs down to around $20 per unit, which would still represent a major premium compared to a typical $3 Gorilla Glass screen, but would at least make the material viable for a limited number of high-end smartphones.

Samsung (005930) says it’s working hard to patch a security flaw in its Galaxy phones that could let people completely bypass the devices’ lock screens. A company spokesperson tells AllThingsD that Samsung is “aware of this issue and will release a fix at the earliest possibility” without providing any details about when a patch might be released. The security flaw, exposed by blogger Terence Eden on Wednesday, is a fairly involved process that requires hackers to repeatedly dial non-existent numbers into Galaxy devices’ emergency calling screen. Doing this briefly opens up the device’s home screen for less than a second, which gives quick-fingered users the ability to activate voice commands and download lock screen bypassing applications from Google Play. Exploiting this flaw requires a good deal of patience and it’s unlikely to be used by all but the most determined hackers, but it’s nice to see that Samsung is already on top of it. A video explaining the security flaw is posted below.

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It’s been nearly three years since Steve Jobs wrote his famous takedown of Adobe’s Flash platform as a battery-draining, Mac-crashing, insecure mess. Since that time, Jobs has largely been proven right since the mobile industry has moved on from Flash as a video platform in favor of HTML5, the open-source alternative that Jobs predicted would “win on mobile devices” going forward. All of this makes it somewhat surprising that Apple (AAPL) has decided to hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as a vice president of technology, especially because Lynch was one of Flash’s most prominent public defenders during Adobe’s spat with Jobs.

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The Raspberry Pi was invented in the United Kingdom and now it’s going to be manufactured there was well. Computerworld UK reports that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided to move the main production facility for the Linux-based mini-computer from China to Wales in a bid to meet unexpectedly high demand in western markets. Apparently the foundation was experiencing manufacturing bottlenecks at its Chinese facilities and thus decided to move production closer to home where it will be easier to monitor. The $35 Raspberry Pi has become a surprise hit since its launch in 2012 and has sold around 1 million units in just over a year on the market.