Back in 2010 Oracle took Google to court claiming that Google had violated its copyright by including 37 Java APIs within Android. Although Java itself had originally belonged to Sun Microsystems,Oracle had previously acquired the rights to the popular framework.
In May 2012 it seemed that Google would win the battle, as a judge determined that the structure of the Java APIs couldn’t copyrighted and therefore shouldn’t be protected under such law. At the time Google might have found victory, but the war was just beginning.
Today it has been announced that the original ruling in Google’s favor has been reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The three-judge panel determined that “a set of commands to instruct a computer to carry out desired operations may contain expression that is eligible for copyright protection.”
Of course, things are far from over. The reversal means that Oracle can continue to pursue its legal case against Google, where it is asking as much as $1 billion in damages. The case has now been referred back to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, which means its only a matter of time before the two companies return to battle before a judge.
Even after this next case is done, more than likely the losing side will end up appealing the decision and things will drag on indefinitely — not unlike the Samsung-Apple patent war.
Here’s the big question though: should APIs be subject to copyright law? Or will this only stifle innovation further? If you’re interested in learning more about the 63-page decision, you can do so by heading on over to Re/Code.
A lot of people know about Helpouts already but we’ll go over it again for those who may not know. Helpouts is a platform where people can go to find help. You simply to go the site, type in the subject, and you’ll be given the option to have a live person help you over video chat. Think of it like tech support but for almost any subject and you chat with a person face to face instead of over a phone or in a text chat.
Okay so here’s how it works. First you need to develop a problem. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen but in the event that it does, you would go to helpouts.google.com either search for your problem or you can scroll down and browse the various categories. It can take a minute as a keyword can bring a lot of results from a lot of categories, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to find what you’re looking for.
Once you find the Helpout, your next step is to get into it. You can start a Helpout right away or you can schedule one for later if your problem can be solved at a later date. Sometimes you have to schedule it because not all helpouts are immediately available. This is a common with popular Helpouts.
During this process you’ll also need to secure a payment method for a Helpouts chat if it’s not a free one. You’ll need Google Wallet for this. If you don’t have one, it’s fairly easy to set up. Once you have secured your payment method you’re ready to go.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you simply have your Helpouts and that’s it. Helpout sessions can short or long depending on your spending limit and your scheduled time. If you’ve ever been in a hangouts video call before, then you know how they work. You simply have a video call with someone that you’re paying to help you.
You can also perform this entire process through the Android application if you so choose. The application can do everything the web version can and that’s always comforting. So if your problem is either somewhere where you don’t have a computer or it’s because your computer is broken, you can still access a Helpouts if need be.
So how can you use this? For anything really. I went diving in to see what topics I could find and there really is a bunch of unique stuff. You can find anything from yoga poses and food preparation to creating 3D parallax video clips out of 2D photographs. Simple concepts like tech support to more complex things like writing a novel. It even has weird and specifically specialized stuff like Aquaphonics and balloon animal instructions.
Critics of Helpouts have pointed out that you can find most of this stuff on the internet free of charge and that’s true. You can find tutorials for pretty much anything that explains how to do pretty much everything.
However, there is an inherent advantage to having someone knowledgeable to interact with and you don’t get that advantage when you read a WikiHow link. Having someone there to answer your specific questions and concerns can help streamline the learning process and reduce the amount of troubleshooting time significantly.
Okay, let’s take a look at what’s good about Helpouts.
Of course, like any service there are some cons too. So here’s the bad.
Overall, this is an amazing platform. It has its detractors but so does everything ever and in this case I would highly recommend that you try it out for yourself to see if you like it. There are free topics to get your feet wet and it’s a great way to get personalized help in a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Seriously, even balloon animals.
The interface is easy to navigate and the process of paying for and getting into a Helpouts is as straightforward as you can reasonably expect it to be. There are some limitations here and there, sure, but the benefits of using Helpouts outweigh the limitations by a fairly large margin. If you want to try it out, simply head to helpouts.google.com to get started or if you want to try the Android app, just click on the button below.
If what I’ve said just isn’t hitting those strings and pushing those buttons, what if I told you that you could try it at a discount. For a limited time, if you use the promo code ANDROID-AUTH, you can get $20 off of your first paid Helpout. There’s also a link you can follow below that’ll help you automatically redeem that. So now you have $20 to try out your first Helpout and really, is there any reason not to try it?
Click here to get $20 off your first Helpouts session! (Limited time only)
It’s 2014 and already we’ve seen quite a few from both major manufacturers and newcomers, all packing as impressive of specs as possible. With the upcoming LG G3, we expect this trend to continue with the handset maker becoming the first major company to embrace QHD resolutions on a smartphone.
But is there a point where enough is enough? As devices become more powerful, we have to wonder if focusing on increasing specs is really the best strategy for manufacturers. In this week’s Friday Debate, we discuss the spec war and whether it’s really worth keeping up with anymore.
Some could argue that we’ve already reached a point where phones are “good enough”, and that it’s time for handset makers to reevaluate their strategy and focus on new areas.
What’s your take? Join in the discussion below and answer in our poll!
Jonathan Feist
I love the idea of meaningful innovation. Don’t get me wrong, the latest string of phones and components heralding in an era of large and powerful Android devices is very exciting; however, putting my money where my mouth is, I do not want a 6-inch QHD phone.
Let me explain what has been good enough for me in one phrase, Nexus 7.
With the Nexus 7 in tow wherever I go, my requirements of a phone are that it is easy to lug around in my pocket, great battery life and serves up great hotspot speeds for the tablet. A great camera is good too. In the end, a 6-inch phone would only be a redundancy for me and likely to be damaged as it would not be able to just slide, forgotten, into a pocket to serve up my WiFi, only to re-emerge to place calls and snap photos.
Looking at devices in terms of ppi screen resolution, I find it terribly silly that we are getting into the 500, even 600ppi+ territory. I am not against 2K or 4K resolution in general, I love the tech behind it and the idea of where it can go next, but at the screen sizes we are talking about here, the human eye really cannot see the difference. Sure, the screens may look different, but is that because we are seeing the individual pixels or, speaking about that meaningful innovation, is the pixel materials, layout, color and brightness different?
For the sake of seeing what it is all about, I have been using a Moto G as my daily driver for the last couple weeks. This thing packs specifications that this year’s flagship devices absolutely laugh at, but is still a really great device. Is it going to be my long term user? No, but that is for lack of functionality (LTE, Gyroscope, MHL/Slimport, camera…,) not lack of performance or size.
As it turns out, my beef is purely with size, I think a phone should be small but powerful and a secondary device or an attached secondary display should handle your larger screen needs. I think back to one of the greatest things that never really came to be, an Ubuntu phone. Not the Ubuntu built device with Ubuntu mobile OS that flopped as a kickstarter, I am talking about back when they promised we could run a Galaxy Nexus with Android in hand, then dock it and instantly boot into a desktop OS.
My dream machine is a combination device of the idea behind the faded from memory docked Ubuntu OS, a play on ASUS’s silly PadFone nightmare, just with universal connections and a selection of modular size upgrades, Chrome OS and full Chromecast device mirroring. To me, meaningful innovation would see to more power, more function and more external display and peripheral support, not so much on ppi counts. But, I suppose I am strange like that. As long as the majority of users continue to use their smartphone as little more than just an entertainment device, the smart move for manufacturers may be what I am arguing against – on that note, let’s go for it, show me a 6.5-inch 4K display!
Robert Triggs
The tech loving side of me always wants to keep an eye on what’s going on at the bleeding edge of the industry, but the savvy consumer in me can’t justify spending $600 on something shiny and new when my current handset does everything I want. For me, smartphones have been “good enough” for a while, and the industry certainly isn’t keeping pace with the big generational hardware leaps seen in the glory days of the old Samsung Galaxy series.
The big handset manufacturers have come up against a wall this generation particularly, with none of the recent flagships doing much to impress me compared with the last batch. I wouldn’t say that the big companies have forgotten how to make great phones, rather I think that they’re struggling for meaningful innovation now that smartphones can manage pretty much everything that consumers can throw at them.
Fingerprint scanners or slightly louder speakers don’t justify a $600 price tag to me, but the big names have to appear to be doing something to justify their leading positions. That being said, if you look to Motorola, Nvidia, or cheap developers like OnePlus, they are innovating in areas which some consumers care about, such as smart software, gaming power, and price.
Whilst some handset manufacturers may be suffering from a lack of ways to improve the basic calls, internet, and media formula that most people demand from their smartphones, the more niche sectors, such as gaming or ultra-high resolution content, continue to go from strength to strength.
The spec race isn’t over for me, but I concede that it’s becoming harder and harder to justify in mainstream handsets. Devices are more than good enough for what most people need.
Andrew Grush
Are today’s smartphones really good enough, and is the spec race over? Yes and no. While I personally love having bleeding-edge hardware, that’s really more the competitive geek in me than anything.
The reality is that, while my Nexus 5 is considerably better than my wife’s Moto G, they largely do the same things. We both use them for ocassional e-book reading on the go, we both use them for browsing the web, listening to music and playing a few games. They are both fast and both are decent looking devices. There are very few things that my Nexus 5 can do that the Moto G couldn’t, allow mine might do it a bit faster and with a much more impressive display (both size and resolution).
So, the answer in my opinion is that the spec war is becoming less meaningful for consumers, but it’s far from over. There will always be those that want better specs for better specs sakes. I’ve seen AA comments dissing Snapdragon 800 CPUs are a poor choice when the Snap 801 is avaliable and I’ve been guilty of somewhat stating this in my own articles. And yet the differences are very minimal.
As for the notion that manufacturers have lost touch with what makes a phone good? This is also somewhat true. I feel that none of 2014’s major flagships have done much to impress me, though smaller brands like Oppo and OnePlus have attempted to change things up in terms of pricing and other areas that make things a bit more interesting.
Ultimately, I think that manufacturers haven’t lost touch, but they are struggling to figure out exactly how to move forward now that the jumps between CPU, RAM and other components aren’t as drastic from generation to generation. Going forward, I hope that manufacturers spend less time on pure specs and more time on price, battery life and user experience.
Speaking to the latter point, Motorola is a good example of a manufacturer that’s starting to target user experience over specs, though I’d like to see something that lands a bit more in the middle.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Google Play Weekly! This week we talk about Canadians finally getting Google Play Music. Portal is coming to NVIDIA Shield next week. Google Wallet and Google Camera both got updates this week and don’t forget about Google Maps! Rovio’s new non-Angry Birds team called LVL11 is about to release a new game called Retry. Google Now continues to roll out awesome updates spanning back from last week. Finally, here are 6 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week.
[Price: Free]
First up this week is Chadder. This is the latest app out of Etransfr and is publicly backed by John McAfee. The premise is simple. This is another one of those anonymous messaging apps where nobody can see what you type except the person you’re typing to. The idea is cool but the app is a little buggy as the developers frankly state that they kind of rushed this beta release. For now, unless you enjoy trying out brand new stuff, it’s probably best to wait until this app gets a few more features and a few more fixes.
[Price: Free]
Firefox for Android, desktop, and pretty much everywhere else updated recently. Included are a few new features, a few UI tweaks, a new sync service, and a bunch of other stuff. You can now sign into Firefox sync on your desktop and mobile and it’ll sync your history, bookmarks, tabs, etc pretty much just like Chrome and that’s actually really exciting. I’ve been using this for about a week now and it’s worth checking out.
[Price: Free]
9 Cards Home Launcher is an interesting concept. If you’ll recall back in the day I did a review of Everything.Me launcher. Imagine having what that launcher had without being required to change your home launcher and that’s pretty much what 9 Cards Home Launcher does. It categorizes your apps into categories such as social, media, etc then categorizes them again depending on what time of day you use which apps. You can then swipe to get to them quickly. The best part is 9 Cards lays over top of your current launcher so you don’t have to give up anything to use it. It’s free and it’s kind of cool.
[Price: Free]
Videostream in a nifty Android application and Google Chrome extension that allows you to stream local videos to your TV through Chromecast. Yes, there are apps out there that do this but the more the merrier I always say. The claim to fame is the ability to stream videos up to 1080p and it’s available on both computers and mobile devices. So far it’s received solid reviews and rocks a 4.2 rating on the Play Store. It’s also free, so go get it!
[Price: Free]
Frequency is kind of what would happen if you took internet video, RSS, and cross bred them into an application. The app lets you find various video feeds from a whole bunch of sources and kind of create your own little video channel from those feeds. It has YouTube, The Wall Street Journal, and many other widely popular and highly regarded video sources. It’s not just news as you can get anything from epic fail videos to cat videos too. It’s free to try, so why not download it?
[Price: $6.99]
If you’re in your late 20’s or older you may remember a PC gem called Transport Tycoon. If you do and you want some actual retro awesomeness, then you can now get Transport Tycoon for Android. The entire game has been ported to Android so you’ll be able to play the game in all its glory all over again. It’s $6.99 in the Google Play Store but there are no micro transactions at all so you can just buy it and SIM it up old school.
Come May 13th we know Motorola will unveil at least one new handset that will supposedly be “price for all”. Unfortunately, that’s really all can confirm about the event.
Some rumors suggest the event will showcase an upcoming device that will be much lower priced than the Moto G and could debut under the name Moto E, but again, there’s really no solid proof just yet. Adding more confusion to the wait, Motorola seems to be gearing up for a release of at least a few other new handsets including the Moto X’s successor X+1. Now it seems that three new variants of the Moto G might also be in the works.
Turning to these newer Moto G devices, they will allegedly go by the names Moto G 3G 4GB, Moto G 4G and the Moto G Cinema. Evidence of the first two devices comes to us by way of Russian-based MobileTelefon.ru, where they spotted placeholders for the Moto G 4G and the Moto 3G. This isn’t the first time that Motorola has unintentionally revealed more information about their devices through a website placeholder, as the same thing recently happened with the Moto X+1.
The placeholder pages really don’t tell us anything solid about the devices, and while they list pricing, odds are the pricing is also merely a placeholder. This does make us wonder what these two handsets are all about, though. If we had to take a guess, we’d say both of these handsets are probably minor variants of the original Moto G as opposed to full-fledged successors. For the Moto G 4G the only major change could be LTE, and the Moto G 3G may likely be the same handset we know and love but with the memory reduced down to 4GB.
As for the Moto G Cinema? Once again, evidence of this device’s existence comes through a placeholder on Motorola’s website, though the source this time is @evleaks.
Hello, Moto G Cinema [comments: http://t.co/dMTT3g393q] http://ift.tt/1nm9iE3
— @evleaks (@evleaks) May 8, 2014
Although the Moto 3G/4G are interesting enough, the Moto G Cinema really has us curious. Is it a redesigned handset with better speakers? A larger screen? A higher resolution? Or maybe all three? We really don’t know, but the mention of “Cinema” in the name makes it obvious that the focus will likely be on better speakers and/or the display.
We might not know much about Motorola’s upcoming devices, but it’s pretty clear that Motorola has something big up its sleeves. How much longer until they show their hand? Although we anticipate at least one handset unveil on May 13th, there’s a pretty good chance that at least a few of these upcoming devices won’t be formally unveiled until sometime later this summer.
