Wires Crossed #107 – November 23

Lawyer Sues Over Surface Storage

Lawyer Sues Over Surface Storage
Californian lawyer Andrew Sokolowski is suing software giant Microsoft, alleging that the company was telling porkies when it comes to the amount of storage in its Surface tablet. His tablet was supposed to have 32GB of space, however, after taking into account pre-loaded apps and the operating system, he was left with 16GB of storage for his own files. Countering Sokolowski’s claims, Microsoft states that "Customers understand the operating system and pre-installed applications reside on the device's internal storage thereby reducing the total free space”. Really? I never knew that. Makes sense I guess , but is it common knowledge? We’ll see.

Samsung Jury Foreman In Firing Line
I think we could dedicate a weekly column to the number of law suits going on in Tech Land and we’d never run out of copy. Are tech company’s some of the most litigious entities on Earth? Samsung recently lost a suit in California, whereby they were ordered to pay over $1 billion to Apple. Not content with taking it on the chin, they want a retrial due to jury foreman, one Velvin Hogan, who it believes had an axe to grind with the South Korean company. Seems in years gone by, Hogan had issues with his former employer Seagate, a company that has a commercial relationship with Samsung. Apparently these issues eventually contributed to Hogan going bankrupt. Initially we thought it was sour grapes, but thinking about it, it would be a nice time to exact some revenge on a multi-national that you think had done your wrong.

The Donald And Cher In Twitter Fight
Say what you like about social media – good, bad or ugly – it has certainly opened up a whole new world in to the lives of celebrities – especially those that have public feuds. The latest to hit the twitter sphere is between developer Donald Trump and aging star Cher. Cher referred to Trump as a “racist cretin” while he had a crack at her enumerable plastic surgeries. Doesn’t take much to take get the claws out these days, and celebophiles lap this stuff up.

Vodafone Loses 50,000 Customers
Of the big three Telcos, it’s no secret that Vodafone has been struggling. From less-that-stellar marketing plans, through to the more troublesome coverage problems, the past couple years have not been the company’s best. And in the Land of the Long White Cloud, it just shed 50,000 customers. Before you start feeling too sorry for them, unlike here in Australia, Vodafone are the major player in New Zealand, with Telecom (NZ’s version of Telstra) coming in second in market share. What we found interesting about these figures is that Vodafone claims 2.32 million customers, Telecom 1.57 million and another vendor 2degrees 1 million. By our calculations that’s 4.89 million customers, give or take. Considering the latest New Zealand Census has the population at 4.4 million (this includes babies and pre-schoolers, too), either Kiwis have the most prolific uptake of mobile phone usage (and yes, we get that some people will have business and personal handsets) or the providers and inflating their sales figures. We know which theory we believe.

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