News about what is happening in technology today!

Samsung Korea has announced the introduction of their new SPH-V6800 Wi-Fi enabled multimedia handset.

This CDMA2000 slider features a 2″ QVGA TFT display, 1.3MP digital camera, MPEG-4 video recording, MP3 / AAC audio playback, voice recognition, video-on-demand, TV-output, EV-DO, and built-in Wi-Fi wireless 802.11b LAN - all in a 96.8 x 47 x 24.5 mm form-factor.

The SPH-V6800 will be made available to KTF subscribers for around ₩500,000 KRW (~ $477 USD).

SPH-V6800 Press Release (Korean)

Associated Press

A federal judge ruled invalid Wednesday a $450 million settlement between a small patent holding firm and the maker of BlackBerry e-mail devices, Research in Motion.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer is a victory for NTP, an Arlington company that contends the technology behind the popular BlackBerry infringes on its patents.

Canada’s RIM had sought to uphold the settlement, which was reached earlier this year. NTP argued that it was never finalized.

As expected, Spencer also denied RIM’s request to delay the case while awaiting word from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is re-examining NTP’s patents. The patent office has preliminarily rejected the patents at the core of the lawsuit.

Spencer’s decisions raise more uncertainties for BlackBerry users in the United States, where most of the company’s 3.65 million customers live. The judge could next consider re-issuing an injunction that threatens to shut down BlackBerry service in this country.

However, analysts and industry observers expect RIM could be backed into a corner and forced to settle for a sum as high as $1 billion.

“It was pretty much as predicted, and it indicates that Judge Spencer is going to move swiftly to conclude the case,” said James H. Wallace Jr., an attorney for NTP. “We would hope that these developments would bring the parties back to the table to resolve this matter.”

When asked whether U.S. BlackBerry users might see an end to their service, Wallace remarked that RIM officials “own the keys to their own jail.”

An attorney for RIM did not immediately return a telephone message.

The Nasdaq market halted trading of BlackBerry’s shares just before the ruling was made public. The stock’s price rose 36 cents to $65.28 before the halt.

Spencer said he would be communicating with both parties to set up a hearing date and briefing schedule “on the remaining issues of injunctive relief and appropriate damages.”

The judge has grown impatient with the long-running patent case.

During a Nov. 9 hearing, he said that he had spent enough of his “time and life involved with NTP and RIM.” On Wednesday, he expressed similar frustration.

“Drawn out discovery disputes, claim construction issues, multiple motions for summary judgment, countless pretrial motions and many evidentiary objections set the tone for a complex, contentions path toward a resolution of this case,” Spencer wrote in his opinion.

NTP was co-founded by Thomas J. Campana Jr., a Chicago-area engineer who in 1990 created a system to send e-mails between computers and wireless devices. He helped form NTP to protect his work.

In 2002, a federal jury in Richmond agreed that RIM had infringed on NTP’s patents and awarded the smaller company 5.7 percent of U.S. BlackBerry sales. Spencer increased that rate to 8.55 percent. The amount of damages and fees had reached $210 million at last count.

by Michael Calore

The latest release of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is out. Version 1.5 adds improvements to accessibility features, performance, and security. Read the release notes here.

Webmonkey’s testing lab has had a chance to drive the new browser today. We can report that forward/backward navigation is much faster. Also, the new drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs is very cool. There is also a searchable cookie manager that we haven’t had time to play around with yet.

The installer broke a few of our extensions, but most of them seem to work. There is usually a lag time of a week or so between the release of the latest browser version and the updating of the most popular extensions. So, we’ll revisit this issue in December to see how the extensions stuff is coming along.

Seems like customers are at a huge disadvantage when dealing with dishonest retailers. This is the story of a man who had a horrible experience with an online camera retailer. In short he was lied to, yelled at, and threatened to be sued if he posted the experience on his blog. He was also persuaded to sign an agreement that would allow the retailer to charge him an extra $100 if he left bad feedback.”

“Skype is showing that there’s life after the eBay purchase. Techworld reports that the company has just launched the beta of Skype 2.0, having added video to its telecommunication software. The company is already lagging behind the likes of AOL and MSN in offering this, but Skype must be hoping that the size of its user base will help it - its store is to start selling videocams almost immediately.” The LA Times has a review from a 2.0 beta tester, if you’re interested in a hands-on look.