Samsung

Samsung announced Monday that it has sold more than 100 million of its Galaxy S smartphones since launching the line in 2010. The South Korean company made the announcement with a series of photos posted to its Flickr account. The pictures show a group of people holding up phones with numbers on each one, collectively writing out "100,000,000. " According to the Associated Press, Samsung has sold more than 25 million Galaxy S smartphones, 40 million Galaxy S II devices and 41 million units of the Galaxy S III, its current flagship phone.

Samsung has canceled plans to release a Windows RT device in the U.S. because of "modest demand" for machines running the scaled-down version of the Microsoft operating system. In an interview with CNET , the South Korean company said it decided to cancel the release of the Ativ Tab in the U.S. because of low demand and also because of the amount of money it would cost Samsung to advertise the benefits of buying a Windows RT machine. "When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait," said Mike Abary, Samsung's senior vice president who oversees the company's U.S. PC and tablet businesses.

LAS VEGAS - For a corpse, the International Consumer Electronics Show was pretty lively. The 2013 trade show, which ended a four-day run Friday, attracted a record 3,250 exhibitors and was on pace to match last year's 156,000 in attendance despite being pronounced all but dead before it started. The reason for the grim diagnosis by some pundits and analysts was simple: Many of the most influential tech companies in the world didn't officially participate: Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. Although this year's show won't be remembered for any ground-shaking innovations or jaw-dropping product launches, it did highlight several ways the global technology industry has evolved.

Samsung has been rumored to be readying flexible, high-resolution displays for its smartphones, and this week at CES the South Korean tech giant somewhat confirmed those rumors by showing off several prototypes. At its keynote the company announced Youm, a new line of flexible OLED displays. OLED technology allows companies to create thinner and lighter displays that also provide even more vivid images than other HD technologies. Brian Berkeley, senior vice president of Samsung's San Jose Display Lab, said that with Youm the company can make displays on ultra-thin and unbreakable plastic.

LAS VEGAS -- Samsung may have given consumers a sneak peek at its smartphone plans with a new TV it announced Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show. At its booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the South Korean company displayed the world's first curved OLED TV. From afar, the TV looked like any other set that might be on display at a tech show, but once Samsung spokesman Scott Cohen pointed out the new gadget, I began to notice its unusual curved screen. The picture quality was, unsurprisingly, remarkable and the weird curve didn't really affect the way my eyes saw the image.

Samsung this weekend teased what it'll have on display next week at CES, and it appears the South Korean tech giant will be showing some new TV designs. In a blog post Sunday, the company said it would be showing off an "unprecedented new TV shape and timeless design," according to a translation by The Verge .  Along with the short text, the company also posted a picture, which can be seen above, showing a tree in a desert landscape. The tree is centered in a vertically oriented rectangular frame resembling a television screen.

Samsung is looking to eclipse its 2012 sales record by shipping more than a half billion phones in 2013. To be exact, Samsung is planning to ship 510 million phones next year, according to The Korea Times. That would represent a 20% increase over the 420 million phones Samsung is estimated to ship for 2012, according to the report. Broken out, 390 million of the devices are expected to be smartphones while the other 120 million would be feature and budget phones, according to The Korea Times, which cites unnamed sources at Samsung and its suppliers.

Consumer electronics are among the most popular holiday gifts, but how many people really wanted a BlackBerry tablet, a Panasonic television or a Nokia smartphone for Christmas? It's been a tough year for old-guard tech companies including Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Nokia and Research in Motion, which not too long ago enjoyed widespread popularity. Now, for a variety of reasons - price, slow pace of innovation, lack of coolness factor and a cutthroat market - the former stalwarts are frequently becoming second-tier options among fickle consumers.

In denying Apple Inc.'s motion to ban sales of some Samsung Electronics Co. products that a jury had determined infringed its smartphone patents, legal observers say a federal judge delivered a potentially troublesome message to the technology giant: These violations are small potatoes. That might sound odd, considering that a jury in August found the patent infringements serious enough to award Apple $1.05 billion in damages. But U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh made it clear in a ruling this week that the scope of the violations was tiny relative to the enormous number of features contained in a smartphone.

Apple has decided to appeal a federal judge's ruling that denied the company's request to ban 26 Samsung products.  In August, a jury ruled that the Samsung products had infringed a handful of Apple patents and ordered the South Korean tech giant to pay $1.05 billion in damages to the maker of the iPhone.  Apple then sought a potentially more devastating punishment against Samsung by requesting a permanent injunction against those products....