Two weeks ago, we reported that Kodak was looking into filing for bankruptcy if it couldn’t sell off enough of its patents. Kodak licenses some these to companies like LG, Motorola, and Nokia. A week after that report, Kodak sued both Apple and HTC for infringing on some of those patents.

Today, the company is adding Samsung to the list of those being sued for patent infringement. The lawsuit singles out Samsung tablets specifically for using some of its technology without asking. The patents that Kodak says Samsung is using without permission center around the automatic handling of photos, such as sending them through email. Here are the five in question:

U.S. Patent No. 6,292,218 – “Electronic Camera For Initiating Capture of Still Images While Previewing Motion Images”
U.S. Patent No. 7,210,161 – “Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Camera to a Service Provider Using a Network Configuration File”
U.S. Patent No. 7,742,084 – “Network Configuration File for Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Still Camera”
U.S. Patent No. 7,453,605 – “Capturing Digital Images to be Transferred to an E-Mail Address”
U.S. Patent No. 7,936,391 – “Digital Camera with Communications Interface for Selectively Transmitting Images over a Cellular Phone Network and a Wireless LAN Network to a Destination”

It appears that these patents involving the transmission of photos are the same ones the company is suing Apple and HTC over. Before it sells off its patents or files for bankruptcy, the company must defend its assets, and the company certainly isn’t being quiet about it. As our own Brad McCarty points out, Kodak has become a dinosaur in digital photography, since it hasn’t executed on its own social offerings:

Kodak has been touting its social sharing functions for the past couple of years and the idea behind them is good. However, the implementation is simply incomplete. Instead of having a one-touch share button that allowed you to directly upload to Facebook, that button allows you to flag a picture. Then you have to hook up your camera to your computer, use Kodak’s software and finally upload it to the service of your choice.

If Kodak is going down, it certainly isn’t going down quietly. However, it looks like most of the damage to the company was self-inflicted.

Yesterday, we told you about one of the coolest items at this year’s CES conference in Las Vegas, the Samsung Smart Window. The company has posted an official video demo of the product and we learned another juicy tidbit about it; it’s partially powered by the sun. The thing only requires 10% of normal power consumption.

Makes complete sense, since the gorgeous transparent device is a geeky replacement for a window. Not only is this thing “Minority Report” cool, it’s eco-friendly. Unsurprisingly, the Smart Window won a well-deserved CES 2012 Innovation award. If the other wasn’t enough to make you want to get one of these things, this one just might:

The only thing missing is a release date and price for the Transparent Smart Window from Samsung. The video suggests putting it in the kitchen, so maybe it won’t be overly pricy. Who am I kidding? They could put any price tag on this baby and I’d at least contemplate picking one up.

Even though the conference is over, you can go back in time and catch up on all of our CES 2012 coverage!

Very rarely do I get excited about TV-related technology, probably because I don’t watch much TV. This beautiful creation from Samsung is an exception though.

This transparent screen will fit any window up to 46 inches at a resolution of 1366 x 768. The thing is completely see-through, but what you’re viewing on the screen is completely private from those outside. It’s fully controlled by your touch, and reminds us of a scene right out of Minority Report or Mission: Impossible.

Check out this quick demo, which shows a cool option to pull down blinds when you’re tired of looking outside:

There’s no word on when these will become available yet or how much they’ll cost, but the rumor is that they may go into production within the next month.

The Smart Window has installed widgets and will let you watch regular TV and movies on it, so it’s not just for show. Can you imagine putting one of these in every room of your house?

Check out all of our CES coverage here.

IFI Claims has released its top 50 US patent assignees of 2011. IBM was number one of the list with an astounding 6,180 granted patents. The rest of the list is made up of some pretty heavy hitters in the technology space.

Samsung had quite a busy year, even though it’s in a war with Apple, being granted 4,894 patents last year alone, which is good enough for second spot on this list.

Patent numbers do not equal innovation and success though, since Apple shows up at #39 on this list with a seemingly measly 676 US patents granted, and it’s doing just fine. As our own Jon Russell points out:

That still works out to around two per day, assuming that they work weekends and take no holiday.

Noted.

Here’s the top 20:

Missing from the top 50? You guessed it, Google. Maybe those folks are too busy working on making search more social instead of filing patents.

If you’d like to check out the full list, head on over to the IFI Claims site.

Samsung has officially announced that its “Galaxy Note” product is coming to AT&T.

The screen is 5.3 inches and sports a stylus called the “S-Pen”, which has 250 levels of pressure sensitivity. The product is aimed at the enterprise set, sporting full integration with calendars and mail, as well as security that companies look for in BlackBerry devices.

The company says the S-Pen not “just a stylus”, but we’re going to have to get our hands on it to make that decision for ourselves.

The devices appears to be a hybrid between a smartphone and a tablet, one that you would carry around and take notes on. The stylus has gone away ever since the introduction of the iPad, but the Galaxy Note has brought it back. With availability already in Europe, this announcement brings the device to the US market.

Samsung has become quite the darling at CES this year, coming off of a huge 2011 in mobile.

Be sure to read all of our CES coverage here.

Today during its CES press conference, Samsung announced that its Smart TV line will exclusively partner with the Angry Birds franchise, bringing new content to compliment its games to homes worldwide.

The partnership will bring all new digital shorts featuring the popular characters of the Angry Birds games to the TV. The content will be free, and is a huge partnership for both companies. By doing an exclusive deal with Angry Birds, Samsung keeps its competitors away from the series, namely Apple.

The company also announced its plans for a smarter Smart TV in 2011, and shared that it currently sells 2 TVs per second, globally.

Rovio has proven once again that distribution is the key to success.

Be sure to read all of our CES coverage here.

Samsung is currently holding its press conference at CES, and is starting off by announcing that it will update its line of TVs with “smarter” ones.

The company is telling us that while we have many devices, the TV is the center. Samsung is promising to push boundaries and break down walls between the devices we already have.

Its “Smart TV” line will soon be able to update itself without you having to buy a new set every year, which is how we’re used to consuming brands of televisions.

Tim Baxter, President of Samsung Electronics America, discussed the companies strategy that uses the TV as the center piece, and includes content, service, and connectivity. Baxter says:

Consumers want more content, and find it more easily, with more intuitive controls

The TV that captures that approach? The Samsung ES8000, with dual-core processor that enables multitasking.

The TV set comes in sizes up to 75 inches, and finally includes an integrated camera for video conferencing. The company also says that 3D has been big for them, with 12 Million 3D Samsung TVs being sold to date, and the company plans on half of the new smarter TVs it releases to include 3D capabilities.

Be sure to read all of our CES coverage here.

Today on the Android Developers blog, the team announced newly available publicly documented APIs in its latest Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). The Android team discussed a bit about why not all APIs are publicly documented even though the operating system is open source:

In almost every case, there’s only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We’re not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we’re not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation.

We’re not claiming that they’re “Private” or “Secret” — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We’re also not claiming they’re forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run. And in fact we know of quite a few apps out there whose developers have used undocumented APIs, often to good effect. It’s hard to get too upset about this in cases where there’s a useful API that we haven’t gotten around to stabilizing.

This is following the Google API trend of not rolling out public APIs too quickly, as to not upset the developer community who is creating and integrating features quickly for their applications.

The new publicly available APIs include Calendar and Text To Speech, probably the two most sought after features of Android’s operating system for developers.

The team had this to say about Calendar:

Let’s start with the good news: As of ICS, the Android Framework will include a fully-worked-out set of APIs for accessing Calendar data. You can guess the bad news: Quite a few developers have built apps (including many good ones) using the undocumented Calendar APIs, some using fairly low-level access to the calendar database. Unfortunately, these integrations were unsupported, and prone to breakage by platform updates or OEM customization of calendar features.

We want to see lots of good calendar apps and extensions that work reliably across Android devices, and aren’t broken by platform updates. So we decided to create a clean API, including a comprehensive set of Intents, to manage calendar data in ICS. Now anyone can code against these new APIs and know that Android is committed to supporting them, and that partners have to support these APIs as part of CTS.

Once the new APIs arrive, you’re going to have to update your apps before they’ll run correctly on ICS while still working on older releases. There are a variety of techniques for doing that, many of which have been featured on this blog, including reflection and lazy loading. Recently, we introduced Multiple-APK support, which could also be used to help with this sort of transition.

The downside of developers using undocumented APIs is that they run the risk of having to update their apps, but this is one of the known issues with working on open source systems, especially ones that run phones.

There are some heavy updates to the Text To Speech API, and will also cause developers to have to update their apps:

Android has never really had a text-to-speech API at the Framework level, but there was unofficial access at the C++ level. With ICS, we will have a fully-thought-through application-level API running on Dalvik, so you can access it with ordinary Java-language application code.

The old C++ API will no longer be supported, but we’ll have a compatibility layer that you can use to bridge from it to the new API. We think it should be easy to update for ICS with very little work.

Google is making it as easy on developers as possible, mentioning that they will offer a compatibility layer that will act as a bridge between updates. That means that most apps will not break in the interim. That can’t always be said for Apple developers, especially ones who haven’t made their iOS5 udpates as of yet.

The moral of the story is that there are risks in developing features around undocumented APIs on an operating system, but it’s good to know that Google is trying to minimize the impact for hardworking teams, and rewarding them with the information they need to create great applications for the Android platform.

UPDATE: See the full spec of the new device, and details of Ice Cream Sandwich, here.

The leaks about the Samsung Galaxy Nexus have been plentiful this week, and today is no exception.

We reported earlier that an NTT DoCoMo flyer leaked the specs of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, well ahead of the Hong Kong launch.

The original launch date of October 11th was cancelled by Samsung and Google potentially due to Steve Jobs’ passing, and the companies wanting to let the technology community grieve before making debuting its latest Android phone.

A video posted today shows a hands on walk-through of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, which is waiting its announcement.

The official Samsung and Google Ice Cream Sandwich event is set for tonight.

Samsung announced on Wednesday that it has filed a request with European Union agency Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) to void the design rights associated with Apple’s iPad tablet, as the Korean electronics giant seeks to gain the upper hand in its legal battle with the Cupertino-based iDevice maker.

The application was submitted to the Spain-based agency on August 9, confirming Korean media reports, and is thought to be one of the methods Samsung will use to try and lift sales restrictions on its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Europe.

Samsung spokesman Kevin Jeong told reporters:

“Apple claims that the iPad’s design is exclusively its own, but the design existed long before the iPad.”

With legal battles still ongoing in Germany, The Netherlands, France, Asia and North America, Samsung has targeted the OHIM, an agency that oversees rights for trademarks and designs in EU countries. Companies can apply to see their products made a registered community design, which gives the company entity the exclusive rights to make, market, import or export products for a period of five years and can be renewed to a maximum of 25 years.

Apple filed for a registered community design for the iPad on May 2004, according to the OHIM website, providing it with exclusive rights to use the design and to prevent other companies from using the design anywhere within the European Union.