LG Electronics Co., a South Korean smartphone maker, said Monday it plans to launch "the G Pro2" phablet in February, aiming to narrow the gap with industry leader Samsung Electronics Co.LG's awaited phablet, a cross between a smartphone and tablet PC, is expected to feature a wider screen and faster speeds compared to its predecessor, the G Pro, industry sources said. The next model is equipped with a 6-inch screen and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 processor with 3GB RAM and is powered by Google's

South Korea's tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said Monday it and U.S. Internet giant Google Inc. have agreed to share their intellectual properties and avoid necessary patent disputes, a step giving Samsung a much needed edge in an ongoing patent war, especially with U.S rival Apple Inc.Under the cross-license agreement, Samsung and Google will share their existing patents as well as those obtained over the next 10 years, allowing the two industry leaders to tap into deeper research and devel

Google's widely used free email stumbled Friday as some of the Internet giant's services were disrupted by apparent software woes.An online Google Apps dashboard indicated that trouble rippled through Gmail, Google+ and an array of the company's other services.Google did not disclose the extent of the Gmail glitch but the brief outage was believed to have affected millions of people, including those using the service at work.Complaints were posted online from Europe, Canada, the United States an

Chinese computer giant Lenovo will buy IBM's low-end server business for $2.3 billion, it Thursday, giving it a platform to compete in that sector with US giants Dell and Hewlett-Packard.IBM will receive $2.07 billion in cash and the rest in shares for the x86 business, Lenovo said, in a deal seen as helping the Chinese firm diversify away from the slumping PC-sales sector.IBM will still provide maintenance on behalf of Lenovo, while some 7,500 members of staff worldwide will be offered employme

The feud between LG Electronics and environmentalists over the firm’s construction plan for its U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, is far from over as more activists are joining the opposition side. According to The New York Times, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Natural Resources Defense Council and a local conservation group said they would raise the ante in the ongoing legal battle against the Korean firm to halt the construction of its headquarters atop the

South Korea’s No. 1 mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. said Thursday it plans to use a new platform for smartphones starting next month that aims to improve users’ convenience and block spam calls.The new system, named “T-phone,” will allow users to find numbers easily on its database of 1 million listings, making it faster than searching through the Internet, the company said.Based on SK’s positioning system, T-phone will provide the closest number depending on users’ location, along with related We

South Korea’s smartphone users will be allowed to prune unwanted preinstalled mobile applications, a measure that will give them more data storage, the country’s communications ministry said Thursday.The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said it will apply new guidelines on preinstalled apps to local industry players starting in April.“The move aims to normalize an abnormal practice that causes inconvenience to smartphone users and causes unfair competition among industry players,” th

Key customer begins expanding and diversifying supply chain of display panels

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. outperformed its rivals around the globe last year in television sales to retain its top place for the eighth consecutive year, data showed Wednesday.Samsung, also the world’s top maker of smartphones and memory chips, is estimated to have sold some 49 million units of flat-panel TVs in 2013, according to the data. The firm does not officially disclose annual sales figures.Market researcher DisplaySearch earlier estimated Samsung’s TV sales at arou

South Korea will inject 1.6 trillion won ($1.49 billion) through 2020 with local firms to build the fifth-generation network in the country, the communications technology ministry said Wednesday.The 5G network is expected to be 1,000 times faster than the existing Long Term Evolution service, allowing users to download an 800-megabyte movie in one second, compared with 40 seconds on the LTE-Advanced network, currently billed as the world’s fastest.The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning