Chip supplies are not affected

Also posted as a story comment on Slashdot.

An LG spokesperson clarified, that the court situation does not affect supplies of Qualcomm chips to LG. Source.

Therefore, the 'concerns about rollout' is speculation (IMO) by an analyst whose assertion got a signal boost from Reuters.

Any possible delay — which is just a rumour — could be attributed to a thorough testing of hardware and software.

Judge Lucy Koh ruled, that Qualcomm has had onerous prices for use of its patents, and that Qualcomm should 'sign new patent licensing deals without Qualcomm's offending terms,' which is what LG wants.

But Qualcomm apparently wants the antitrust decision to not be enforced and to be set aside in licensing negotiations with LG (and possibly others) as one of the delay tactics in legal proceedings so as to demand the fulfilment of Qualcomm's previous and onerous terms on pricing. If LG caves, the ruling by the honourable Judge Koh will be pointless.

This would simply mean more expensive phones.

For LG, that would mean releasing kit with a bigger sticker price, which isn't exactly enticing to consumers, and, of course, LG either.

LG would still have a good position, because the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, who originated the case, also asked the court to deny Qualcomm's request for stay.

The pricing and antitrust issues notwithstanding, the LG mobile business has a decent opening with the ongoing brouhahae surrounding Huawei.

It should be noted, that like Samsung, LG is a Very Large(tm) company in South Korea, with 222,000 employees in 2012, and $147.2 billion in revenue plus a $2.4 billion profit for the year 2018.

It is strange, though, that LG terminated their previous patent licensing deal with Qualcomm instead of renegotiating that deal, or negotiating a new deal while the previous deal was still in effect. Currently, both have an interim deal.

There was a similar case with Apple suing Qualcomm over prices, and plenty of people whined, as if Apple and its consumers weren't rich enough to pay up.

Apple and Qualcomm settled, with 'Apple paying $4.5 billion to settle a case and obtain a license for 5G modem technology.' That settlement will stand, even if Qualcomm's request to stay is denied. Very suddenly, Intel announced that it was shutting down its modem business and the relevant research and development, while a rumour surfaced, that Apple wants to buy just that, and Intel is looking for a buyer (story at URL above).

The Apple and Intel story is interesting, but at this point, I do not know if regulators in the European Union will approve the sale, as the modem business is in Germany, and is based on Infineon, which was purchased by Intel. Apple would certainly be poised to have and develop competing modems, as some of the former Infineon employees are already at Apple.

Regulators should watch the movements closely. See, when Apple purchased AuthenTec, a company with the best fingerprint sensor in the market, then the other phone makers could no longer use it. As much was implied by Mr. Dennis Woodside, then-the-CEO of Motorola, who told The Telegraph, that Motorola and the others were left with the 'second-best supplier in the market, who weren't there yet.'

Predictions of FM radio's demise are overrated. FM radio in Estonia.

This was written as an AC and as a reply to a post on Slashdot, but turned out to be too long. There's plenty of discussion, among which there's a U.S.-centric notion, that FM channels there do not play much good music, and a substantial amount of airtime is devoted to ads.

So, I'm in Estonia, and the local public (national) broadcaster ERR has five channels, of which four are broadcast nationwide, while Raadio Tallinn airs just around the capital and its surrounding counties.

Of these, Raadio 2 is like BBC Radio One. It is youth-oriented, plays current music, has some talk programmes; its evening programmes are themed by music genre. Raadio Tallinn plays adult contemporary, jazz, and world music with just news a the top of the hour. Klassikaraadio is self-explanatory. There are promos to events, but no ads. Raadio Tallinn almost has no promos at all. It's all free to listeners, and ad-free ERR channels are entirely paid for by the taxpayer.

Across the country, there are 33 channels in total, but not all are broadcast nationwide. 28 channels are privately-run; of these, there are about four or five that are Christian; six are broadcast in the Russian language (seven total with ERR). Some are only regional. In the north of the country, I could sometimes pick up two Finnish channels.

The non-Christian privately-run channels typically play music geared toward different listeners: one plays only Estonian-language music; another only Russian-language music; another one is extremely conservative, dislikes the state and does conspiracy theories; yet another one is mainstream talk radio. Most others are in-between, vacillating between retro and pop.

Across Estonia, there's music and great (and not-so-great) content available to all tastes, and I don't know of anyone who'd be complaining about radio.

With the exception of Norway with only digital radio, I can imagine, that Finland and other EU/EEA countries have a similar radio landscape.

Because of the large installed base of FM receivers, it would seem really pointless for a country -- as it seems pointless in my view -- to switch FM radio off in its entirety. While digital radio broadcasting has its advantages, then it would be better to implement it side-by-side with FM radio in order to counter planned obsolescence. The side-by-side method is transitional.

Estonia's switch-over to digital tv in 2010 was a major thing. By then, most people had already transitioned away from Soviet-made SECAM sets to those made in the West because of a need to adopt the PAL standard, so anything with a SCART outlet was good for a digital box.

What causes user interface lag (yank) in Android, and remedies to that

This was meant as a reply in /. about lag in Android durin gaming.

The lags are there, because there are processes in the background doing something.

• Switch off all other running tasks.
• Check the services running in the background, and all the currently running processes to find out, what's going on.
• Switch off the animated main screen background image, and replace it with a still one.

The two things always causing mayhem during normal phone operations, were and are Google Play Services and Google Play Store apps automatically updating in the background at the expense of everything else. There is no notification or wait-until-idle-and-then-some period. On many occasions, I just had to wait until the phone was responsive again, and when checking in settings for apps, the version numbers of these two apps had been bumped up.

Another culprit is synchronisation — of all your data, and especially the sync of all your photos. Switch off sync in almost all the apps you have. Except maybe Google Play, because without sync for that turned on, the Google Play app won't be able to access the store under you account.