Samsung is calling ChatON their Global Mobile Communication Service.

ChatON is a multi-platform messenger service that is also available for Android, Bada – Samsung’s own mobile platform.

The ChatON messenger includes the following features:

1) ChatON supports multi platforms and devices. Users can chat freely through ChatON.

- Currently, ChatON supports iOS, Android, Bada, Samsung Feature and will support Blackberry, Window mobile, web soon.

2) ChatON provides multi ways to make your communication richer.

- 1:1 Chat, Group Chat, Broadcast, Drawing Message, Picture, Video, Voice, Location, Contact, Calendar.

3) Using ChatON, create your own unique drawing message by hand drawing etc.

4) ChatON provides group management feature for easy group chat

5) ChatON provides Interaction rank which informs you how often you chat with your buddies.

6) For every chat room, you can easily see all sent images and videos in a Trunk.

7) Something to say for your buddies? Use ‘Buddies Say’!

If you don’t get the verification SMS then Samsung has advised us users to go to ChatON’swebsite for an alternative verification.

You can download ChatON for free using this App Store link. Unfortunately, the app seems to be available only in the U.S. App Store

Insiders who know about Apple’s manufacturing habits will agree that most of their parts are sourced and assembled by low-cost Asian manufacturers. Reuters’ insiders are claiming that a relatively new Samsung factory in Austin, Texas is outputting A5 chips for Apple. The ARM-based dual-core A5 processor powers the iPad 2 and the new iPhone 4S. Reuters reports.

Nearly all of the output of the non-memory chip production from the factory – which is the size of about nine football fields – is dedicated to producing Apple chips, one of the people said. Samsung also produces NAND flash memory chips in Austin.

Neither Apple nor Samsung commented on these claims, stating that they will not disclose information on supplier/customer relationships.

Despite all of the patent litigation going on between the two, it appears as though Samsung is still the manufacturing partner in charge of processors for Apple. Rumors in August claimed that Apple was looking at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for its upcoming A6 processor, though later there were claims that Samsung will continue to manufacture the processors for iOS devices.

Now, because of this new information, there seems to be more support for the rumor that Samsung will be the one to produce Apple’s upcoming A6 processor, which will power the iPad 3, next generation iPhone as well as the Apple-branded TV that are expected to be launched in 2012.

Gizmodo reports that Apple has told Samsung should create a design with:

• Front surface that isn’t black.
• Overall shape that isn’t rectangular, or doesn’t have rounded corners.
• Display screens that aren’t centered on the front face and have substantial lateral borders.
• Non-horizontal speaker slots.
• No front bezel at all.
• Thick frames rather than a thin rim around the front surface.
• Profiles that aren’t thin.
• Front surfaces with substantial adornment.
• Cluttered appearance.

Folks at Gizmodo decided to create a mockup of the tablet based on Apple’s demands.

Thomas Baekdal has written an interesting post where he says that “Apple never designed the iPad. They undesigned the tablet. They focused on creating the simplest form possible. Every single decision is based on usability, readability, comfort, and focusing your eyes on the content itself.” We disagree with Baekdal’s view as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook are good examples of tablets that have been designed in such a way that nobody could mistake them for the iPad.

So though most of Apple’s demands seem quite outrageous, Apple is probably justified in saying that Samsung slavishly copies their products as there are a lot of examples where Samsung’s devices bear a resemblance to iPhone and iPad.

Up to now, the general assumption about Apple was that it’s very territorial about its patents, especially ones concerned with “fundamental” iOSfunctionality/aesthetics, and that they’ve been conservative about licensing them to other companies. The Verge’s Nilay Patel has looked at the patent-jungle surrounding Apple and its rivals and has found that this is not the case.

Apple specifically licensed its “scrollback behavior” patent #7,469,381. It outlines what happens when you scroll too far at the edge of something in iOS: you get a gray underlying background and then the main content bounces back to the edge. It’s a pretty iconic feature of the iOS experience.

The Verge has gotten a hold of a few redacted documents that show that this patent was licensed to IBM and Nokia.

For Nokia, this software license was part of the settlement of an infringement lawsuit (which also happened to HTC and Samsung). Samsung, on the other hand, did not accept the licensing offer, and that decision will have significant bearing in one of the lawsuits that is currently going on.

What we don’t know is how or why those November 2010 settlement negotiations fell apart: Apple could have been asking for exorbitant rates on a patent license, Samsung could have refused to pay because it thought the patents were invalid, or Jobs could have simply called the whole thing off…

Added to the list of unknowns is whether they’re still talking about a settlement at all. It’ll be interesting to see where the Samsung vs Apple patent war goes in light of all of this. It’s worth noting that the scroll-back patent was mentioned specifically in the case where Apple lost its injunction against Samsung.

As far as Apple’s patent licensing goes, Patel sums things up nicely here:

Offering up a distinctive software feature covered by a strong patent indicates a level of willingness to negotiate that we simply haven’t heard from Apple in the past – it’s a far cry from Steve Jobs telling his biographer that he was willing to go “thermonuclear war” on Google and Android OEMs for infringing Apple’s patents.

AnandTech has published some initial performance analysis of the flagship smartphone obtained from the GLBenchmark database, which reveals that it performs better than iPhone 4S runningiOS 5 on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark and the Rightware BrowserMark, but lags in the graphics departments.

Galaxy Nexus is powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 dual-core processor running at 1.2 GHz and the Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 540 GPU for graphics. It also comes with a 4.65″ HD(1280 x 720) Super AMOLED screen, 1GB RAM, 5-megapixel camera and 1.3MP front facing camera. According to AnandTech, CPU side of things is comparable to Apple’s A5, although the cores are clocked noticeably higher than the 800MHz we saw in the iPhone 4S.

Meanwhile on the graphical side, iPhone 4S has the edge over Galaxy Nexus in the graphics department when it comes to hardware as the Galaxy Nexus comes with PowerVR SGX 540 from Imagination Technologies, whereas iPhone 4S makes use of dual-core SGX 543MP2 GPU from Imagination Technologies

As you can see in the graph above, the new Galaxy Nexus outperforms on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark and the Rightware BrowserMark.

However, the roles are reversed in the graphics department with the iPhone 4S outperforming the Galaxy Nexus as you can see in the GLBenchmark 2.1 Egypt and Pro tests.

AnandTech concludes:

Google really pushed the performance of its software further with Ice Cream Sandwich, while GPU performance is limited by the SGX 540. The good news is that there’s more than enough hardware at ICS’ disposal to deliver a smooth experience.

We’ll have to wait and see how Apple responds, as it now has an incentive to make the iPhone and iOS even better, which is always a good thing for us as customers.

Dustin Curtis who is user interface designer has been wondering about Apple’s decision to launch iPhone 4S with the 3.5 inch screen, especially when it has been facing competition from Android based smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S II that sport a larger screen. He believes that it boils down to usability.

He writes on his blog:

When you first see a phone with a 4-inch or larger screen, it seems like a much better experience. I thought it was a technical decision, and it could be, but since switching to an Android phone — a Samsung Galaxy S II, the “best Android phone you can buy, anywhere” — 15 days ago, I have realized another huge downside of larger screens: when holding the phone with one hand, I can’t reach the other side of the screen with my thumb.

Touching the upper right corner of the screen on the Galaxy S II using one hand, with its 4.27-inch screen, while you’re walking down the street looking at Google Maps, is extremely difficult and frustrating. I pulled out my iPhone 4 to do a quick test, and it turns out that when you hold the iPhone in your left hand and articulate your thumb, you can reach almost exactly to the other side of the screen. This means it’s easy to touch any area of the screen while holding the phone in one hand, with your thumb. It is almost impossible to do this on the Galaxy S II.

There two more reasons:

• If Apple would have launched an iPhone with a bigger screen, it would have been quite a disruptive change for developers as they would have to redesign their apps for the larger screen, which is quite an obvious reason to resist changing the screen size.
• As John Gruber of Daring Fireball had pointed out last week, an increase in the screen size would have also reduced pixels-per-inch resolution beneath Apple’s own threshold to qualify as a “retina display”.

But the reason that Dustin has highlighted could have also played a major role in Apple’s decision to stick with 3.5-inch screen. We’ve always felt the size of the iPhone is just about right, anything bigger would make it uncomfortable to handle it with a single-hand. As TiPb points out Apple treats iPad as a two-handed device, iPhone as a one- or two-handed device.

It will be interesting to see if Apple decides to offer a bigger screen in future iPhones. We wouldn’t count on a 4-inch screen, though a 3.7-inch screen is probably possible with an edge-to-edge screen even if you take usability into consideration, which will occupy nearly the entire front of the phone as seen in one of the mockups below.

9 to 5 Mac reports that the expert now says that Apple may be infringing on Samsung’s patents.

As we’ve reported before, iPhone 4S includes significant upgrades to its antenna system. The ability to switch between two antennas dynamically for both sending and receiving means that the dead grip issues observed with iPhone 4′s antenna system should be practically non-existent for users.

Professor Pedersen states, simply:

The idea is good enough, but the question is whether they are allowed to use it.

He and others at the Danish university of Aalborg speculate that Apple will run into some legal problems. Samsung has two patents (one | two) that cover technology on intelligently switching between different antennas.

One particular method of changing antennas in these patents does so by checking if the device is in portrait or landscape mode. Pedersen thinks that this feature may be included in the new iPhone 4S’s antenna technology. Since we don’t have much concrete information on the device as yet, the professor goes on to say:

I can not say that they are directly breaking the patent, but there are not many ways they can choose the right antenna, without coming to break many patents.

This is hot on the heels of Samsung’s recent move to ban the iPhone 4S in Italy and France and it looks like Samsung has not yet used these patents in its litigation with Apple.

So this could potentially add more fuel to the fire in the patent war between Apple and Samsung.