European Union Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht is preparing a formal investigation into anti-competitive behaviour by Huawei and ZTE in order to protect a "strategic" sector of Europe's economy.

De Gucht told Reuters that Huawei and ZTE are dumping their products on the European market. If the EU takes action against the two, then they could lose their most important trading partner.

Chinese exports of goods to the 27-member bloc reached $372 billion last year but cheap capital for these Chinese companies creates a distorted playing field, De Gucht said.

Huawei denied it had broken any rules, claimed that it always plays fair and wins business  through innovative technology and quality service, rather than via pricing or subsidies.

Huawei's Western Europe president Tao Jingwen said the firm's rivals were blaming the company for their own losses.

He said that such losses were caused by their own laziness, rather than any price fixing from Chinese companies. ZTE has also in the past denied benefiting from illegal state support.

De Gucht's office said an investigation was prepared but put on hold. At the time no companies were officially named. The pause is to allow further negotiations with China in hopes for a resolution. However, the Chinese government has threatened the EU with retaliation if it takes any steps against its companies.

What is strange about the EU moves is that it lacks the backing of EU manufacturers. This is based on a theory that European telecom equipment makers have not made any complaints for fear of Chinese reprisals. After all, most of their gear is made behind the bamboo curtain and they also want to sell in China.

Equally, there might be opposition to the moves from European companies. Ericsson is the global leader with a 35 percent market share and openly said it opposed the Commission's move.

If the EU makes the case, it does so for the first time on its own initiative and the question is why it would be doing that. Some think that the EU is hoping to squeeze something out of the Chinese companies and the US by doing a complex alliance with America over trade tariffs. It would explain why the US is making some unusual claims about the security of Chinese products, even though no one has actually explained how this works. 

The letter features eight questions and asks Page for a response by 14 June, reports the New York Times.

“We are curious whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy of the average American,” the letter said. 

The lawmakers, members of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, point out that the actual product has not been released yet, hence there are a number of unanswered questions Google needs to address. On the other hand, perhaps this is their way of getting a free sample to play around with.

Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, wants to know how Google plans to collect and store data from Google Glass, and how it will make sure that the data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, much like some AP phone records and IRS tax returns. 

Of course, Google is trying to downplay the concerns. It insists that there is nothing really scary about Google Glass, apart from its appearance. Google maintains that it followed all its privacy and data collection policies and built in more tech to prevent privacy violations. It makes perfect sense, since few people will be willing to buy Google Glass unless they are absolutely certain that an embarrassing episode from their personal life won’t go viral. It is in Google own best interest to make it very, very secure.

In related news, Congress is currently facing its lowest approval ratings in history. Congress is now less popular than root canals, head lice, colonoscopies, carnies, traffic jams, France, Donald Trump, cockroaches and used-car salesmen. However, it did manage to beat out the Ebola virus, North Korea, meth labs, and gonorrhoea.

Shipments for the top two operating systems reached 199.5 million units globally for the first quarter, an increase of 59.1 percent compared to the previous year.

Android is indisputably the top dog in terms of market share, which seems to have been Google's plan all along: tempt the manufacturers with a quality OS to rival Apple's and flood the market. Samsung was leading the charge, holding an impressive 41.1 percent of the total Android vendor market. Many others maintained single digit market share but there were yet more with share of less than one percent.

IDC believes competition among the Android vendors has not leaned negatively on their overall mobile strategies but is shaking the market into each trying to come up with their own proprietary experiences on top of it.

Contrasted with its own performance, Apple's iOS was a record breaker - enjoying the biggest ever Q1 volume on the back of iPhone shipments. However, for the wider market it posted a yearly decline in both share and shipments. IDC mirrored other recent criticisms from the technology community: that although there is still demand for the iPhone, the iOS experience has been pretty much the same since the first model hit the market back in 2007 - which could change with the next iteration of the OS.

Windows Phone has picked up the pace compared to its sluggish debut, doubling its market share since last year thanks to Nokia's contribution. Nokia Windows Phone devices accounted for 79 percent of all shipped in the quarter. Although other vendors do ship Windows Phone, these are largely alternatives to flagship Android smartphones.

IDC believes the slow climb of Windows Phone - even with its measly shipment volumes of seven percent - represent some sincere support from both manufacturers and the consumer.

Blackberry's revamp from RIM does not yet show its potential. Although there are double digit declines from the same time last year, IDC recognises that Blackberry is trying to turn what punters thought was a last hurrah into something more viable and long term. IDC points out that BB7 smartphones made up the majority of shipment volumes, which was not necessarily bad news because their cheaper prices did seduce customers in the company's key markets. The jury is still out on BB10.

It won't surprise anyone that Symbian's popularity plunged: Nokia scrapped the OS and has moved on to Windows Phone instead, while remaining Japanese vendors who relied on Symbian have picked up Android. IDC believes there is a chance Symbian shipments will go on into 2014 but at even lower volumes.

Linux may yet win over some corners of the market with the launch of Mozilla, SailFish, Tizen and Ubuntu on the cards this year, however for now the open source alternative dropped to levels unheard of since the first quarter of 2010.

What’s got Google so miffed? Well Microsoft’s app strips out ads and allows users to download content, which means it violates YouTube's terms of service. 

“These features directly harm our content creators and clearly violate our Terms of Service. We request that you immediately withdraw this application from the Windows Phone Store and disable existing downloads of the application by Wednesday, May 22, 2013,” Google claims.

However, Microsoft claims that Google is simply refusing to cooperate and allow Redmond to develop an app on a par with other platforms. In other words, they needed something better, but Google did not provide the necessary APIs, so Microsoft decided to build its own from scratch. 

It is unclear whether Microsoft will be forced to yank the app altogether, or address the concerns raised by Google and re-launch the app, minus the contentious features. 

Sony is selling waterproof phones, Samsung is apparently working on an optical zoom camera, while HTC is making great phones that don’t make the company any money. NEC has taken things up a notch, by announcing the world’s first water-cooled smartphone.

The Medias X 06E features a 2012 vintage Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.7GHz. Of course, the chip really doesn’t need water cooling, but we won’t say it gets hot under load, because Qualcomm is sort of sensitive about that. 

So why did NEC bother water-cooling a tiny ARM SoC? It wasn’t for the sake of enthusiasts, oh no, it was actually a way of attracting the ladies. Since smartphones tend to generate quite a bit of heat, adding water cooling to the X 06E was a way of keeping it cool and comfy, reports the Verge.

Women don’t like sweaty palms and that is where the heatpipe comes in. It helps dissipate the heat and keep the snowy white smartphone cool. Of course, it doesn’t eliminate excess heat altogether, it just spreads it along the device a bit more evenly.

The company shipped 4 million units by the end of April, an unnamed exec told the Chosunilbo. According to the source, Samsung managed to ship 4 million units worldwide in under five days. By comparison, it took Samsung 85 days to ship three million Galaxy S handsets, while the S2 and S3 got there in 55 and 21 days respectively. 

"As of Friday, we have sold more than 6 million units, and we predict that we could break the 10-million mark by as early as the end of this month," the source said.

A couple of years ago, Samsung could have only dreamt of coming close to Apple’s iPhone launch sales, but now it seems to be there, as Apple managed to sell 5 million iPhones in its launch weekend. 

It should be noted that Samsung counts all sales to distributors and telcos, which means 6 million Galaxies have been shipped, but not all of them have made it off the shelves yet.

According to Canalys, the excessive growth which has characterised Apple sales in the smartphone sector has slowed and the outfit only had 19 percent of the market.

The Age put this market share figure in perspective when it pointed out that Apple is now one point ahead of the much maligned Microsoft.

The winner right now is Android, which continues to dominate the mobile market, making up nearly 60 percent of those shipments. It is worth pointing out here that since Microsoft has patent trolled Android to bits, it makes $8 out of each phone sold, so it is winning here too.

Samsung was the top manufacturer, growing its volume by 64 percent year-on-year. After Samsung and Apple, manufacturers Huawei, LG and ZTE rounded out the top five - but they all make up less than five percent of the market share.

A quick look at the fruity Apple zealots in the press shows a complete lack of understanding about how Cupertino, in the space of a year, not only dropped the ball, but gift wrapped it and gave it to its rivals.

While some claim that this would not be happening if Steve Jobs were alive, saner appeals suggest that Apple is just too terrified to modify Jobs' vision. Pete Cunningham, Canalys' principal analyst, said that Apple is not making better phones than HTC or Samsung.

He said that the iPhone user interface is now six years old and badly in need of a refresh. Apple has also ignored the trend for larger displays in premium smart phones.

Apple cannot say that the market is saturated either. Global shipments for notebooks, tablets and smartphones reached 308.7 million in the first quarter of 2013, up more than 37 percent in the same quarter from the year before.

Canalys figures show that tablets are the fastest growing among the three markets, climbing 106 percent year-over-year to 41.9 million units.

Apple is still the leader in the tablet market with a 46 percent share, but holds nowhere near the same level of dominance it once enjoyed.

Tiny magnets within the iPad can shut off implanted defibrillators on a pacemaker if the device is left on the chest, such as might happen if the user falls asleep with the iPad lying on them.

As a death scenario, it does not seem very likely, but with the English Health and Safety executive being what it is, we would have thought that it would have ranked right up there with paragliding into a minefield.

We are also surprised that the geniuses at Apple did not think of this as it is something that a 14 year old girl could spot. Actually the 14 year old was Gianna Chien who made the discovery as part of a science fair project.

According to Bloomberg,  her project did not win first place, presumably because the judges felt that Apple was perfect and the only thing the iPad has to do with death are the Chinese kids who throw themselves off buildings so that American kids can own them.

Chien will be presenting her findings to 8,000 doctors at a meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Denver, where she will hopefully find a more reasonable audience.

Basically if a person falls asleep with the iPad2 on the chest, the magnets in the cover can "accidentally turn off" the heart device, said Chien. Chiens' dad is a doctor so she realises it is pretty important that people know this.

Chien's study found that 30 percent of patients with defibrillators who put iPads on their chest were affected by the device. Most defibrillators will turn back on once the magnet is removed, but some must be reactivated manually causing a potentially life-threatening situation.

John Day, head of heart-rhythm services at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, and chairman of the panel that reviews scientific papers to be presented at the Denver meeting said the research offers a valuable warning for people with implanted defibrillators, which deliver an electric shock to restart a stopped heart. 

The ITV Player has not been made available for Android because the broadcaster is miffed that the operating system is more fragmented than Humpty Dumpty and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put it back together again.

But for some reason it has changed its mind when it comes to Samsung.  The outfit  revealed that its Android devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 2, will get exclusive access to the app thanks to a partnership between the two firms.

ITV has tinkered with its app to work on Samsung's Android devices so that it can dynamically scale to a range of screen sizes and has improved playback. It can run on Android versions 2.3 through 4.2.

However, for some reason, it is going to be exclusive to the Samsung flavours of Android, due to that er selective fragmentation again.

ITV said that it did have plans to launch the app "onto other Android devices in the future" but at the moment it was all exclusive to Samsung until 31 August.

The player is available to download from Google Play for free here and will be available for Samsung smartphone owners.

UK based OpenSignal has just launched a crowdsourced meteorological platform, designed to take advantage of sensor packed phones like Samsung’s new Galaxy S4, reports New Scientist. The S4 has the largest sensor suite of any smartphone, which makes it ideally suited for sensor tinkerers. The fact that Samsung tends to sell millions of its flagship phones also helps. 

The S4 features a barometer, a thermometer, hygrometer and a magnetometer, in addition to a light sensor, which is the only sensor visible to users. By tapping the sensors, OpenSignal’s weather app, dubbed WeatherSignal, can deliver a relatively accurate assessment of local weather conditions, but it cannot work out whether any precipitation is on the way. We’ll just have to rely on our knackered old bones for that. 

The other question is temperature. Although the S4 has a temperature sensor like all other smartphones, it is used to monitor the temperature of the lithium battery, so your phone wouldn’t pull a Dreamliner in your pocket. It can be used to obtain the ambient temperature, but the readings aren’t very accurate. However, if multiple devices are used, a fairly accurate average could be worked out.

WeatherSignal is already available and it’s free, but a Samsung GS4 isn’t.