Google CFO denies Samsung conflict

Google CFO Patrick Pichette played down reports that his company's relationship with Samsung was becoming strained and noted that "journalists love big headlines that sell newspapers."

Pichette was referring to a Wall Street Journal report this week noting Google was worried about Samsung's dominance.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investment conference, Pichette fired back:

We have a terrific relationship with Samsung. They've been very successful with the Android platform. They benefited just like the rest of the ecosystem. We welcome all of the partners that we have on our Android platform and continue to innovate. And what our objective and our aim is to make sure that as many partners in the ecosystem continue to benefit from these open source platforms.

I think that both Samsung and ourselves have benefited not only on the Android side but also on the Chrome side. The Chromebook is a runaway success; it's a runaway success for Google, it's a runaway success for Samsung. And so, what is not to like about these types of environments. I just think journalists love big headlines that sell newspapers.

Hardware was a recurring theme for Pichette, who touted Chromebooks as well as Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Pichette said that the Motorola deal needs more time.

You invest for the long term, but we have inherited 18 months of pipeline that we actually have to drain right now and while we are actually building the next wave of innovation and product lines. And so far, as we said many times in the past, we have to go through this transition. This is not -- these are not easy transitions. We are very optimistic, we are very supportive and we have kind of great plans for Motorola. But for the coming -- for the last few quarters you have seen the announcements of restructurings and rationalization of product lines and this has to kind of continue over the next few quarters while we actually kind of make that cross over.

So there is still kind of really kind of hard work to be completed at Motorola before we see tangible signs. But we also very optimistic because since day one we have started working on the next agenda and we see that pipeline kind of showing up.

Regarding the Chrome OS, Pichette talked that topic up too. He said:

There is a better mousetrap and it has been invented and it is called Chrome OS. If you are in enterprise today the benefits of Chrome OS and the Chrome infrastructure is to have the equivalent of a desktop is one-sixth the price of a traditional answer.

And so if you are a 350 or 400 or 500 people kind of company, that is millions of dollars that you can reinvest into your business, because -- into the development of your product or the servicing of your product rather than just having sitting on your desk just a hardware and software just to run your business.

Not only that, but Chrome OS is actually immensely secure. The Chrome platform has been proven, you have seen these tests where we have these hacker weeks where we try to kind of that people break into the systems. And if you are a business, to actually have -- security is like oxygen to a business if you think of your data. You take it for granted until you have a breach and like everything kind of stops.

The Chromebook that was launched last fall has been a runaway success, absolute runaway success. We couldn't keep up with demand. And through the holidays and it has been a terrific kind of testimony that people want ease-of-use -- beautiful, simple -- there is a minimum standard they expect, but for the right price point they love the product.

Add it up and the overall message from Pichette was clear. Google is serious about hardware integration and melding its services even if it's efforts largely remain a work in progress.

This story originally posted as "Google CFO plays down Samsung conflict talk, touts Chromebook mojo" on ZDNet Between the Lines.

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With no pope, cardinals summoned for conclave

VATICAN CITY The Catholic Church has awoken with no pontiff following Benedict XVI's resignation, in which he pledged obedience to his successor and described himself as "simply a pilgrim" starting the final part of his life.

Now begins a period known as the "sede vacante" or "vacant see" — the transition between the end of one papacy and the election of a new pope.

During these few days — no more than 20 — a few key players take charge running the Holy See, guiding the College of Cardinals in their deliberations and organizing the conclave to elect Benedict's successor.

In one of his first official acts as dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano on Friday officially summoned cardinals to Rome to participate in the conclave, a formality given that most are already here. Sodano sent official "convocation letters" to the cardinals' offices around the world Friday, along with electronic versions via email, summoning them to the Vatican.

And in one of his first official acts as camerlengo, or the chamberlain who actually runs the Holy See in the transition, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone sealed Benedict's apartment in the Apostolic Palace on Thursday night. It will not be reopened until a new pope is elected.

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Pope Benedict XVI officially retires

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Pope leaving behind unfinished business

With the 8 p.m. Thursday end of Benedict's papacy, every department head in the Vatican lost his job — except for those whose offices are crucial for the smooth running of the transition period itself.

Cardinals on Monday will begin formal meetings to set the date for the conclave and discuss problems facing the church; major topics of discussion are expected to be the report Benedict commissioned into the leaks of sensitive Vatican documents and the dysfunction currently reigning in the Vatican bureaucracy.

The date for the conclave of cardinals to begin their deliberations has not yet been set, although one of Pope Benedict XVI's final acts before resigning his office was to amend the rules governing the election of a successor, allowing the cardinals to meet earlier than the usual 15-day transition between pontificates.

On Thursday, soon after Benedict left the Vatican on his final day as pope, Monsignor Carlo Maria Celli, a papal communications officer, hinted that the date could be March 11. That could not be immediately confirmed.

The date of the conclave's start is important because Holy Week begins March 24, with Easter Sunday March 31. In order to have a new pope in place for the church's most solemn liturgical period, he would need to be installed by Sunday, March 17

"What we talk about ... will be certainly the governance of the church and in that context there may be questions to people who did the report," said Chicago Cardinal Francis George. "I think we will find out a lot from a lot of sources to figure out what is necessary now to govern the church well here in Rome itself."

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Fla. Man Swallowed by Sinkhole, No Signs of Life

A Florida man has disappeared into a 30-foot-wide, 20-foot-deep sinkhole that collapsed the bedroom portion of his home overnight, according to police.

The hole opened up at around 11 p.m. Thursday night in the Brandon, Fla., neighborhood, authorities said.

"[The family] heard a sound that they described as a car crash emanating from the bedroom in the back of the house," Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers said at a news conference today.

The family rushed into the room where Jeff Bush, 36, was sleeping, according to ABC News' Tampa affiliate WFTS-TV.

"All they could see was part of a mattress sticking out of the hole. Essentially, the floor of the room had opened up," Rogers said. "They could hear the nephew in the hole, but they could not see him."

Bush's brother, Jeremy Bush, jumped in and tried to rescue him, but was unsuccessful. A first responder "heroically" jumped in and rescued the brother, Rogers said.

The family was evacuated from the home as rescuers tried to get to the man.

Louisiana Sinkhole Raises Fears of Expansion Watch Video

Listening devices and cameras were sent into the hole.

"They did not detect any signs of life," Rogers said. "There continued to be collapses of the earth below the floor to the point where they had to eventually back out of the house."

Rogers said the main issue right now is that authorities and rescuers do not know how stable the house is.

It was previously reported that the hole was 100-feet wide, but Bill Bracken, president of Bracken engineering, clarified at the news conference that the safety zone around the hole is 100 feet, but the hole itself is between 20 to 30 feet in diameter.

It is contained within the footprint of the house, he said.

"The hole has actually taken up most of the inside of the house," Bracken said. "It started in the bedroom and has been expanding outward and it's taking the house with it as it opens up."

When asked what authorities believe the victim's status is, Rogers said, "Until we can actually determine where the victim is, I can't really answer that. We're going to do everything we can for Mr. Bush, but we have to make sure we don't endanger other personnel in the process."

Rogers said "time is a critical thing" and they are assessing the situation as quickly as possible without jeopardizing anyone else.

"We're not going to leave until we know that this community is safe and we know the extent of this issue here," he said. We're going to make sure that everyone is safe as much as we can. We don't know where the next sinkhole is going to open."

Police evacuated the other residents from the structure, as well as the two surrounding homes. Officials say the home could go at any moment.

"Our hearts go out to the Bush family during this terrible time," he said. "They're dealing with a lot of questions, a lot of unknowns."

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Scientists link two rats' brains, a continent apart

PARIS: Creating a "superbrain" of connected minds, scientists on Thursday said they had enabled a rat to help a fellow rodent while the animals were a continent apart but connected through brain electrodes.

With electrodes imbedded in its cortex, a rat in a research institute in Natal, Brazil sent signals via the Internet to a counterpart at a university lab in Durham, North Carolina, helping the second animal to get a reward.

The exploit opens up the prospect of linking brains among animals to create an "organic computer", said Brazilian neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis.

It also helps the quest to empower patients stricken with paralysis or locked-in syndrome, he said.

"We established a functional linkage between two brains. We created a superbrain that comprises two brains," Nicolelis said in a phone interview with AFP.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, Nicolelis' team gave basic training to thirsty rats, who had to recognise lights and operate a lever to get a reward of water.

They then implanted ultra-fine electrodes in the rats' brains, which were linked by a slender overhead cable to a computer.

In a glass tank in Natal, the first rat was the "encoder", its brain sending out a stream of electrical pulses as it figured out the tricks for getting the reward.

The pulses were sent in real time into the cortex of the second rat, or "decoder" rat, which was facing identical apparatus in a tank in North Carolina.

With these prompts from its chum, the decoder rat swiftly found the reward in turn.

"The pair of animals collaborated to solve a task together," said Nicolelis.

What the second rat received were not thoughts, nor were they images, Nicolelis said.

When the encoder rat achieved various tasks, the peaks in his brain signals were transcribed into a telltale pattern of electronic signals that were received by the decoder rat.

Once the rat recognised the usefulness of these patterns, they became incorporated into its visual and tactile processing.

"The second rat learns to recognise a pattern, a statistical pattern, that describes a decision taken by the first rat. He's creating an association of that pattern with a decision," said Nicolelis.

"He may be feeling a little tactile stimulus, but it's something that we don't know how to describe because we cannot question the subject."

The linkage "suggests we could create a brain net, formed of joined-up brains, all interacting," the scientist said, hastening to stress that such experiments would only be conducted on lab animals, not humans.

"If you connect several animal brains, rat brains or primate brains, you probably could be creating an organic computer that is a non-Turing machine, a machine that doesn't work according to the Turing design of all the digital computers that we know. It would be heuristic, it wouldn't use an algorithm, and it would uses probabilistic decision-making based on organic hardware."

Still unclear is how the decoder animal incorporates the encoder's signals into its mental space, a phenomenon called cortical plasticity.

"We basically show that the decoder animal can incorporate another body as an extension of the map that the animal has in it's own brain," said Nicolelis, adding, though: "We don't know how this is done."

Nicolelis carries out research at Duke University in Durham and at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal, or ELS-IINN.

A decade ago, he leapt to prominence for pioneering work in having lab monkeys move a robotic arm through brain impulses.

The latest work should help this, he said: "We are learning ways to interact with and send messages to the mammalian brain that will be fundamental for our goals of medical rehabilitation."

His next goal is to have a paraplegic patient give the official kickoff to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, using a brain-machine interface to activate an artificial limb.

- AFP/al

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Practical, affordable phones take center stage at MWC 2013

Firefox's new mobile OS in action on the Geeksphone Peak

Although mobile phones will always have a central role at Mobile World Congress, this year's the red-hot buzz went to software, tablets, wearable tech, and other geeky-cool oddities.

With heavy hitters HTC announcing its flagship HTC One days before MWC, and Samsung saving its Galaxy S4 announcement for March 14, it was the sensible, midrange
Android phones made up the bulk of the announcements.

However, it was the outlier operating systems that really stole the show.

Firefox, Ubuntu, Tizen: The other, other OSes

The mobile, browser-based Firefox OS appeared on several smartphones, like the Geeksphone Peak (our pick of the bunch,) Alcatel One Touch Fire and ZTE Open.

LG and Huawei Firefox phones also made an appearance under glass, and
Firefox has locked down carrier partners to bring its -- frankly, rather green -- OS to emerging markets for cheap.

Ubuntu Touch OS impressed on an LG Nexus 4 and Google Nexus 7 tablet, and Samsung's Tizen OS came out for an early look.

The usual suspects

MWC 2013 saw a mini trend of large-screen devices (you might call them phablets,) like the LG Optimus G Pro, ZTE Grand Memo, and the Alcatel One Touch Scribe Easy.

The LG Optimus G Pro is a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 contender.

(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

There was also a larger trend of wallet-friendly options like the Samsung Galaxy Grand, Alcatel One Touch Snap, and Acer Liquid E1 and Liquid Z2.

On the Windows Phone side, Nokia took top honors with the Nokia Lumia 720, a nice midrange Windows Phone 8 device with many of the features you also see on the higher-end Lumia 920.

A step below, the Lumia 520 is notable for its low price, but strong feature set -- 139 euros (a little under $200) unlocked. U.S. customers should pay attention, since a variant will also arrive on T-Mobile as the 521.

The SpareOne Plus can live for up to 15 years in your car on a single AA battery.

(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

Weirder fare

We also enjoyed uniques like the rugged Cat B15 Jelly Bean smartphone and the dual-screen NEC Medias W N-05E.

In non-smartphone land, and an emergency cell phone, SpareOne Plus, which runs on a AA battery. The Nokia 105 also made headlines for its ridiculously low retail price of 15 euros.

As with
CES last month, MWC 2013 gave the smaller brands a chance to prove their worth.

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Five major psychiatric disorders linked in new study

(CBS News) An international group of scientists have identified genetic links between five major psychiatric disorders, including autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia.

Their study, published in the medical journal Lancet, could change how we understand and treat the illnesses.

For the first time, researchers were able to see if there are any genetic variants that are linked to not just one of those disorders, but to all five. "And there were," Dr. Jordan Smoller, one of the lead researchers in the study, said on "CBS This Morning."

Smoller, a psychiatry professor at Massachusetts General Hospital, explained, "There were several regions of the genome, several variations that seemed to increase the risk for all five. It's important to realize, of course, that this is a small part of the genetic component of these disorders, but it points to a shared biology."

The researchers took this approach because disorders often cluster in families. Smoller added, "It's not only that, we sometimes see the same family being affected with multiple kinds of disorders, so there was some evidence that there would be shared links, but this is the first time we've been able to see specific DNA variations."

Will the study affect how we treat these disorders?

"Well, not immediately," Smoller said. "But one of the interesting findings from the study was that genes involved in how calcium channels operate in the brain. These are important for how brain cells communicate. It seemed to be associated with all of these disorders, so it raises the possibility that treatments that target those channels might have broad effects."

But just because you have family members that have one of these disorders doesn't mean you will develop a disorder, Smoller explained. "We do know that all psychiatric disorders do seem to run in families to a degree," he said. "We also know that genes are not destiny. It is not the entire picture. But the hope is that we're going learn something fundamental about how these disorders occur."

Asked if eventually predicting these disorders is possible, Smoller said, "We're not there yet, but the more we learn about the genetic and non-genetic causes of these disorders, the better position we're going to be to know who might be at risk and what we might be able to do."

For more with Smoller, watch the video in the player above.

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Why Should We Care? The Politics of Picking a Pope

Feb 28, 2013 9:34am

                             (Image Credit: L’Osservatore Romano/Vatican/Getty Images)

ANALYSIS

VATICAN CITY – In a U.S presidential campaign, the New Hampshire primary is thought of as “retail politics,” where the candidates actually get to meet and have contact with real voters.

That’s Walmart, compared to a Vatican conclave. This process is more of a boutique.

READ MORE: Benedict XVI Begins Final Day as Pope

All the voters and all the viable candidates can fit into one room. In some cases, they have known each other – or known “of” each other – for years. In some cases, they have worked with (or against) each other in the daily management of the church.

It’s not just the fancy costumes, the churchly rituals or the sweep of history that makes this process so fascinating. There’s also the sheer human drama of it all.

VIDEO: Pope Benedict’s Last Sunday Prayer Service

For the 115 men planning to take part in the conclave to elect a pope, all of whom have devoted their lives to the Catholic church, this choice might well be the most important contribution they make. A lifetime of service reduced to a single election.

It’s also crucial for the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.

The new pope will set the tone of the institution on issues of life and death: abortion, birth control, genetic medicine, euthanasia and more.

He’ll frame the church’s role in the moral debate about the way people live their lives, as individuals and as families. Divorce, gay rights, adoption, education, the role of women (not least in the church) are all areas in which previous pope’s have exerted tremendous influence.

He’ll instantly be the most powerful spiritual leader in the world, a global ambassador for Christian values (however he and the rest of the church interpret that mandate).

9 Men Who Could Replace Pope Benedict XVI

Will he be able to win over a wayward flock? Many have left the church, bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of pedophile priests, the mismanagement of arrogant administrators or even what they perceive as the institution’s irrelevance in the modern era.

At its best, the church is a voice of compassion and social justice. But it has also, at times, been a voice of intolerance, as well as a bastion of the status quo.

On one level, this is local politics. Each voting cardinal – even the ones who live thousands of miles away – has a titular church, an actual church here in Rome assigned to them where they officially serve as the pastor. So the conclave represents the Roman clergy’s electing the next Bishop of Rome.

At another level, it’s global. Prelates from 50 countries do their best to discern (through the guidance of the Holy Spirit) how to make the universal church thrive in a new millennium.

Win or lose in a presidential election, we all know it’ll start all over again in four years’ time. There are checks and balances too, so, for better or worse, “change” tends to be largely a campaign slogan.

It would be sheer exaggeration to say any presidential contest were a battle for the soul of the United States.

But in a very real way that’s what this process is for the world’s largest church.

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Iran upbeat on nuclear talks, West wary

ALMATY (Reuters) - Iran gave an upbeat assessment of two days of nuclear talks with world powers that ended on Wednesday, but Western officials said Tehran must start taking concrete steps to ease mounting concerns about its atomic activity.

The first negotiations between Iran and six world powers in eight months ended without a breakthrough in Almaty, but they agreed to meet again at expert level in Istanbul next month and resume political discussions in the Kazakh city on April 5.

Israel, assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, is watching the talks closely. It has strongly hinted it might attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran denies any such aim.

Iran's foreign minister said he was optimistic an agreement could be reached with the powers - the United States, France, Russia, Britain, Germany and China - on the country's disputed nuclear program.

"Very confident," Ali Akbar Salehi told Reuters when asked on the sidelines of a U.N. conference in Vienna how confident he was of a positive outcome.

The six powers offered at the February 26-27 Almaty meeting to lift some sanctions if Iran scaled back nuclear activity that the West fears could be used to build a bomb.

Tehran, which says its program is entirely peaceful, did not agree to do so and the sides did not appear any closer to a deal to resolve a decade-old dispute that could lead to another war in the Middle East if diplomacy fails.

But Iran still said the talks were a positive step in which the six powers tried to "get closer to our viewpoint".

Western officials had made clear they did not expect major progress in Almaty, aware that the closeness of Iran's presidential election in June is raising political tensions in Tehran and makes significant concessions unlikely.

"I hope the Iranian side is looking positively on the proposal we put forward," said European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who led the talks on behalf of the powers. "We have to see what happens next."

The United States did not expect a breakthrough and "the result was clearly in line with those expectations," a senior U.S. official said.

The meeting was "useful" as the two sides agreed dates and venues for follow-up talks but there was a need for progress on confidence building measures, the official added.

UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR SITE

The West's immediate priority is that Iran halts higher-grade uranium enrichment and closes an underground facility, Fordow, where this work is carried out. The material is a relatively short technical step from bomb-grade uranium.

"What we care about at the end is concrete results," the U.S. official said.

One diplomat in Almaty said the Iranians appeared to be suggesting at the negotiations that they were opening new avenues, but that it was not clear if this was really the case.

Both sides said experts would meet for talks in the Turkish city of Istanbul on March 18 and that political negotiators would return to Almaty on April 5-6.

Russian negotiator Sergei Ryabkov confirmed that the powers had offered to ease sanctions on Iran if it stops enriching uranium to 20 percent fissile purity - a short technical step from weapons grade - at the Fordow underground site where it carries out its most controversial uranium enrichment work.

Western officials said the offer of sanctions relief included a resumption of trade in gold and precious metals.

One diplomat said that lifting an embargo on imports of Iranian petrochemical products to Europe, if Iran responded, was also on the table. But a U.S. official said the world powers had not offered to suspend oil or financial sanctions.

The sanctions are hurting Iran's economy and its chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, suggested Iran could discuss its production of higher-grade nuclear fuel, although he appeared to rule out shutting Fordow.

In comments in Persian translated into English, Jalili told a news conference Fordow was under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog and there was no justification for closing it.

MOOD "MORE OPTIMISTIC"

Asked about the production of 20-percent enriched fuel, he reiterated Iran's position that it needed this for a research reactor and had a right to produce it.

Iran says its enrichment program is aimed solely at fuelling nuclear power plants so that it can export more oil, and that Israel's assumed nuclear arsenal is the main threat to peace in the region.

But Jalili did indicate that Iran might be prepared to talk about the issue, saying: "This can be discussed in the negotiations ... in view of confidence building."

Iran has also previously suggested that 20-percent enrichment was up for negotiation if it received the fuel from abroad instead. It also wants sanctions lifted.

"While an agreement to meet again may not impress skeptics of diplomacy, an important development did occur," said Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran. "The parties began searching for a solution by offering positive measures in order to secure concessions from the other side.

Another expert, Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: "I note that the mood is more optimistic and that's great, but a deal still hasn't been reached and in my view its unlikely to be reached before the Iranian elections have come and gone."

(Additional reporting Fredrik Dahl in Almaaty, Georgina Prodhan in Vienna, Zahra Hosseinian in Zurich, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Marcus George in Dubai; Writing by Timothy Heritage and Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Fitch Ratings warns US over budget fighting

WASHINGTON: Ratings agency Fitch warned Washington on Wednesday that continued political fighting over the government budget and deficit-cutting measures could lead to the US losing its AAA grade.

With the government two days away from enacting the harsh "sequester" budget cuts because political parties cannot agree a more moderate compromise, Fitch said that the policy deadlock could lower confidence in the world's largest economy.

It pointed out that after the $85 billion sequester cuts that begin to take effect Friday comes a battle over a six-month budget, which has to be concluded by March 31 or the government could be shut down.

And shortly after that, on May 19, the country will hit its statutory borrowing limit.

"Implementation of the automatic spending cuts -- the sequester -- and a government shutdown would not prompt a negative rating action," Fitch said in a statement.

"But such an outcome would further erode confidence that timely agreement will be reached on additional deficit-reduction measures necessary to secure the 'AAA' rating."

Fitch, like other rating agencies focused mainly on how the US will reduce its massive deficit and debt burdens over the medium term, said that the sequester itself was not bad.

It called the 2011 poison-pill deal between Democrats and Republicans, originally aimed at scaring them into a more moderate deficit-cutting plan, the government's "only substantive agreement on medium-term deficit reduction" so far.

But it acknowledged projections that implementing the sequester's $85 billion in targeted cuts over the next seven months, and $110 billion in reductions for the 2014 fiscal year, would slow economic growth.

"A re-profiling of the spending cuts would support the economic recovery," Fitch said.

"But eliminating the sequester without putting in place equivalent deficit-reduction measures would imply higher deficits and debt than currently projected by Fitch and increase the pressure on the US sovereign ratings."

- AFP/al

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LG's 4K phone upscaling squeezes Ultra HD from your mobile, wirelessly (video)

LG's 4K smart phone upscaling revealed in video

BARCELONA, Spain--LG is showing off a new smart phone system, that transforms your smart phone into a 4K media hub.

The South Korean company is calling the new platform the 'world's first wireless Ultra HD transmission technology'. If you've got a game or video playing on your mobile in HD, the new platform will upscale the feed to a 4K resolution, before beaming it out wirelessly to another device.

In this situation that second device was an LG 4K television, acting as a simple monitor for the 4K feed that the phone was pumping out.

We played with Epic Citadel, a graphically intensive tech demo that -- in this case -- was running on one of LG's Optimus G smart phones. The process of upscaling the feed to 4K is an intensive one, and the phone felt very warm when we touched it, but nevertheless the Optimus G's quad-core processor was handling the task with relative ease.

Games ran with a little judder, but as this technology is still months away from being released I'm prepared to withhold judgement for now. I was told the proprietary system would be cropping up in smart phones at the start of next year, or possibly the end of 2013.

It seems that tech companies want to control your living room, turning your smart phone into a portable media centre.

For me, the system demonstrates how powerful smart phone processors have become in just a few short years. If the Optimus G can handle it, I've no doubt that other mobiles emerging in the next year or two will be equally capable.

What do you think of 4K? Let me know in the comments below, and be sure to examine the rest of our coverage from Mobile World Congress.

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