The debut of Samsung’s marquee smartphone at Radio City Music Hall tomorrow night lets Samsung bring the fight directly to Apple’s strongest market. The South Korean company is relying on an advertising blitz and cutting-edge features, potentially including a snazzier camera and eye-tracking capabilities, to generate the kind of buzz associated with Apple’s products. …

The phone will sport a 5-inch screen, slightly larger than the one on last year’s S3, according to two people familiar with the product. The U.S. version will use Qualcomm Inc.’s quad-core chip, giving the phone more processing power to handle multiple tasks at the same time, they said. In other markets, it will rely on Samsung’s “octacore” eight-core chip, the people said.

In rare move, Apple goes on the defensive against Samsung [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]

He shared data on the iPhone’s popularity and said Apple’s own research shows that four times as many iPhone users switched from Android than to Android during the fourth quarter, according to company research.

His remarks echo similar messages coming from Apple in recent months, as competitors such as Samsung have been gaining buzz—and market share.

Mr. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of world-wide marketing, also said that Android users are often running old operating systems and that the fragmentation in the Android world was “plain and simple.”

Twitter acquires We Are Hunted, readies standalone music app [CNET]

The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

Google concedes that drive-by prying violated privacy [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

While the settlement also included a tiny — for Google — fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.

Complaints have led to multiple enforcement actions in recent years and a spate of worldwide investigations into the way the mapping project also collected the personal data of private computer users.

“Google puts innovation ahead of everything and resists asking permission,” said Scott Cleland, a consultant for Google’s competitors and a consumer watchdog whose blog maintains a close watch on Google’s privacy issues. “But the states are throwing down a marker that they are watching and there is a line the company shouldn’t cross.”

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