US Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, probably America’s most eminent jurist, ordered Google and Motorola Mobility to turn over information Apple has been seeking about Google’s acquisition of Android Inc, the development of the Android operating system and the pending $12.5 billion Google-MMI merger. His order Monday reads, “Motorola shall be expected to obtain full and immediate compliance by Google with Apple’s liability discovery demands.” The discovery is supposed to help Apple calculate damages. As you might expect, MMI resisted Apple’s laundry list of demands, arguing that Google isn’t party to the lawsuit and can’t be compelled to turn over documents. It will probably put up further resistance but FOSS Patents figures it’s possible Apple might find a smoking gun even if the broad discovery it’s been granted is curtailed.
Hours before Apple introduced its new third-generation iPad Wednesday Samsung said it filed a new suit in South Korea charging the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 with trifling with three of its patents. Samsung told the Korea Times there would be “no compromise” with its single largest customer. That was after the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Apple had offered Samsung a license for $5-$15 a device (more of this anon). And to kinda prove Samsung’s point, the Korea Times said that Samsung has upped the budget for its worldwide court battle with Apple from $200 million to $260 million. Anyway, Reuters says the new charges relate to the way data is displayed, the user interface and short text messages.
We know everything about the new iPad but the name. After Wednesday’s hour-plus-long launch event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cookies and team unveiled details about the company’s new tablet, simply calling it the “new iPad” throughout.
Apple unveiled the new iPad Wednesday calling the third-generation device simply the new iPad, not iPad 3 or iPad HD. The dingus does, however, have that to-die-for high-resolution retina display it was rumored to have. It also has a souped-up A5X chip, and a new five-megapixel iSight camera. The new chip includes quad-core graphics said to be 4x better than a Tegra 3 or 2x better than the performance of the iPad 2. The camera’s advanced optics can capture 1080p HD video and includes a new video image stabilization feature that removes the bumps and shakes typically seen when filming with a handheld device. The screen, the same 9.4-inch size as the iPad 2, offers 264 PPI, which means the human eye can’t see an isolated pixel. The resolution, as expected, comes in at 2,048 by 1,536, or 3.1 million pixels, a million more than HDTV.
There’s no iPad 3, CNET said Tuesday, hours before the dingus is supposed to be unveiled Wednesday. It’s going to be called iPad HD after the gadget’s reported new retina-like 2,048 x 1,536 screen. CNET got it from a developer “who’s previously provided reliable information with respect to things Apple.” VentureBeat, using similar sourcing, is saying the same thing, following Gizmodo last week and the Verge last July. VentureBeat says, “ The higher-resolution display will not only make text and pictures sharper, it’ll also make the iPad HD the only tablet to support 1080p high-definition at its full resolution (1,920 by 1,080). Expect Apple to market the hell out of that feature.” Then it added, “Android tablets have been sporting 720p HD displays (1,280 by 720) for some time now, but if the reports are true, the iPad 3’s display will blow Android slates out of the water.”
As evident from various social media interactions, blogs, tech news sites and other Google searches, the two events that clearly brought the attention of every one happened in quick succession. Interestingly there are huge discussions about the issue of ‘Windows 8 vs iPad 3,' while the former is an operating system, latter is a tablet device, yet the discussions are pointing to the fact that Windows 8 will facilitate other non-iPad tablet manufacturers to pose a serious challenge to iPad3. Analysts claim that while Apple iPad3 is expected to increase the market size further in the tablet field, Windows 8 has enough features to induce a new Windows 8 tablet market that can pose a serious challenge to iPad 3. As it always happens in any kind of competition between innovative products, only time and their respective marketing strategies will provide the final results.
Apple’s App Store hit 25 billion downloads Saturday. That’s up 10 billion since July and 15 billion since last January. The App Store opened in July of 2008 so it’s not yet four-years-old. It now stocks 500,000 iPhone apps and 140,000 iPad-specific apps. Google’s Android Market, which opened a few months later in October 2008, had wracked up 10 billion downloads this past December, when the Mac App Store, which opened in January of 2011, had 100 million downloads.
One of the really great features in Tiggzi mobile app builder is that you can quickly export the app as mobile Web, Android or iOS: For Android, you can get a ready for the app market binary file (Release binary). Just take the file and upload it to Android Market. It’s that simple.
Apple Thursday won an injunction in Germany against all Motorola Mobility devices that infringe a photo gallery patent. If Apple enforces it, MMI will have to destroy all the implicated widgets in its possession and recall those out in the channel. That currently means the Xoom tablet and two smartphones. The FOSS Patents blog says MMI’s only recourse is to modify the Android operating system, drop the zoom-in feature and degrade the user experience. MMI successfully defended the zoom-out mode. It’s the second injunction Apple has won from the same Munich Regional Court against Motorola in the last two weeks, making Apple’s score two for two. It’ll cost Apple a €35 million bond to enforce both injunctions.
Here we are on the cusp of the iPad 3 introduction next week and Apple, whose market cap has now passed a half-a-trillion dollar, as in trillion – finds itself in the ludicrous position of being sued by a bankrupt Chinese company on the verge of being delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange over the iPad trademark. Proview may be flat broke but it seems to have money enough for lawyers and press agents and that may be because Proview’s assets including the trademark was seized by three big Chinese banks in 2009 after it defaulted on a $400 million loan. Anyway, Proview has opened a legal front in the US where it is now suing Apple in California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara for fraud and unfair competition. It figures it was snookered because Apple used a third party to buy the trademark rights, a common enough device in both the US and China, but Proview alleges fraud by intentional misrepresentation, fraud by concealment and fraudulent inducement.
Apple Tuesday sent out an invitation for what is assumed to be the iPad 3 unveiling next week on Wednesday March 7. The festivities will be held in San Francisco, not New York as CNBC put out there for a while. The invite makes no mention of what Apple’s announcing. It just reads: “We have something you really have to see. And touch.” All the signs of course point to the next-generation tablet that may or may not be called the iPad 3. The device could be based on souped-up new Apple-made dual- or quad-core ARM chip. The rumor mill had also suggested it will be 4G LTE-capable, with a higher-resolution screen and camera and perhaps function as a new stage for Siri to beguile. First deliveries are reputedly set up to start March 9.
The International Trade Commission has thrown out the first of two HTC infringement complaints against Apple, the one filed in May of 2010. ITC commissioners last Friday upheld the findings of the agency’s administrative law judge last year. He found that Apple doesn’t infringe any of four asserted HTC patents. HTC only appealed on one of the patents. Patent follower Florian Mueller observes that “Smartphone-related patents have a very high drop-out rate at the ITC. In my observation, only about one out of 20 asserted patents is deemed violated. The challenges that patent holders face at the ITC have contributed to the popularity of certain German courts, especially the Mannheim Regional Court and the Munich I Regional Court, among patent plaintiffs.”
Proview, the bankrupt Taiwan-Mainland China display house that apparently – through slight of hand – rooked Apple out of the rights to the iPad trademark in China – is supposedly making settlement noises after a Shanghai court refused to stop iPad sales in the city pending a decision by still another, higher court in another province that won’t hear Apple’s case until next week. Meanwhile Proview reportedly means to appeal. Apple, which has three stores in Shanghai, is itself appealing a decision made by a court in a place called Shenzhen that said Apple doesn’t own the name. Proview has taken advantage of that initial Shenzhen decision to get iPads in the channel confiscated in some Chinese cities.
An outfit called OnLive has put a virus-free Windows 7, not 8, 7, plus the whole Office suite, Adobe Reader and a one gigabit-a-second Internet connection with the data sized to fit, on the iPad. It works virtually through a remote computer farm sort of like GoToMyPC writ large. Microsoft’s helping since its Touch Pack add-on makes Windows iPad-friendly, or at least stylus-friendly. The service, which, by the by, can run Flash content (think Hulu), runs five bucks a month. There’s also a cut-down free version with two gigs of storage and someday a $10-a-month service that puts any Windows program you license on the iPad.
Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple’s own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available and synced with iPhone and iPad. There’s a Gatekeeper system to vet software, a way to use Apple TV as a screen, and it adds features for the Chinese market in support of Chinese web sites like Baidu. All told there are reportedly 100 new features.
Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets. The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft’s Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they’re on the corporate network or not. It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another “pane of glass” in the form of another standalone management console. Its new enterprise-scale subscription-based cloud service is called DirectControl for Mobile and harnesses a company’s existing on-premise Active Directory infrastructure, skill sets, familiar processes, and group policy-based management tools to enforce and update mobile security settings, lock or remotely wipe devices, automate the configuration of each user’s authentication credentials, e-mail, Wi-Fi and VPN settings and reduce helpdesk traffic.
Apple sent the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in Monday to start inspecting the conditions under which its widgets are made including Foxconn’s factories in China, the recent subject of an Upton Sinclair-like exposé by the New York Times. Apple said the FLA and its labor rights experts are supposed to interview thousands of workers about their living and working conditions including health and safety, wages, hours and communication with management, checking the plant floor, dorms and other facilities and reviewing documents relating to all stages of employment. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement that “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
A Munich court Thursday found Motorola Mobility guilty of infringing an Apple patent and handed Apple a permanent injunction against two Android smartphones. Apple can enforce the injunction after posting a bond lest MMI succeed in invalidating the slide-to-unlock patent (EP1964022) that opens a device with a gesture on an unlock image. Patent watcher Florian Mueller, who was in court for the trial in December and again on Thursday when the decision came down, apparently expected the court to stay its hand pending a decision on the patent’s validity but evidently Apple’s post-trial pleadings persuaded Judge Peter Guntz that the patent would ultimately stand. Guntz only upheld Apple’s complaints against MMI’s phones, not its complaint against MMI’s Xoom tablet.
The Chinese company that claims it owns the iPad trademark says it plans to seek a ban on iPad exports out of China, threatening global supplies. According to what a lawyer for Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Co Ltd told Reuters, the firm is petitioning Chinese customs to stop shipments of the tablet in and out of China. Customs has reportedly not responded to the request. A Chinese court last year found Proview owned the trademark. Apple, which claims it bought global rights to the name from Proview a few years ago, appealed and a final hearing is now set for February 29, Reuters said. Apple says a Hong Kong court supported its position, but that apparently doesn’t mean much.
The Internet highway may start looking like a proverbial New York traffic jam at rush hour soon. Feel free to substitute any town you like because Cisco says there’s going to be a faster-than-expected 18x surge in worldwide mobile data traffic between 2011 and 2016. That’s when mobile cloud traffic should account for 71% of total data traffic, or 10.3 exabytes a month, up from a mere 269 petabytes a month now, outgrowing global fixed data traffic by 3x. That’s like 33 billion DVDs or 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files. There are supposed to be an estimated 10 billion mobile connections by 2016 – more than the 7.3 billion people on earth by then – or more than eight billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and nearly two billion machine-to-machine connections, such as GPS systems in cars, asset tracking systems in shipping and manufacturing and medical applications for making patient records more available.
Contrary to Steve Jobs’ dictum that the 9.7-inch iPad is as small as a tablet can get, Apple is testing a widget that’s around eight inches and has gotten as far as qualifying suppliers for it, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s supposed to be working with screen makers AU Optronics of Taiwan and LG Display of South Korea. The device would reportedly have the same resolution as the current iPad. Apple is expected to unveil an iPad 3 next month with heightened resolution that can also run on Verizon and AT&T’s faster 4G LTE networks. A smaller iPad suggests that Apple may try to broaden its worldwide market share, which stood at 60% in Q3, particularly in developing markets like China and India, and take on competition from the Android mob, which is selling smaller tablets like the seven-inch Amazon Kindle Fire, the 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note and the seven- and 8.9-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Apple wants the Ice Cream-bearing Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone that Samsung worked on with Google banned from the United States because it allegedly infringes four strong Apple technical patents – none of this squishy design stuff like before. Apple quietly asked a district court in California for the preliminary injunction last Thursday as part of a new lawsuit. Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls the patents the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” In Florian’s metaphor, they might to unleash pestilence, war, famine and death on Android 4.0 as it comes from Google – no Samsung features have been added to the so-called stock Android – giving the suit a potentially more crippling arc that implicates all Ice Cream Sandwich widgets. It’s the closest Apple has gotten to taking on Google directly and if Google removes any of the challenged features it’s as good as an admission of an infringement taint, Florian observes.
Within seconds of Wall Street opening Monday morning Apple tore through the $500-a-share barrier for the first time, a little over six months after hitting $400. The talking heads on CNBC say the company has added the value of a Facebook since its legendary founder Steve Jobs died in October. Up $9.44 to $502.86, its market cap was $460 billion.
Apple quietly wrote a letter to ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in November asking it to set basic rules for the licensing of standards-essential patents and to make its patent-wielding members commit to the principles. Apple clearly had Google and its Android acolytes in mind in writing the letter. Motorola Mobility and Samsung are asking ludicrously high sums to license IP that’s supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). They have also sued alleged infringers like Apple and Microsoft demanding product-stopping injunctions. Apple wants all this to stop. It wants ETSI to insist on appropriate royalties, a common royalty base and no injunctions. Apple’s lead IP lawyer Bruce Watrous told ETSI that the industry lacks consistent adherence to FRAND principles in licensing all the patents necessary to make mobile devices.
The FBI Thursday released a 20-year-old file it had on Steve Jobs. The background check was done on the then-NeXT CEO reportedly because President Bush 41 was considering appointing him to his Export Council. The FBI confirmed in interviews with friends and associates that Jobs was difficult, temperamental, wanted his own way and had used pot, hashish and LSD. The agency wrote in its findings that “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”