On my daily scour of the Interweb for the cheapest HTC Desire price I’ve come across the cheapest so far – £368.77!
It’s from Kikatek.com and if you pre-order the phone using your Visa Debit card you get the phone for £368.77. If you use any other card you’ll have to pay £370.62 (for some reason) which is still £17 cheaper than the previous cheapest price.
I’ve never personally heard of Kikatek.com but their Google Shop rating is nearly 5/5.
Virgin Media have announced that Virgin Mobile will be getting a look in at the HTC Desire amongst other phones.
They are now the sixth company in the UK to offer the phone to the public which just goes to show how popular this thing is.
How compelling a tariff can be I have no idea but I look forward to seeing their offers.
Virgin Mobile - The latest company to join the HTC Desire bandwagon
HTC HD2 holds a conventional PPC standard shape. The large screen of 4.3-inch WVGA allows the users to surf the internet facilities or watch any kind of videos with a good visual sense.
The keyboard design of HTC HD2 is rounded of the predecessor of effective keys, the users are benefited by the increase of the practical physical buttons to five.
HTC Touch GD2 machine has grown in the field of entertaining with the rich resource of third party, the extension of powerful capabilities and the windows mobile 6.5 OS.
Overall speed of the machine is assured by the hardware with 1 GHz frequency processor Qualcomm Snapdragon with 512MB ROM memory and 448MB RAM. A camera of 5 million pixels with the auto focus facility is build by the handset.
Source:http://www.shuttervoice.com/3057/htc-touch-hd2-the-king-of-hardware.html
Do you remember the Commodore Amiga? If so, you should be old enough to remember Cannon Fodder – a game by Sensible Software which was published by Virgin Interactive (God that’s going back a bit – 1993 to be precise). Well anyway, my point is, Droid Gamers have uploaded an article about an exciting new game that has appeared on the Marketplace:
The game is called Defend Homeland and closely resembles the Cannon Fodder / Command & Conquer style gameplay of combat simulation. Be sure to check out the Droid Gamers article for more info and take a look at the video below.
HTCو قد جاء في المركز الأول الهيرو
يليه في المركز الثاني الـHD2
الآيفون 3GS في المركز الثالث
ثم من بعده في المركز الرابع جاء جهاز Samsung Genio Touch
ثم في المركز الخامس جهاز Sony Ericsson Satio
وفي المركز السادس جهاز Palm Pre
و في المركز السابع جهاز Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
و في المركز الثامن جهاز Nokia N900
و المركز التاسع كان من نصيب LG Chocolate BL40
وأخيرا ، المركز العاشر من نصيب Blackberry Curve 8520
وكان هذا التصنيف أوروبي انجليزي من خلال أحد المواقع المتخصصه في مجال الجوال
Source : Mobiles Phones
Google have recently released their first ever mobile phone is the United States called the Nexus One. This handset was manufactured by HTC, who have produced the majority of the Android handsets on the market to date. A interesting fact, is that the Nexus One is still to appear on the UK market, yet HTC have gone ahead and released their own in house version called the HTC Desire and have tweaked it slightly – for the better. If you who think this handset looks familiar, apart from being a Nexus look a like, it was previously give the codename Bravo and appeared on several well-known phone blogs.
The Desire is a smartphone handset which will be running on the very latest version of the Android Operating System – V2.1 As well as to the updated OS, this handset will also feature HTC Sense user interface, which didn’t work that well in the past, but has been getting better in recent releases. HTC has got rid of the trackball cursor control found on most Android handsets, including the Nexus One. This has been replaced with Optical pad. There are good and bad points to both trackball and pad, so will have to see if this is a significant difference or not.
HTC Sense will grab your contacts updates from Facebook and Twitter and add them inside your contacts list. You will also be able to add and view live feed updates to your accounts from your phone, send snap shots and pictures to your Flickr account and move around several applications at the same time thanks to the 1GHz processor used for this phone.
The impressively fast 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which has been used in the Nexus One will guarantee that the phone can handle the stress that running multiple applications This processor is much faster than what the Apple iPhone and will be enough to stop the phone from crashing, freezing and losing your data. This is aided by the 576MB RAM found on the Desire, compare to just 512MB on the Nexus One.
It terms of the screen on the HTC Desire, you will be getting a 3.7 inch Amoled touchscreen which will use the capacitive technology (made famous by the iPhone) that allows for multi-touch and pinch to zoom features. Capacitive technology, seems to be the way ahead for advanced smartphones and I think that HTC have managed to integrate this perfectly in the Desire. The Amoled part of the technology will make the display screen really clear to view, with out putting a drain the battery.
The features for multimedia fan are nothing spectacular, it comes with a 5MP cameras, HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS and memory up to 32GB. One thing it does have over the Nexus one is a FM radio, but this is something the Google might add on to their next software update.
Overall, there are only minor differences between the two phones. One major point, if you are in the UK, is that the HTC Desire is available now and the Google Nexus One has yet to be released. Users will have to wait and see what the price difference will be when both handsets are on the market. I am guessing more people might be tempted by the Nexus One because it has the Google name to it.
HTC Desire Contracts
http://htcdesire.blog.co.in/
According to one researcher @ Panda Security, upon attaching an HTC Phone to her PC, she found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet.
Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world’s larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them. – Threat Post
Read Threat Posts original story for more details…
A new theory about why Apple decided to take HTC — and indirectly, Google — to court
Photo: Apple Inc.
Two thirds of the way through a 3,000-word essay on This Apple-HTC Patent Thing, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber quotes a tweet by John Siracusa that gets to the heart of the matter:
“To me, the Apple patent suit smells like nothing more than a manifestation of Jobs’s own sense of injustice.”
In the context of Gruber’s essay — a passionate and thoroughly readable diatribe about why the software patent system is broken — the quote rings true.
Apple (AAPL), like most large tech companies, uses the system primarily for defensive purposes. They amass a portfolio of broadly worded patents to be unleashed, like nuclear warheads, on any company that dares take them to court — as Nokia did last October (see here).
What’s different about the suits Apple filed Tuesday is that they amounted to a first strike — something Apple hasn’t done in patent court, as far as anybody can remember, since Apple vs. Microsoft, the famous court battle over the Macintosh “look and feel” that Apple ultimately lost.
That case, although it was filed in 1988, when Jobs was nowhere near Apple, may be a telling precedent. Like Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows, the Google (GOOG) Android operating system that runs most of the HTC smartphones in Apple’s complaints is self-evidently built on the shoulders of Cupertino’s designers and software engineers.
Jobs, Gruber suggests, is not so much worried about HTC’s products as offended by them. He quotes Apple’s Tuesday press release:
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
“That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation,” writes Gruber. “That’s the language of a man aggrieved.”
It’s easy to understand Jobs’ indignation, especially in light of the damage Windows inflicted on the Mac’s market share. But the problem for Steve Jobs is that everybody in the world of modern software — including Apple — “steals” (to use his verb) from everybody else.
Gizmodo on Tuesday dragged out the clip (posted below) from the 1996 PBS documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” in which Jobs quotes Picasso’s “good artists copy, great artists steal” and adds, about Apple: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
By launching a nuclear first strike against HTC, Apple seems to be coming very close to the dark side. Gruber quotes an open letter to Jobs posted by Mac developer Will Shipley:
“If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft.”
“Apple is inching ever closer to evil,” writes Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, using the word in Google’s low-bar “Don’t be evil” sense, “and I worry that there’s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.”
Gruber won’t call Apple “evil,” but concludes by saying he’s right there with Graham in that sentiment.
“And I say this not in any sort of hippy-dippy sense of expecting or even hoping for Apple to behave selflessly, holding them to a separate idealistic standard, or expecting them to fight with one arm tied behind their corporate back. And only a fool would argue that a company should never seek redress through litigation.
“But I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts.”
Gruber’s essay is available here. For people who care about the issues raised by the Apple-HTC lawsuit, it’s a must-read.
Below, Steve Jobs on artists stealing ideas:
See also:
Apple vs. HTC: What the experts say
Apple strikes back, sues HTC
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
By David Goldman, staff writerMarch 4, 2010: 11:14 AM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Let the smartphone smackdown begin.
In the blue corner, wearing black, weighing in at 4.8 ounces, the 31-month champion of the touch screen phones: Apple’s iPhone!
In the red corner is the challenger, appearing on every carrier, a new entrant to the heavy-weight battle: Google’s Android!
It doesn’t take Michael Buffer’s “let’s get ready to rumble” introduction to know that Apple and Google are squaring off for what looks to be an epic battle of the smartphone platforms. Apple made that loud and clear on Tuesday when it announced it would sue HTC, the maker of the Nexus One “Google phone,” over 20 alleged patent violations.
Experts say Apple is an aging champion that is feeling threatened by the momentum surrounding new-to-the-game Google’s Android platform.
Steve Jobs: A man aggrieved “Apple set the bar and now it’s being toppled,” said Will Stofega, program director of mobile device technology and trends at IDC. “Apple is playing defense, and Google is playing offense.”
Although it may seem that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) are the only contenders battling it out in the U.S. smartphone market, that’s simply not true. In fact, neither is even the largest.
That “biggest” award goes to BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM), which commands 41.6% of the market, according to technology data tracker comScore. Apple’s iPhone OS is is second place with 25.3%, and phones that run Google’s Android operating system are in fifth with 5.2% of the market.
Battle for the data belt But there is an all-important metric that sets Android and iPhone OS apart from the competition: data. Heaps and heaps of data.
The iPhone, iPod Touch and the handful of smartphones that run Android accounted for a whopping 86% of the data downloads from U.S. smartphones in January, according to a recent study by Web advertising company AdMob. IPhone OS downloads accounted for 47% of the data requests across the nation, and Android accounted for 39%.
That’s important for consumers, because it means they’re getting more functionality out of iPhones and Android-based phones, which is, after all, the point of getting a smartphone. Those phones give users a seamless, computer-like browsing experience, and they offer by far the most apps.
The iPhone App Store has more than 100,000 apps. Google’s Android Market has 20,000. The next biggest competitor is RIM with several thousand and Palm’s (PALM) WebOS just crossed the 1,000-app threshold.
It’s not just size that counts, it’s how you use it: iPhone and Android users download an average of just under 9 apps per month, according to AdMob. The next largest contingent is Palm, which sees an average of 5.7 apps per month downloaded.
“People are more engaged with their iPhones and Android phones due to the browsing experience,” said Soumen Ganguly, principal at tech consultancy Altman Vilandrie & Co. “That’s where BlackBerry generally lags by quite a bit.”
Data usage also gives Google and Apple an edge over the competition, because more data usage means more revenue. Apple takes a 30% cut from the apps that it sells, and Google makes money when people search on Google or visit Web sites that feature ads supported by Google.
It may be too soon to count out any of the smartphone players just yet, given how quickly new technologies develop. RIM recently said that it planned to improve its browser functionality and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) wowed spectators with its Windows Phone 7, which is set to be unveiled this fall.
But some say it’s Android and iPhone OS, more than any other smartphone platform, that are making the greatest strides in the race to be market leader.
“Looking to the future, it is primarily between Google and Apple to shape the future of the mobile industry,” said Jagdish Rebello, principal analyst of communication systems at iSuppli Corp. “When you look at what Google and Apple are doing with applications and creating an ecosystem … others are just playing catch-up.”
Blow by blow Google and Apple have taken very different approaches to the battle. Here’s a look at how that bout is playing out:
Apps: Apple is winning the app war now, with about five times more apps than Google. But app developers have to get their products cleared by Apple’s standards police (remember the 6,000 sexy apps that got purged last week?) before they can appear in the App store. That’s a process that can take months.
Google has taken the opposite approach, opening its platform to developers. IDC’s Stofega says that developers are embracing Google’s approach, and as Android adoption grows, more developers are writing Android apps. That could bring some of the higher-quality apps to Google’s side. Google has a lot of ground to cover, but app war may just be beginning.
Devices and prices: IPhone OS runs on three devices: the iPhone 3G S, the iPhone 3G and the iPod Touch, with prices ranging from $99 to $299 with a new contract.
Android is currently available thorugh three carriers on on 10 smartphones in the U.S., with prices ranging between $79 to $199 with a new contract. It also runs on a number of other devices, including several netbooks and the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader.
6 ways iPhone and Android differ ISuppli’s Rebello said Google’s strategy of offering Android on more phones, with more carriers and varying price points was the same winning strategy for RIM’s BlackBerry devices.
“Apple has a confrontational ‘our way or the highway’ strategy, but it’s the Google model that’s winning over carriers,” he said.
Availability: The iPhone is available exclusively on AT&T (T, Fortune 500) in the United States, and there have been well-documented problems with how that partnership has negatively impacted many customers’ experiences.
Google is carrier agnostic and, unlike Apple, allows wireless companies to take a cut in the app revenues. As a result, wireless companies are embracing Android. The only major U.S. carrier without an Android phone is currently AT&T, but the wireless company just announced it will begin to sell five Android phones by June.
“Google’s strategy isn’t about keeping one carrier happy but about enabling mobility, hardware and software to a variety of different tiers,” said Stofega. “There are advantages to serving a number of different masters, and that’s where Apple has some problems.”
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/04/technology/google_apple_mobile/index.htm?cnn=yes
excerpt from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/source-code-hacks/
Hackers who breached Google and other companies in January targeted source-code management systems, security firm McAfee asserted Wednesday. They manipulated a little-known trove of security flaws that would allow easy unauthorized access to the intellectual property the system is meant to protect.
The software-management systems, widely used at businesses unaware that the holes exist, were exploited by the Aurora hackers in a way that would have enabled them to siphon source code, as well as modify it to make customers of the software vulnerable to attack. It’s akin to making yourself a set of keys in advance for locks that are going to be sold far and wide.
According to the paper, the hackers gained access to software-configuration management systems (SCM), which could have allowed them to steal proprietary source code or surreptitiously make changes to the code that could seep undetected into commercial versions of the company’s product. Stealing the code would allow attackers to examine the source code for vulnerabilities, in order to develop exploits to attack customers who use the software, such as Adobe Reader, for example.
Apple vs HTC IPR suit : http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/03/apple-vs-htc-a-proxy-fight-over-android-could-last-years.ars
a roundup from the highly flammable comments section:
How’s the quote go? “Good artists create, grate artists steal” Sucks for you Mr. Jobs. It’s like APPL vs. MSFT all over again. Mr. Jobs should of learned the first time this happened, he let Mr. Schmidt get too close and bam! What do you know all of a sudden you have a cheaper comparable product that anyone can build on and improve upon. How Mr. Jobs didn’t see this coming again in perplexing to me.All in all aside with the snarky comment, this move reeks of fear. Maybe apple just realized that they can’t compete with a ton of open source dev’s backed by google. Not to mention the hardware side where you have several manufactures cranking out several phones a piece with prices ranging from dirt cheap ($50 to buy a new droid these days) to cheaper then the iphone. All of them with more or less the same capability, some of them much more. Mark my words, android will slowly destroy the head start that apple has with the iPhone and overtake them unless apple come up with some real reason to stay in their closed more expensive eco-system.
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Even as a loyal Apple customer I am not sure that I like their approach. One question I have is whether there is a fine line in between defending a patent and an anti-trust lawsuit?
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Its all about the iTunes Money!
Okay, we’ve all heard the news that Apple has opened a multi-patent (20 of them) lawsuit against mobile handset maker HTC. HTC is a mobile computing and cellular handset maker and subcontractor that makes quite a few handsets that run Android and Windows Mobile. They either make them and sell them themselves, or they’re subcontracted out by Google, Microsoft and various mobile carriers to design handsets. The company also creates custom skins and interfaces for Android and Windows Mobile that can better fit the overall design of the different handsets.The company is based in Taiwan and has been around since 1997.
Now, looking at the list of patents that aren’t in legalese or engineer-ese, some are quite laughable at best. It seems Apple invented and holds patents for ‘Object Oriented Operating Systems’, Touch Based Gestures that Unlock Mobile Communication Devices’, and even ‘Programming a CPU to Interact With an Operating System for Battery Saving Measures’. Further reading also indicated that Apple claims invention of ‘Multi-Touch’, ‘Phone CPU Undervolting’, ‘Large On-Screen Fisher Price Colored Icons’, and even ‘Applications and the Online Mobile Only Store That Sells Them’. So they’re suing HTC to stop Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile sales because they touch things too.
Pretty laughable to say the least. A few of the patents are even from 1995! If memory serves me correctly; Xerox invented the object oriented operating system with interactive icons back in the early and mid 1970s. And a company called Palm was working on a touch and gesture mobile device in 1995 and it was called the Palm. And Apple in the early and mid 80s tried suing Microsoft for copying its ‘Object Oriented Operating System’. Apple lost that one and software patents have been of dubiousness since then. Heck, Windows Mobile had touch screen and touch gesture capability before the first iPhone was a rumor and HTC and Toshiba made the handsets.
It is somewhat surprising that Apple received some of the patents in question, such as the patent on “Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor”. When you really look at it (and show it to a licensed electrician), the patent basically is talking about saving power by supplying less voltage to a circuit and switching circuits on and off to do so. That’s obviously been done before (prior art), but its a given by the laws of nature (power = current * voltage). If that’s patentable, the concept of die shrinks and Moore’s Law should be patentable, overclocking and underclocking would be patentable, and a whole host of other things made possible by laws of nature, physics, and thermodynamics should be patentable as well.
I’m no patent lawyer and looking through the technical details of a good portion of these patents made my head hurt. I know my computer history very well, know the ins and outs of various operating systems from the last 20 years, and I know my way around all sorts of hardware.
So what’s really going on here? Why go after just HTC? They just make the handsets and a few modifications to the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems. There’s lots of other mobile handsets and a couple of other touch screen operating systems.
I think I know what’s going on here and it has nothing to do about patents.
It has everything to do with the iTunes revenue stream and walled garden that Apple has created. Its all about the money!
Let’s put technical and patent talk away now. When Apple released and made the iTunes Store, they created a massive revenue stream that included music, movies, tv shows, and apps for all their mobile devices (iPod, iPhone, and all things iTouchy). While Apple’s markup on their hardware sales (40% in most cases) is the highest in the industry, its all the deals they made with the entertainment industry to make content available to thier mobile portfolio that’s got Apple rolling in dough. And allowing developers to create applications for their mobile things also had Apple making dump trucks worth of cash from the cut they were taking in sales.
So to put it simply, anything associated with iTunes, including keeping all the hardware tied to it, is making Apple loads and piles of money. Follow me? Good.
Apple has already shown displeasure at the various music labels and tv and movie studios for double dipping and selling and licensing the same content on not only iTunes, but also Amazon, Pandora, MySpace, YouTube, their own respective sites, and Hulu. And those various companies have acquiescenced to Apple in some cases, but have also complained about Apple’s wall garden mentality of iTunes and iDevices only. Many developers are also taking their apps and either developing them for Windows Mobile and Android as well or they’ve moved past the iDevice App Store because of Apple’s sporadic, draconian, and inept App Store policies.
Still doesn’t explain the whole patent thing, right? But I am giving you a direction to think in. By suing HTC, Apple hopes to put a big stop to handset development in the Android and WinMo spaces. And to send a shot across the bow of Microsoft and Google, however indirectly that may be. Suing Google and or Microsoft would be suicide for Apple. They’d get squashed.
There’s one company that hasn’t been mentioned in this dispute. But they have been mentioned in another dispute with Apple’s mobile iTouchy devices. Its Adobe and their Flash platform.
We all know what Flash is. Its the video technology behind YouTube and all those TV shows and movies you watch on Hulu or CBS’s or NBC’s website. Its the games you play like Bejeweled and Collapse. Or how’s about all those games you play on Facebook like Farmville and Mafia Wars? Many business websites use Flash for their front end (UPS and Fedex off the top of my head).
That’s a lot of content that’s available on the Flash platform, and Adobe has a massive developer network that has been creating and developing with Flash and its development suite for years. They’re very close to releasing Flash 10.1 for quite a bevy of mobile devices which include Windows Mobile, Android, Zune, Blackberry, Nokia (Symbian and Maemo) and a few others (which will use Flash Lite). That’s alot of movies, music, tv shows, apps, and games that will be available for free or through other paid services on quite a large number of mobile devices.
Well, all except Apple’s mobile iTouch devices that is.
See, there’s that whole iTunes wall garden compound of Apple’s that contains most of Apple’s revenue stream. And Apple is scared. For the first time in a number of years, Apple has some serious competition to the iTunes hardware, software, and content ecosystem. There’s the Android OS and it’s App Market. The Windows Mobile 7 Series, its Windows Mobile Marketplace, the Zune players and the Zune Marketplace (and the availability of Xbox Live content too). Nokia’s handsets and its Symbian and Maemo OSes with the Ovi Store. And pretty soon Adobe’s going to enter the fray with Flash content on all those devices and operating systems. Even a mobile version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is on the way and all the respective application plug-ins that come with that framework.
That’s a lot of competition for Apple on the hardware, software, web, and content front. And a direct threat to the iTunes walled garden revenue stream. So what does Apple do? It takes a bunch of its patents, even the old pre-return of Steve Jobs, and files a patent lawsuit in the hopes to at least stall the development and release of all that competition. Its that plain and simple. Apple has $40 billion in the bank and no debt. A patent lawsuit as a stalling tactic is a drop in the bucket for them; money-wise at least anyways.
Remember the tepid reaction to the iPad when it was revealed? Apple was just as surprised to the tepid reaction people were tepid to the product reveal. From showing off a giant iPhone that still used AT&T’s 3G data network, to showing off the so called full featured internet functions (with 1/4 of the NY Times webpage missing due to not including Flash), to Steve Jobs calling Flash buggy and dying technology and Adobe’s developers as lazy, and not to mention all the missing print content publishers who won’t release their content because of Apple’s diehard insistence to be keymaster and gatekeeper to all things App Store and its content. Even the games shown off weren’t all that impressive.
But by filling a stalling patent lawsuit, Apple hopes to hold off this onslaught of hardware and content competition and find a way to shore up its own revenue generating ecosystem to avoid another tepid reaction when the next iPhone is revealed.
Steve Job’s comments about Adobe and its developers really got Adobe sharpening its swords for a fight. They rallied the troops and partnered up with most of the big mobile players. They’re unleashing the ‘lazy’ developers, the ‘buggy’ Flash platform, and all that cross device content to as many mobile systems as possible.
I’ve been using my Motorola Droid for a week now and I’m amazed with everything I can do, how its done, and customize my handset to my liking. The screen is gorgeous and pretty soon I’ll be checking out a few Hulu shows, checking out a few upcoming video game trailers in HD Flash, and playing a few free games like Bejeweled and Collapse.
That type of freedom from all sorts of different sources and devices is what scares Apple most. They as a company have never truly competed outside of their walled compound. Its always been about only their hardware, their software, their content, and only the applications and content they allow in on their terms and conditions. Apple used to be the trendsetter, the innovator, the ‘Think Different’ crowd. Now they find themselves in a position they haven’t been in in years; playing catch up. They got complacent, greedy, and egotistical. And they’re going to pay for it.
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You don’t seem to understand the patents. Apple did not patent launching a phone or a smartphone or an internet-enabled device or a touch screen internet enabled smartphone or a device built from common parts. Apple patented how very important parts of the iPhone did its magic. Bad people steal Apple magic. Apple fight bad people.
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I’m not sure what you mean by technology? Above you talk about touch screens, ARM processors and 3G and you can’t patent hardware choices. What Apple patented was methods of users interfacing with the phone (which when the iPhone was introduced was close to revolutionary) and the ways in which its technology actually worked.
Things like the unlock-gesture are relatively minor patents but we’ve had touch screen technology for about 20 years in PDAs and I’ve never seen such a simple method to unlock a device before. It’s quick, simple and intuitive, it may well have taken Apple a lot of work to get there and that’s why it was patented. The simplest things can be very, very difficult to develop. Obviousness is something that often only comes with hindsight.
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Historically this could be an interesting development. As people have noted, a lot of these dubious patents have being kept in reserve as a defense mechanism. Suddenly (at least in the mobile space) these patents are coming out of the woodwork in a potential tech Armageddon. No one believes it will come to that, but obviously some sort of a power struggle or reshuffle is occurring.
Apple obviously believes it will benefit from an industry wide IP shakeup. How realistic is that. How many enemies will they make doing so. Perhaps the earlier RIM patent case has given them reasons for optimism. However unlike the RIM patents, Apple has a real business to defend from counter attacks.
This does not look like business as usual where large patent holding business diligently circle the wagons and avoid each other. Apple is casting itself as the outside aggressor, saying it stands above them. This could get messy.
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Isn’t this really about how the Internet market for information will be defined? Apple is pushing a Pay-For model, and Google is pushing a Paid-By-Advertizing model. Apple has world dominance over distribution of music, smart phone apps, and is trying for world dominance over “printed” material with iPad. Google has world dominance over distribution of Web searches, maps, and air-borne and space imagery.
Isn’t the patent issue just a vehicle for disrupting Google’s progress while Apple advances?
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Reminds me of the time that Apple took Microsoft to court for stealing the idea of having a Garbage can icon. Apple had to know they would win that one (perhaps they did it just for the PR). In this case Apple is claiming a patent violation on the idea of scaling back the CPU voltage when the device is not in use. For an encore I’ll bet they will try to place a patent on the use of electrons.
I spent my journey home from MWC this year reminiscing about the old days of 3GSM, when handset vendor innovation equalled upping megapixelage, and launching new products basically involved rehashing a former best seller but slightly updating the form factor, and blowing the R&D budget on expensive brand consultants to come up with a CRZY name!
Those days are gone my friends, and it was never more obvious than at MWC 2010. Nokia were conspicuous by their absence from hall 8, presumably hiding away in a hotel somewhere licking their wounds and plotting their revenge. Whilst Apple was expectedly absent, and therefore deliberately inconspicuous – save for the fact 80% of visitors these days have iPhones.
That latter fact was one Google seemed anxious to change, largely by handing out Nexus Ones like branded breath mints. Your correspondent sadly missed that particular boat, but he did manage to get some branded breath mints. Of course, keen to be seen as an earlier adopter, he was already a proud owner of Google’s first branded toy anyway, and has seen the benefits of outsourcing management of his social affairs to a 3rd party specialist first hand.
Adobe were keen to demo flash 10.1 running on the N1 (and various other devices), and it seems increasingly obvious that N1 owners are going to seize the Look at What My Phone Can Do That Yours Can’t bragging rights that iPhone owners have lovingly hogged for so long.
So this is what innovation looks like at MWC10: rather than presenting over equipped, over designed feature phones, incrementally more expensive and packing in more and more unwanted services, they now have to change your life, and do it more radically, and with more simplicity, elegance and ease of use than anything else out there.
So the challenges for the industry are now different – rather than fretting about ASP and ARPU, the concerns are things like STAYING IN BUSINESS, or avoiding becoming a data pipe for Google/Apple. But there’s more, the 3G networks are starting to look horribly inadequate for the purposes of delivering always on internet to everyone all the time, and LTE is still a spot on the horizon.
Furthermore, over the past few years smartphones have embarked on a borg-like assimilation of all consumer electronics products – digital cameras, calculators, MP3 players, sat nav, email/web surfing devices etc, etc. Eric Schmidt noted in his MWC keynote that smartphone sales will overtake desktop PC sales within 3 years. So the mobile phone revolution becomes the Everything Mobile revolution.
What was clear from MWC10 is that the march of the mobile handset has taken it far beyond the borders envisaged by the telecommunications industry, or even the PC industry – Bill Gates recently noted that Microsoft weren’t ambitious enough in their plans for Winmob.
Given all of that, one wonders whether the GSMA (given that it’s a group comprised of old guard Telco’s pushing vested interests) will be able to continue delivering a relevant convention to address this new converged Everything Mobile world. Or, like seemingly everything else in tech – will the action all relocate to San Francisco?
