William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

March 2, 2010

Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Microsoft,Nokia — William_T_Goodall @ 17:12

Apple is using its strong patent portfolio to fight iPhone competitors in court. Its latest target is HTC. Apple has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the cell phone manufacturer. The suit involves “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.” Steve Jobs is quoted in a press release saying: “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. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.” The lawsuit itself is not available yet online. We’ve asked Apple for a copy. The lawsuit could be a way to go after Android, although Android is not mentioned in the press release. HTC manufactures some of the most successful Android handsets, from the first G1 up to the latest Nexus One. HTC’s touchscreen Android phones are the most similar to the iPhone. If that is the case, the lawsuit is a shot across Android’s bow and a warning to all Android manufacturers. This is not the first time Apple has gone after a mobile phone competitor. It is involved in similar patent litigation with Nokia. That lawsuit is more about Apple trying to get Nokia to license its patents. And the HTC suit may have the same motivation. But the fact that the lawsuit was filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) as well as in a U.S. District Court in Delaware suggests that Apple is really going for the jugular. “The ITC does not award damages,” says Peter Toren, a patent lawyer with New York City law firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman. The only remedy the ITC can award is an order to stop the importation of the infringing product. HTC is based in Taiwan. Apple thinks it owns the concept of the touchscreen Web phone and it wants other cell phone makers to pay for copying the iPhone or to stop altogether. Who will Apple sue next? Motorola? Palm? Research in Motion? Update: The complaint is embedded below. Some of the patents in questions are Patent Nos. 7,362,331, 7,479,949, 7,657,849, 7,469,381, 5,920,726, 7,633,076, 5,848,105, 7,383,453, 5,455,599, and 6,424,354 .

Apple vs HTC

CrunchBase InformationAppleHTCInformation provided by CrunchBase

[From Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents]

With all this suing going on it will be interesting to see if some of these patents (Apple’s, Nokia’s and others) actually stand up, and who has to concede what when the dust settles. In several years time…

Mac OS X North American installed base almost 11%

Filed under: Apple,IT — William_T_Goodall @ 11:58

Web analytics firm Quantcast has recently published some usage statistics for operating systems, broken out into geographical regions. The company’s data shows that 10.9 percent of online users in North America are using Mac OS X, an increase of nearly 30 percent over the past year.

Unlike determining market share by units sold, Qauntcast measures OS share by comparing the operating system of users via the company’s “audience measurement services,” similar to statistics gathered by Net Applications. Such usage patterns can give us a rough idea of the installed base of an OS among end users.

Read the comments on this post

[From Mac OS X North American installed base almost 11%]

The trends in other territories are also up. That’s the highest OS X has ever reached.

February 26, 2010

Nexus One From an iPhone Developer’s Perspective

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT — William_T_Goodall @ 17:08


Jeff LaMarche on the Nexus One:


“Multitasking” is one of the much lauded benefits of Android over the iPhone. Of course, it’s not really multitasking. Everybody except most “tech pundits” knows that the iPhone’s Mach kernel supports full preemptive multitasking and also knows that at any given moment there are somewhere on the order of twenty daemons and other processes running on a stock (non-jailbroken) iPhone.

What people mean when they misuse this term is the ability to run more than one GUI application at a time, the way we do on our regular computers. And the Android certainly allows this. Only, it’s not really a point in Android’s favor. When you hit the home button, the previous application keeps running, which means it keeps eating memory, keeps using processor cycles, and keeps eating battery. To truly quit most applications requires a multi-step navigation that is neither intuitive nor well-documented. The ability to have more than one GUI application at a time on a device with such a small screen isn’t as important as some make it out to be, since you can’t actually interact with more than one a time.

Lots of interesting points in the post.

February 24, 2010

iPhone and Android biggest winners in mobile market in 2009

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Microsoft,Nokia — William_T_Goodall @ 12:29

Though the overall mobile market is slowing—sales are down about one percent for 2009 year-over-year—a slight fourth quarter sales jump balanced the dips during the rest of the year. The good news is all in smartphones, as sales were up a whopping 41.1 percent for the fourth quarter and 23.8 percent overall, according to the latest data from market research firm Gartner. Nokia still commands large but declining chunks of smartphone and overall mobile phone sales, while iPhone and Android devices saw big leaps last year.

Overall mobile phone sales were down about 11 million units for 2009—perhaps good news for the growing concern about the contribution mobile phones make to the growing e-waste problem. Three of the top five vendors saw sales decline over the year, with Nokia down a couple points, and Motorola and Sony Ericsson seeing their shares cut almost in half. Samsung’s share of the mobile phone market is up to almost 20 percent, and LG bumped up a couple points to 10 percent. Gartner told Ars that Apple doubled its share of the overall market from 1.2 percent in 2008 to 2.1 percent for 2009, though it wasn’t enough to put it in the top five.

[From iPhone and Android biggest winners in mobile market in 2009]

Don’t forget RIM.

February 17, 2010

Jim Ray on the WebKit Mobile Browser Monoculture

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Microsoft,Nokia,www — William_T_Goodall @ 14:23

Jim Ray:

More importantly, though, with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture.

First, I was observing more than celebrating. (But if any one rendering engine had to win the whole mobile shebang, I’m delighted it’s WebKit. But I’d love to see Mozilla get its mobile balls on.) But, bigger point: if any individual WebKit platform vendor disagrees with the direction of the mainline WebKit trunk, or simply thinks they can do better, they can do so. Real open source.

And:

For one, replace “WebKit” with “Flash” and suddenly the iPhone is the holdout.

Really? Every WebOS, BlackBerry, and Android phone today ships with Flash? I didn’t know that. (Not to mention Windows Mobile 7, phones with which aren’t shipping until “holidays 2010”, and which apparently aren’t going to ship with Flash.)

★

[From Jim Ray on the WebKit Mobile Browser Monoculture]

On the desktop Adobe had years to develop a Flash player to run properly on Mac OS X and Linux and failed. If they can’t provide a good implementation for more than one desktop platform how can they possibly provide a half-dozen or so mobile versions that aren’t dreadful?

February 9, 2010

Touchscreens take lead in smartphone biz

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Microsoft,Nokia — William_T_Goodall @ 12:30

Bumper year for finger-friendly phones The world’s smartphone makers shipped more touchscreen models in Q4 2009 than at any time in the past – and more touchphones than devices with buttons.…The power of collaboration within unified communications [From Touchscreens take lead in smartphone biz]

And Apple is the leader in touchscreen smartphones.

February 4, 2010

Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass weighs in on why Microsoft ‘no longer brings us the future’

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Microsoft — William_T_Goodall @ 15:06

It’s a sad tale, if you hear Dick Brass tell it. In a new op-ed for the New York Times, the former Microsoft VP explains how he thinks the Microsoft corporate culture has “never developed a true system for innovation,” and that while the company is obviously strong at the moment, he doesn’t see the company retaining its dominance if or when the Office and Windows revenues die down. His own anecdotes are a little heartbreaking: his team developed ClearType (first announced in 1998), but due to infighting and jealousy within the company, was kept from shipping as a default until 2007 with Windows Vista. Similarly he argues that the Tablet PC was much restricted by an Office team that didn’t believe in the concept, and therefore never developed a version of Office that was stylus-friendly. Dick left the company in 2004, and he says the tablet group at Microsoft has since been eliminated, and that almost all the executives in charge of “music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade” have also left. The man isn’t out to get Microsoft: he sees the company as important, and its profits have obviously gone to great philanthropic ends through Bill Gates and others, but if what he says about the anti-innovative corporate culture is true, it sounds like Microsoft has some work to do before it can return to its place of preeminence as an innovator, instead of the fast and effective follower it seems to be becoming in many areas.Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass weighs in on why Microsoft ‘no longer brings us the future’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | New York Times | Email this | Comments [From Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass weighs in on why Microsoft ‘no longer brings us the future’]

Moribund and soon to be beleaguered Microsoft lost its way many years ago.

February 2, 2010

iPad kool-aid victim goes on the offensive

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT — William_T_Goodall @ 12:21

Dismissing Apple’s iPad is understandable. Given its simplicity and evident shortcomings, it’s easy to see why the tech elite might have little use for it. But the volume and insistence of the wrath, the sheer bloody outrage, is remarkable for a product only a few people have even used. What, exactly, do we have to fear from the prospect of a high-quality, non-user-servicable computing appliance? Heeere’s Joel:

The iPad isn’t a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. And if anything’s dystopian about the future it portends, it’s an American copyright system that’s been out of whack since 1996.

Titled “iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up”, his is an angry rant, but of great value in it is the distinction between the right to hack and the value of attacking products whose design makes hacking difficult. Like those he criticizes, however, Johnson doesn’t quite address the other issue that makes it all so murky: Apple’s near-total control of its mobile software ecosystem, and the brewing battle between it and Amazon over ebook publishing.

To me, the answer seems paradoxical. We have everything to fear from computers like the iPad, because it marginalizes computer tinkering as a hobby and threatens to turn it into an ivory-tower discipline like heart surgery or architecture. But there’s also nothing to fear, because hacking is a way of thinking and if low-end computers finally become unserviceable black boxes, there’s plenty of other things to hack.

That’s why Joel’s final point is the best one: it’s far more important that we attack bad laws like the DMCA than the hacker-averse product design it engenders.

Also, if you hate the iPad’s limitations, Dell’s Mini 5 might be the droid you’re looking for. Check it out.

“iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up” [Gizmodo]

[From iPad kool-aid victim goes on the offensive]

Most of these ‘openness’ whiners are just parroting talking points they clearly don’t actually understand and close to none of them could program their way out of a wet paper bag.

January 31, 2010

★ Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,www — William_T_Goodall @ 10:14

Robert Scoble has a good analogy:

Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the
scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton
of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why
not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant
Internet Explorer back then.

Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these
broken links. Just like Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad
is going to fail because of its own set of broken links.

But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t
work on Firefox? I haven’t.

What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the
standards-based web.

The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with
developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans
any longer.

Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?

Adobe can’t. They can’t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.
Apple could, but they won’t.
Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don’t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.
Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.
Uh, magical unicorns?

Adobe’s initial reaction to the iPad seems to be geared toward #3 — emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.

Adobe’s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.

The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.

Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”. Adobe’s own statistics on Flash’s market penetration claim 99 percent penetration as of last month. That’s because, according to their survey methodology, they’re only counting “PCs” — which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.

What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.

[From ★ Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?]

Good riddance.

January 27, 2010

Live Coverage: Apple’s Special Tablet Event

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,www — William_T_Goodall @ 14:18

Wired is on the spot, covering Apple’s Jan. 27 event at 10 a.m. PDT in San Francisco, where fans expect Steve Jobs to unveil a tablet. [From Live Coverage: Apple’s Special Tablet Event]

I’ll be tracking this like everyone else. Then I expect a 2GB SDK download in the next few days. I hope I’m not near my bandwidth cap 🙂

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress