Apple’s New Killer App: Its Smartphone Software Patent

The headlines sounded the first signs of alarm (or glee, depending on which camp you’re in): “Apple Granted the Mother of All Smartphone Software Patents.” For Apple investors, the news about the patent it has been granted that covers nearly every key aspect of the smartphone user inteface is very good.

For those banking on Android and Windows phone manufacturers, not so much. And whileResearch In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry devices might also take yet another hit, RIM itself may just become slightly more valuable — for its patents.

The online reaction after Apple was awarded the patents on July 17 was swift as analysts and bloggers digested the news. OnPhandroid, a website dedicated to Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android mobile operating system, Kevin Kraus wrote:

“The effects could be swift and lethal… The granting of such a broad patent could have the negative effect of stifling competition in the marketplace and limiting software developments.”

In a decade that has become defined by its legal battles almost as much as technological innovation, what exactly did Apple win, and what are the potential repercussions that are getting the tech press so excited?

In all, Apple was granted 25 patents as part of the application, many of which dated back to a 2007 filing. Two key points make this particular ruling so worrisome for other smartphone manufacturers:

1) One of the patents in particular (8223134) covers “Portable electronic device, method and graphical user interface for displaying electronics lists and documents.”

2) Elements of the patents granted were first filed by Apple back in 2007.

Point one means Apple now has a patent that covers a wide range of commonly used smartphone touchscreen user elements. Think of the tasks that people often use smartphones for — displaying a list of instant messages or e-mails, reviewing photos and documents, scrolling, displaying their calendar, viewing a Web browser and looking at maps. Apple’s patent could arguably cover it, especially when combined with a multi-touch user interface.

Point two means it’s going to be more difficult for competing companies to argue in court that Apple has succeeded in patenting something that’s been in common use for years. The company first filed for these patents back when the iPhone was initially released and before the interface elements began to show up in competing mobile operating systems.

As Patently Apple points out, at the time when Apple was filing for these patents, other smartphones relied on either physical buttons and scroll wheels to accomplish the tasks, or required the user to navigate through a series of menus and button combinations. One of the breakthroughs of Apple’s iOS was its use of an intuitive, multi-touch interface that incorporated gestures and a virtual keyboard — and Apple has always maintained that other smartphone competitors stole much of this from it.
This article comes from:http://www.investorplace.com/2012/07/apples-new-killer-app-its-smartphone-software-patent/

Can Apple Launch in China Without Incident?

The big question for the China launch of the new iPad on Friday isn’t whether it will sell well, but if the retailer can keep the police out of it.

When the iPhone 4S launched in January, hundreds of customers waited overnight outside the Apple store in Beijing’s tony Sanlitun shopping district. But when the surrounded store didn’t open as expected the next morning, at least one fan pelted the facade with eggs and by midmorning authorities had moved in to disperse the mass of expectant customers thronging the outside of the store. The incident led Apple to temporarily suspend sales of the iPhone 4S in the five retail stores it then had in China.

It has happened before. In May 2011, on the first of the sale of a white iPhone, shoppers scuffled with employees, and one of the same Sanlitun store’s windowsended up smashed.

This time Apple is taking a different approach. According to the press release announcing sales of the new iPad on July 10, the company will begin taking reservation requests for the tablet on its online store daily from 9 am to 12 pm beginning Thursday, the day before the official launch on Friday. Customers will then be given a set time to pick up their devices.

Word about the new sales approach has been spreading around China’s popular Sina Weibo microblogging service. Apple Exchange, a Weibo account with about 1.3 million fans, put out a message reminding users of the order-ahead process.

But some users were less than clear about what that meant. One Weibo user responded to the message asking, “pre-order means what? Every machine has to be ordered ahead of time?”

It remains to be seen how many would-be customers have gotten the message, and whether those who were frustrated with their attempts to order the iPad online might not just show up at the store to try their luck.

Also unclear is what role scalpers will play this time around. In January, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported that clashes between two groups of scalpers were to blame for the fracas in front of the Apple store.

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Vodacom, Cell C compete in iPhone arena

Vodacom has followed rival mobile operator Cell C with the release of cheaper iPhone packages, or “Smart Plans” for Apple's fifth-generation smartphone.

While SA's first and second operators, Vodacom and MTN, respectively, have had the latest iPhone, the iPhone 4S, on their shelves since December last year, third operator Cell C started stocking Apple products for the first time this past weekend.

Cell C customers can now get the iPhone 4 and entire iPhone 4S range on Straight Up contracts, ranging from R329 per month for the iPhone 4S 16GB, to R799 per month for the 64GB handset.

Yesterday, Vodacom unveiled new iPhone 4S packages as part of its “all-in-one Smart Plans” – packages introduced last week that include the handset, data, talk time and SMSes. Prices start from R319 per month, for the iPhone 4S 16GB – and go up to R799 per month for the 64GB version.

Cell C's entry-level contract, for the iPhone 4S 16GB, costs R10 more than Vodacom's price on the same phone and includes significantly fewer minutes and SMSes (50 minutes and 50 SMSes as opposed to 95 minutes and 100 SMSes on Vodacom's plan), and includes 250MB more data.

Both operators' top packages, for the iPhone 4S 64GB, are available for R799 per month. Cell C's plan – Straight Up 400 – includes 400 minutes, 400 SMSes and 700MB of data, while Vodacom's plan – Smart Advanced – includes 810 minutes, 400 SMSes and 400MB of data.

This article comes from:http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56858:vodacom,-cell-c-compete-in-iphone-arena

Former Apple VP Bertrand Serlet joins Parallels board

Apple's former Senior VP of Mac OS Software Bertrand Serlet has joined the board of directors at Parallels, the virtualization software company in a non-executive role. Serlet, who did stints involving both science and programming at Xerox PARC as well as Steve Jobs' former company NeXT, left Apple last year to focus "less on products and more on science." His role at Parallels will be to help supply additional vision and direction for both its flagship product and its server-management tools.

Serlet was part of a large crew of former NeXT employees who came with Jobs when he returned to running Apple in the late 90s. Serlet had contributed much to NeXTSTEP and OpenStep, the heart of OS X software. He also worked on WebObjects and CoreFoundation, building on the work of his predecessor in the Software Engineering VP job, Avie Tevanian. He was with Apple for 14 years (including a decade-long stint at Ariba), and is also working with a cloud-based startup Upthere.

Parallels is best known for its self-named product, one of the three major virtualization solutions for running Windows and other operating systems on the Mac, allowing it to be the most versatile of the three mainstream platforms in its ability to run nearly any other operating system (past or present). The company started in 2004 primarily focusing on Windows and Linux server virtualization, but came to prominence when Apple unveiled the Intel-based version of OS X in 2006 and the first Mac version came out. The company continues to sell the Plesk server automation software.

This aticle comes from:http://www.macnn.com/articles/12/07/17/parc.next.veteran.helped.create.os.x/

Why Apple's Siri is leaving many iPhone users wanting for more

We met at an Apple product announcement in Cupertino, Calif. She was helpful, smart and even funny, cracking sarcastic jokes and making me laugh. What more could a guy ask for?

Since then, we have had some major communication issues. She frequently misunderstands what I'm saying. Sometimes she is just unavailable. Often, she responds with the same, repetitive statement.

Her name is Siri.
At first, Siri, the voice-activated digital assistant on Apple iPhones, seemed a little too good to be true. Sirilured me into a relationship promising to help me set up appointments, to gently wake me in the morning for work, and to give me the ability to text someone while I was driving.

It didn't work out that way. "There's something wrong, and I can't answer your questions right now. Please try again in a little while," Siri will say when I ask something. Or: "I'm really sorry about this, but I can't take any requests right now. Please try again in a little while."

She is always polite. But I'm starting to suspect that "I'm really sorry" is just something Siri says to shut me up. Apple introduced Siri as a beta test, meaning it was still a work in progress. That was unusual for Apple, but the company was counting on it to change the way people searched for information on mobile devices. It wanted a head start.

But it doesn't seem ready to change anything yet. Many people I have spoken to have switched Siri off and reverted to the iPhone's voice dictation service (the little microphone next to the keyboard), which is more reliable because it doesn't use Siri's artificial intelligence software.

Those who have left it have done that for good reason. Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, recently ran a series of tests with Siri and discovered that this is a significant problem for Apple.

Munster subjected Siri to over 1,600 voice tests, half in a quiet room and half on a busy Minneapolis street. In the quiet room, Siri understood requests 89 percent of the time, but she was able to accurately answer a question only 68 percent of the time. On a busy street, Siri could comprehend what people were saying 83 percent of the time, but answer a question correctly only 62 percent of the time.

This article comes from:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/why-apples-siri-is-leaving-many-iphone-users-wanting-for-more/articleshow/14992409.cms

Apple rivals need to bite the bullet on phone updates

HALF-WAY THROUGH this afternoon, my phone updated itself up with a new look. It’s a Galaxy Nexus, one of the few models of Android phone that Google licenses and sells directly to end-users, so when it released the new “jelly bean” version of its Android mobile operating system, the Nexus got a direct update just a few hours later.

For those who use Apple’s iPhone, such upgrades are hardly news. Most iPhone users will be getting an upgrade themselves, some time this autumn, when iOS 6 is released by the Californian company.

For the majority of Android and other smartphone users, though, updates are as rare as first-class upgrades on a flight. Phones keep the operating system software they were primed with when you first bought them and that software stays with them until they break.

Because upgrades – and the software that runs on phones – used to be entirely controlled by the phone companies, it is still common for them to manage the process of rolling out new versions, which happens once in a blue moon.

The usual reason given for such control is that it is their network, so devices connecting to it should only run software that they control or understand. In truth, though, phone companies don’t really seem to care. Even security flaws barely merit an update.

Phone companies have no real incentive to push upgrades to their users, as long as you keep paying for calls and occasionally splash out on a new phone.

Google’s Galaxy Nexus is sold outside the traditional mobile phone contract. Mine is plugged into T-Mobile’s US mobile phone network, but it is not beholden to that company. Instead, it gets its upgrades from the heart of the Googleplex itself, just as the iPhones pick up their software from Apple direct.

In its original vision of Android, Google didn’t intend to sell its own phones. It also didn’t envisage rolling out its own updates. The whole point of Android was that it would be open source, so that mobile providers and manufacturers could mint their own variations on the original Android theme.

But, as with so much Android, Google has quickly realised the limitations of this strategy in comparison to Apple’s iron-tight grip on its iPhone ecology.

The biggest issue, as developers have repeatedly noted to Google, is fragmentation. Initially, coders worried that there would be too many varieties of Android phone. Programming for different screen sizes, hardware keyboards versus touchscreens and processor speeds would mean not only more complex programs, but also the expensive requirement for coders to test on a wide (and growing) range of hardware.

The limitations of Apple’s “you can have an iPhone in any size as long as it’s Steve’s” meant that its app makers have had very little variation to cope with.

Google software design anticipated this challenge to a certain extent and coders (with the exception of game-makers, who tend to push phone hardware to its limits) have learned to live with a jungle of alternative Android implementations.

No, Google’s real problem has been with version fragmentation. When Apple upgrades the operating system behind the iPhone, every iPhone that’s capable of running the new software gets that new version. The vast majority of iPhones walk lockstep into the future.

Most Android devices get left behind by phone manufactures and mobile companies. There are still original Android 1.0 users out there. More than two-thirds of the Android devices being used are four versions older than the latest iteration running on my phone.

With that kind of spread, developers are loathe to depend on new Android features that will only be usable on a few phones. Nobody is going to use the fancier parts of Google’s “cloud messaging” feature, for instance, because only a tiny number of Android users will have an operating system that supports that.

Most of the new features of Android dodge this problem by being slicker versions of old features. A “jelly bean” phone feels faster and has fancier notifications, but it’s one thing for Google to introduce brand new features and quite another to get developers to use them.

That would not matter, except that Google is facing serious competition in the mobile marketplace this year. Apple is determined to keep upgrading its phone and tablet software. Microsoft is, finally, due to make an appearance in the market with its advanced new mobile software. To compete, Google needs to cat herd all of its Android manufacturers and developers into the future – and to do that, it needs modern Android versions running on a large numbers of phones out there.

Google could just give up on both phone network operators and manufacturers. It already owns Motorola. While Google’s management have promised to keep a Chinese wall between the Android team and Motorola’s mobile division, it could decide to drop such niceties in order to compete with Apple, which has no such qualms, and Microsoft, with which a scared Nokia is tightly hugging for security right now.

Motorola this week announced a cheap Android phone that could be just the ticket: the Atrix HD. It is running an old version of Android, with no indication of when it might upgrade. Google can’t even cat herd its own set of cats.

This article comes from:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0712/1224319858525.html

Apple's iPod Nano could return to taller form, rumor says

If there's one chameleon in Apple's iPod lineup, it's a close race between the iPod Nano and the Shuffle. Both have changed dramatically over the course of their respective product life spans, and a new rumor says it could happen all over again to the next Nano.

According to Japanese Apple-focused blog Macotakara, Apple's next iPod Nano will return to an earlier form of sorts, reverting back to the tried-and-true "oblong style" form factor. As a frame of reference, the current Nano is more like an iPod Shuffle, just with a touch screen on the front instead of click controls.

One curious thing about this rumor is what this means to the cottage industry that's been built up around using the iPod Nano as a watch. There have been numerous third-party accessories that use the iPod Nano as a digital time piece, so much so that Apple made it a point in one of its last major iPod Nano software updates to add additional faces.

The benefit in all this, Macotakara offers, is that the device will sport a dedicated home button, and run an iTunes app, presumably meaning it will have a fully working version of iOS. However, that would also put into question where such a device would fit in with Apple's iPod line, considering its proximity to the iPod Touch.

Apple's last major update to the iPod Nano was the move to a square, touch-screen form factor in September, 2010. Apple then quietly reduced the price of the 8GB model at its iPhone 4S event last year from $149 down to $129. The company typically updates its iPod lineup in the fall, just when school is beginning and just ahead of the holidays.

Macotakara's report, which was spotted by 9to5mac, contradicts a series of leaked photos that began in April of last year, depicting a sixth-generation style iPod Nano with a built-in camera. The camera was a feature included in an earlier generation of the Nano, which was nixed when the device was shrunk down.

This article comes from:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57469637-37/apples-ipod-nano-could-return-to-taller-form-rumor-says/?part=rss&subj=crave&tag=title