Posts filed under News

With Apple attempting to sue the pants off HTC and in the process starve the mobile Web from any form of competition, innovation, and, perish the thought – choice, Google has waded into the battle by backing its Android OS and manufacturers to the hilt.

In response to Apple’s pitiful law suit, Google said:

“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it.”

This is cracking news. Apple’s actions, both with its lawsuit against HTC and its over-zealous censorship of the app store, are appalling. Mobile choice in the US has always been restricted, and competition and consmuer choice has suffered as a result. The US mobile phone market has traditionally been at least a year behind Europe as a direct result.

Just when all that looked to change, with Google, Apple and Palm leading the smartphone challenge and looking to dominate the next wave of mobile devices, Apple at a stroke aims to kill the innovation stone dead. Its lawsuit aims to stop HTC, and, by extension, Android, from being sold in the US.

If they succeed, then the only smartphones left in the US will be the iPhone and Palm. Nokia has no carrier deals in the US for its high-end phones; Blackberry is too business-oriented to be classed as a smartphone in the same way the iPhone and Android phones are; and the most successful Windows Mobile phones are made by HTC!

So if the US wants to keep on seeing restricted consumer choice and limited innovation in its mobile phone market, then let Apple do its worse.

I’m not sure what’s more ironic: That Apple under Steve Jobs turned into the very Big Brother figure its original iconic Apple Mac adverts sought to destroy; that the most capitalist market in the world is the least free as far as mobile phones are concerned; or that Google, the one company people associate most with being the next Big Brother with all the data it has on its all, is actually the White Knight in the story!

How weird the mobile world can be at times!

[Source: Engadget Mobile, HTC.cc]

Back in 2001, Microsoft laid siege to the Web. Thanks to its dominant desktop position, it dominated the browser market with IE6 and ultimately killed off its competitors. The result was years of stagnation, a willful disregard of Web standards, and a Web development environment that actively discouraged any innovation throughout the Noughties.

Today, Apple is doing the same to the mobile Web. Not by a dominant market position, but by a lawsuit for patent infringement that it’s thrown at HTC.

And not just any old lawsuit. If they win, Apple will get a permanent injunction against HTC, which will bar them from importing or selling touchscreen smartphones in the US, along with triple damages and maximum interest for all such smartphones they’ve already sold.

In other words – the end of HTC, the end of Android, and the end of any innovation in the smartphone market.

This is is huge. This has the potential to be more damaging than Microsoft ever thought of being.

Read on for how Apple is threatening the mobile Web in the most aggressive attack yet made.

This year, we’ve been treated to the Google Nexus One, HTC Supersonic, Nokia X6 (out today), Sony Ericsson Vivaz and X10, and a pair of Palms, to name just some of the highlights.

And it’s still only January!

I say this because today, the whole mobile phone and gadget industryies are battening down their hatches ready for the big one – the Apple Event of the Year, where Steve Jobs will be announcing not just that Apple tablet thing, but also (possibly) the iPhone version 4.

Consequently, there isn’t a peep to be heard from the rest of the mobile phone industry, as they know any new announcement now would be lost in a blizzard of hype in seconds!

It’s exciting stuff, though. Will the iPhone 4 herald a new chapter in the iPhone’s history, able to take on the new challenge threatened by Android? Or will it just be an incremental upgrade, with the Apple Tablet taking centre stage? Will Steve Jobs even mention the iPhone, for that matter (of course he will!)

We’ll know tomorrow at 6pm GMT. Stick with us, as we’ll be live-blogging the event again (albeit from across the pond!), focusing on the mobile news. We’ll also be tweeting all the important juicy bits, so follow us if you can’t make it to your PC in time.

After all this excitement, surely next month will be calmer (no wait, next month’s MWC 2010!!!)

Spotify have confirmed they have no intention of developing a Spotify app on the Maemo platform. This is bad news for owners of the Nokia N900, and shows one of the dangers of choosing a phone with a limited market share.

As I’ve been saying for ages, only the most popular mobile phone platforms will attract developers, and the platforms with poor developer support will face a death spiral of decreasing demand as few companies develop their apps on it – which in turn feeds reduced demand as no-one wants a smartphone with no apps!

Nokia will drop Symbian on its top-end N-Series phones in favour of Maemo – that’s the latest rumour flying around the tech blogosphere after a marketing manager at a Nokia N900 meet-up said yesterday that Symbian “…would not be used on N-Series between now and 2012.”

This is huge news. Nokia have spent a fortune on Symbian, both in extending the operating system, and in buying Symbian – the company – for 264 million Euros back in June 2008. To admit that Maemo will be used in its high end phones in the future is a tacit admission that Symbian has fallen behind in the smartphone race and can no longer support the kind of features that smartphone users have come to expect.

More details after the jump.

In an effort to prove that the words “Sony” and “Ericsson” are synonymous with “arse” and “elbow”, and that the two are on as intimate terms with each other as that well-worn phrase would imply, a new rumour has emerged that Sony Ericsson is working on a new Android smartphone just days after the Chief Executive, Hideki Komiyama, told Reuters that it would be “some time” before such a phone was launched.

“It does require a lot of evaluation, as well as a lot of testing, a lot of acceptance from a consumer viewpoint, and there is still some time to go,” he said.

If Sony Ericsson’s latest results are any indicator (a loss of ovr $300 million in the last 3 months), there clearly isn’t “some time to go”, so the latest news that a new Android phone is on its way this year should be cause for some relief for Sony Ericsson fans.

So what will this new phone offer?…

Not content with the Nokia N97 that was announced on Tuesday, we hear news that Nokia have even more announcements up their sleeve. The first is a certainty – actually, they’ve already announced it! – the second, is a little more unclear!

The first is something of a shock – it’s the Nokia Home Music system, a dedicated wireless music streamer pitched directly at the Logitech Squeezebox.

Seems Nokia’s going into the music business in a big way, and we can only assume they’re trying to usurp the dominance of Apples iTunes store (and thus sever peoples reliance on the iPhone) with an enhanced version of their Comes With Music music download service.

Either that or Nokia also has 10% time just like Google, and one of their engineers came up with something bloody amazing!

The second announcement rumour comes from Scoble, who has either got his days wrong, or knows something we don’t!

More details after the jump.

If you thought camera phones were old hat, think again. Samsung has announced that its shifted 10 million 5 megapixel+ camera phones so far this year, and expects to ship 13 million by the year’s end.

Gartner, meanwhile,has forecasted that 110 million 5 megapixel+ camera phones will ship globally next year, ramping up to 330 million by 2011.

Part of this is obviously to do with the fact that a high quality camera phone is desirable in its right, but it’s also due to the decreasing cost of developing such phones. In 2007, for example, 5 megapixel+ camera phones were extremely expensive high-end affairs, with the Nokia N95 leading the way. In 2008, 5 megapixels has reached the high mid-range market, with 8 megapixels becoming the norm for the top-end phones.

When I first saw these pictures, I thought “blimey, now that really is a camera phone.” Actually, what I was really thinking was “is that a phone, or just a camera?!” I then noticed the word “Cyber-Shot” emblazoned on it, and the title “Sony T700″, and I got all excited. A new Sony Ericsson CyberShot phone that’s never been seen before? Better still, a new Sony Cyber-Shot phone, sans Ericsson?

Alas, no, it’s none of these things. It’s another fake Chinese phone, and this one isn’t even sure of what it is either. It’s a camera phone alright, it’s just that it doesn’t quite know how good a camera phone it is.

Google have updated their Android SDK to version 0.9, which features new tweaks, a more refined look, and, more significantly, just one digit short of version 1.0: the full release.

So Android really is counting down to its release date, with the HTC Dream set to be the first Android phone on the market. Rumours currently put an October 2008 release date on the HTC Dream, with T-Mobile being the carrier.

Previous HTC smartphones have all been based on Windows Mobile, but the company has shown its ambitions by developing its own user interface on top of Windows Mobile.

With the HTC Dream, HTC are again showing off their pioneering ambitions, being the first to enter the Android market in a direct challenge to the iPhone and other Windows Mobile devices.

If you’re interested in seeing what the HTC Dream’s user interface will look like, check out the Android video after the jump.

[Source: Engadget Mobile]