Wednesday 2 May 2012

02/05/2012

Nokia goes on patent offensive.


   Today amid smaller sales and growing loses, the worlds ex-largest phone manufacturer decided the time was right to follow Microsoft and Apple's lead and dive head first into the courtrooms to protect their  'intellectual property'. 

   The tear-up focuses on three companies in particular; HTC, RIM and Viewsonic. The disputes have been submitted in various German and American courts and Nokia seem genuinely convinced they will have success here, and to be fair they do have a huge history with phones so they should have a couple of solid patents. The only disappointing thing here really is that the mobile world has descended into a litigation mess and it is sad that what goes on in the courtrooms makes national TV. But, we have Apple and Microsoft to thank for that!

   A quote from Nokia's legal department explains the main issues surround; hardware capabilities that include dual function antennas, power management, and multimode radios are included here, as are software bits like application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption, and email attachment retrieval.

   “Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products. We’d rather that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions."

   Let the fight back begin!

HP regains the status as the world's largest PC seller.


   As always in the tech world, 'the world's largest PC manufacturer' is a contemptuous issue, because the statistics currently include sales of tablet PC's. Without iPad sales Apple shifted 4 million computers, with them they shifted 15million units, anyone see the issue here?

   Either way HP is back on top of the PC world, with Apple and their iPad's second. The rest of the top 5 were rounded out by Acer, Lenovo and Dell (4th, 3rd and 5th respectively). I think the rating system may change soon to reflect the emergence of tablets as their own unique group.

RIM announces its BB7 OS and BB10 are NOT compatible.


   Are you the owner of a lovely new device running BB7? Well unfortunately I may be the bringer of bad news, so please don't shoot the messenger!

   The company has announced today that they will not be able to update phones running BB7 to BB10 unfortunately. Although disappointing the news is not very surprising. The two systems are about as different as Windows and OSX so it would be a huge upheaval and that is even if they could get the newer OS to play nice on older hardware.

   The one redeeming feature of this news is that BB7 devices will be fully supported for the foreseeable future and will all get their update to BB7.1 in good time. So it's not all bad!

  PS. Don't worry RIM is making BB10 devices with QWERTY keyboards so don't panic!

In other news:

  • Motorola won it's court room cafuffle with Microsoft over H264 video standards and they have an injunction ready against Xbox's and Windows PC's but they won't be able to enact it because of Microsoft's appeal. Microsoft have said Motorola has 'broken promises' over fair and reasonable terms for other companies using intellectual property, so this chapter is not over yet!
  • Kickstarter has now raise a total of $200million from 2 million funders, so hopefulyl we'll see a few more projects come to fruition!
  • CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS 2 LANDING 13/11/2012!!!! Doesn't need explaining that one!
  • Instagram hits 50 million users.
  • Barnes and Noble have announced NFC  will be coming to Nook Tablets in the future.

And don't forget tomorrow is the big unveiling of the 'Next Galaxy' phone from Samsung, there will be a special independent post about it when the announcement lands, so keep your eyes pealed! 

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