Nokia sues Apple again, this time over iPad
Late in 2009, leading telecommunications company Nokia sued Apple, alleging that the iPhone infringed upon ten of Nokia's patents, most of which revolved around the fundamental wireless technologies used in the device.
Now, the Finnish company has filed another suit against Apple, this time in the Federal District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin. There, Nokia is accusing Apple of five additional counts of patent infringement in both the iPhone and the iPad 3G.
Samsung releases Bada SDK in advance of first Bada phone
ComScore's most recent MobiLens market data ranks Samsung as the top mobile original equipment manufacturer in the United States with 21.9% of the mobile market, a tie with Motorola.
Samsung is attempting to use its lead to advance its own open mobile operating system, called Bada, which the company launched back in November. In February, Samsung started showing off its first device running Bada, the 3.3-inch super AMOLED-eqipped Wave, but the device has not been released yet.
Google Goggles expands to include optical text translation
Google Goggles, the optical search tool released for Android last December received a significant update today which improves the app in a number of ways; including giving it the ability to recognize and translate languages.
Currently, the optical character recognition of Goggles is limited to five languages with Latin-based alphabets: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. When you snap a picture of text, the app scans the content and offers a translation window where you can choose what language you want the text to be translated into. In Google's mobile blog today, Software Engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said the goal is to eventually be able to read non-Latin languages like Chinese, Arabic and Hindi.
Sprint announces $25 unlimited data plan, new pay-by-the-minute network
Mobile network operator Sprint has been wrangling the prepaid wireless business since well before its acquisition of Virgin Mobile USA last year. While the network consistently lost "postpaid" contract subscribers, it consistently gained more prepaid customers than any other major mobile carrier.
In the company's earnings call two weeks ago, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said "I think we're really going to start to pick up prepaid momentum in the second half of the year … Prepaid, in terms of its percentage of the overall wireless industry, is going to grow, so our turnaround is really focused on prepaid becoming a more and more important part of the company and doing better in that market."
The first international non-Latin top level domains go live
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally begun to enable top-level domain names based on non-Latin alphabets. The first three country code top level domains (ccTLD) written in Arabic script are now available for use.
The three new top-level domains are: "Al-Saudiah," "Emarat, and "Misr," and they allow site names to be written right-to-left.
Clearwire adds 19 more cities in 4G expansion, two new 4G phones
WiMAX is indeed gaining momentum as the United States' first and only commercially available "4G" wireless technology.
In its earnings report for Q1 2010 today, network operator Clearwire added 19 cities to its list of upcoming 4G deployments: Nashville, Tennessee; Daytona, Orlando and Tampa, Florida; Rochester and Syracuse, New York; Merced, Modesto, Stockton, and Visalia, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Eugene, Oregon; and Yakima and Tri-Cities, Washington.
Review: Major League Baseball's Roku channel is not a complete solution
Owners of the Roku Netflix set-top box have had an MLB.tv icon on their home screen since August 2009. The logo on the screen originally included a message saying the service would launch with the beginning of baseball's spring training season. MLB.tv subscribers would pay either $99.95 or $119.95 per year to have access to full streaming versions of available pre-season, and then every in-season Major League Baseball game as they happened, with local blackout exceptions. For big baseball fans, it is an excellent package.
But when spring training started, the service was still being beta tested and non-testers couldn't access it. Then the service's opening message changed to say it would be ready to launch on opening day. But when opening day rolled around, the MLB.tv message on the Roku home screen changed again to "Tune in in Mid-April."
Don't be fooled, Microsoft's KIN is not just for teenagers
Starting tomorrow (May 6th,) Microsoft's new KIN phones will be available through Verizon Wireless' website, and in stores on May 13th. The first two devices, logically named KIN one and KIN two, are geared toward the always-connected individual interested in social networking and sharing. Their feature sets fall somewhere between feature phone and smartphone, but the user experience is completely new.
That experience could actually be described as a combination of Windows Live and Zune. Users sync all of their social network and exchange data with their Windows Live account and with their cloud-based KIN Studio, which keeps an archive of all the pictures and videos they share.
Pay attention! It's a pivotal time for 4G
The last two major WiMAX expansions for Sprint and Clearwire were somewhat understated events. At the end of March, Houston became the seventh Texas city to have its 4G network switched on; and last weekend, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Reading and York launched their networks to cover southeastern Pennsylvania.
Clearwire expects more than 80 markets to be completed this year, but has not officially announced which markets these will be in a comprehensive list. Last year, the company said the rollout would include Boston, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC; and at CTIA this year, it added Cincinnati, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis to the list.
Google tells which versions of Android are most common
The Android Team today published a snapshot of the platform which shows the versions of Android most commonly in use. Though the platform is frequently criticized for being highly fragmented, there are three versions used far more than the rest.
Out of the six supported versions of Android, it is a close three-way split between 1.5 (37.2%), 1.6 (29.4%), and 2.1 (32.4%). Version 1.1, 2.0, and 2.0.1 combined only make up 1% of Android users.
For crowdsourced music to work, legalities must be simple, says startup Musikpitch
Two weeks ago, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) held its Music Creator Conference at Los Angeles' Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. Highlights of the conference included sessions with music celebrities John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Quincy Jones, and Rupert Hine (who produced albums for Rush, Tina Turner, Howard Jones, Suzanne Vega, and dozens more).
The messages from all of these professionals, as summed up by
Paul Zollo in American Songwriter this week, were all variations of the same theme...
Windows 7 has overtaken Vista in OS share, says study
Denver-based technology research firm Janco Partners, Inc. today released a study profiling the international browser and operating system market.
The study shows that in the less than seven months that Windows 7 has been available, it has already attained a 14.8% share of the international OS market.
Apple says iPad is a million-seller
In the 28 days between April 3 and April 30, Apple sold one million iPads, the Cupertino company announced this morning.
"One million iPads in 28 days -- that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone," said oft-quoted Apple CEO Steve Jobs today. "Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."
Mint.com: 'Android is just more logical'
Web-based financial planning service Mint.com had an iPhone app available a full year before it was acquired by Mountain View software company Intuit in late 2009. Today, the company has finally released a version of its personal budgeting app in the Android Market.
Like its iPhone counterpart, Mint for Android gives users mobile access to all of the banking, investment, and budgetary records that Mint.com organizes for them, but it adds features that are unique to the Android platform. These include: a home screen widget that gives a real-time view of the user's overall cash flow, a live folder dedicated to all the user's recent transactions, and the ability to make the user's Mint.com data searchable in the Quick Search box. The entire app can then be equipped with a four-digit PIN number so the user's financial data won't be exposed if his phone is lost or stolen.
Sarah Palin hacker convicted
In late 2008, David C. Kennel obtained the Yahoo e-mail address of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and then used simple deduction to answer the "challenge question" that would grant access to her password and subsequently to her e-mail inbox.
Kennel, son of Tennessee Democratic state representative Mike Kennel, got access to Palin's Yahoo e-mail account while the former Governor was on the Republican presidential campaign trail with Arizona Senator John McCain. Kennel posted some of the contents of Palin's e-mail account online, including both "work-related" and personal information, such as the mobile phone number of her daughter Bristol Palin.
Tim's Bio
Tim Conneally was born into dumpster tech. His father was an ARPANET research pioneer and equipped his kids with discarded tech gear, second-hand musical instruments, and government issue foreign language instruction tapes. After years of building Frankenstein computers from rubbish and playing raucous music in clubs across the country (and briefly on MTV) Tim grew into an adult with deep, twisted roots and an eye on the future. He most passionately covers mobile technology, user interfaces and applications, the science and policy of the wireless world, and watching different technologies shrink and converge.
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