News tagged ‘Droid’

This Wednesday HTC accused Apple in infringing of five their patents. The countersuit was filed with the International Trade Commission and now asks to halt the importation of the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad into America.

Vice President of HTC in North America Jason Mackenzie says the action was taken to protect its partners and customers.

"HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible".

The press release given by HTC underlines that the company created the most advanced smartphones in the world for the last 10 years.

At this moment there are twelve HTC phones available in America, including the HTC HD2 for T-Mobile, the HTC EVO 4G for Sprint and the Droid Incredible for Verizon.

Still there is no information revealed about the patents that are involved in the suit.

Recently The Wall Street Journal had reported that Verizon collaborates with Google to create new tablet device that will compete with the iPad. The information was confirmed by Lowell McAdam, who is a Verizon CEO, in his interview to the paper.

"What do we think the next big wave of opportunities are? We're working on tablets together, for example. We're looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience."

Still there were no information revealed about the device's hardware and its manufacturers. McAdam said that collaboration with Google has already led to success in company's efforts to combat the iPhone with Android-based handsets, so he's looking forward for the same result in creating new tablet device.

Verizon CEO also told that the company now will close the gap with AT&T which offers exclusive only 3G data plans for the iPad in the USA. In early 2011 Verizon will present 4G-capable device along with its new high-speed network, which by the end of 2010 will cover 25 to 30 cities. It is planned that there will be more price plans for every selling device, and it may be more expensive than current offers of other carriers who have 3G network.

AT&T seems to not support such policy (at least the company have been repeatedly denying such information), though its CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the industry will be proposing variable pricing once.

"For the industry, we will progressively move towards more of what I call variable pricing. The heavy consumers will pay different than the lower consumers."

Yesterday we posted information about smartphone sales in the last quarter 2010, and as you remember Android-based phones become more popular than iPhones. Now it became known that Apple's spokespeople commented on this data.

In its research NPD group studied over 150,000 completed surveys, that were undertaken online every month in America. Apple's representative Natalie Harrison thinks it is not enough data to make precise conclusions:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide."

It is unknown why Harrison mentioned iPod touch when discussion was about smartphones market, but according to Reunters last week Harrison had referred to the IDC research. The latter also reveals that Apple losing its positions, but this time worldwide, with Nokia and BlackBerry sales ahead in first and second spots respectively.

NPD Group had recently revealed their new study, which shows that iPhone OS became the second most selling OS last quarter in US. To be precise 28% of all handsets sold were Android phones, and iPhones made only 21%. Research In Motion's Blackberries hold 36 percent of market.

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According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

This spring quarter Motorola had reportedly sold 8.5 million phones, which makes it the second biggest US phone maker after Apple that sold 8.8 million iPhones in the same period.

According to a Forbes report, one year ago Motorola had better results - 14,7 million phones sold. But the profit this year is down only by 9% because the company had changed its strategy and now successfully sells more sophisticated smartphones instead of cheap phones.

Motorola had best selling results four years ago when it was selling Razr model. In 2006 it was releasing 46 million phones per quarter. But these days mobile providers push companies to deliver cheap phones and because of it Motorola's profits are falling down.

The company  had big plans on its Milestone/Droid device which ships with Android OS. It was heavily promoted by Motorola and Verizon as the best Android phone available, but the company sold only 2.3 million devices in the spring quarter, which is only 27% of the total phones sold.

As you remember, this Thursday Steve Jobs wrote a letter about his thoughts on Flash. In responce to such a public attack Adobe decided to give its employees mobile phones running on Android OS which support Flash.

CNet reports it has information from three sources close to Adobe that the company is going to give Android phones, but the exact model is not specified yet (though HTC phones and Google Nexus One were mentioned). There is also no information about whether Adobe is going to give devices to all 8,600 employees or just to developers.

Flash 10.1 will be presented in May at Google's I/O conference. Every its attendee will receive Motorola Droid or Nexus One from Google.

Several web-resources including Gizmodo and TechCrunch confirmed that HP stops working on its "HP Slate" tablet device. The decision is caused by this week's deal that will end soon with acquiring Palm. Now Hewlett-Packard is rumored to integrate Palm's WebOS instead Microsoft WIndows in their tablet (which can take a year or more) and reconsider using Intel-based hardware in it because of its excessive power requirements.

So now it looks like HP changes it course and is going to convert webOS to a tablet OS and compete with Google's Android and Chrome on the market of operational systems.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also cancelled working on its own booklet-style tablet device called "Courier". Gizmodo sources say the project will be no longer supported. Anyway, the device had never been publicly announced, though it could be very interesting with its two touch-sensitive screens in a foldable format and handwriting recognition input.

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported that this year Apple is going to charge companies 1$ million for iAds on its mobile devices. Citing an unknown but reliable source familiar with the matter those companies that want to become a part of the iAds launch will pay $10 million to be first in the door.

The pricing policy of iAds is pretty simple. Every time user sees an ad the advertiser is charged a penny. If he's tapping the banner, Apple charges $2. So $1 million ad buy will provoke a big amount of its views and user taps.

In addition to a higher price Apple wants to take more control over marketing campaigns of its clients. But still it doesn't reduce companies' interest in iAds:

"Despite the high price, ad executives at agencies from Boston to New York and San Francisco to Los Angeles have crowded into conference rooms in recent weeks to listen to the tech company's pitch for iAd".

One of the advertisements that is already developed is an ad for Nike's Air Jordan basketball shoes. It includes iAd logo and animated banner. If you select it, you'll see an interactive store locator, special videoclip and exclusive offers taking place at local stores. This iAd was also shown by Apple on its iPhone OS 4 preview event.

Some experts think Apple's appearance at the market of mobile advertisement may convince some other selling ads companies to switch to other mobile platforms (for example, Google Android).

With a growing popularity of apps for Apple devices advertisers and developers see iAds as a potential opportunity to reach a wide audience and raise more money on it.

Android phones have an advantage over Apple's iPhone in navigation, because Google includes their free nice Navigation program, while Apple doesn't have built in navigation in Maps. Here are some good news for iPhone users:

Google confirmed at a London press conference that it plans to bring free satnav to other smartphone platforms, including the iPhone, although it wouldn’t say when.

Unlike TomTom or iGo software, Google’s satnav software doesn’t store maps on the device but downloads them on-demand from the internet. However "Google Maps pre-caches the entire route," said Mobile Maps product manager, Steve Lee. "It needs a data connection when you ask for navigation. But while driving to your destination, if you intermittently lose the connection, it will still carry on. As long as you stay on the route."

Users can choose from several viewing options: standard maps and directions, satellite view and access to Street View, plus live traffic data. Sound like a good deal.

The same guy who two years ago ported Linux 2.6 kernel to the iPhone has yesterday posted a video of Adroid OS running on iPhone. He is a member of iPhone Dev-team and his nickname is Planetbeing.

What is more important, Android has been ported to iPhone with ability to choose what OS you'd like to work with on a boot. This was achieved by OpeniBoot bootloader, which is also developed by Planetbeing.

As it can be understood from the video, this is the alpha-version of Android for iPhone though most of the functions (such as playing music, making calls, browsing Internet) are working fine. The volume buttons serve as the "home" and "call" buttons.

Planetbeing has also posted image that can be downloaded here, but he also states this version works fine only with iPhone 2G. Porting to iPhone 3G must be simple, but there may be problems with delivering Android to iPhone 3GS.

And we're back now with a new e-mail reply by Steve Jobs, received from a TechCrunch reader. He was interested why Apple doesn't apply parental control to apps released in AppStore but simply denies accepting it. Jobs' answer was suddenly long, and he recommended to buy an Android-based phone.

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MOTO Labs conducted a new touchscreen test with a number of the most popular smartphones: Apple iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm 2. The results were expected - iPhone has a first place and is followed by Google Nexus One.

The test was made by 7mm and 4mm robotic fingers for accordingly medium and light touch imitation. Moto Labs reports iPhone screen to have straight and accurate lines but with weaknesses at the edges of the panel. Nexus One with Droid Eris has a "solid performance". The results are almost the same because both of the devices are manufactured by HTC. As you remember, Apple filed a lawsuit about infringing their touchscreen-related patents earlier this month.

The results for the other smartphones can be seen on the picture below.

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California-based company MicroUnity System Engineering filed a lawsuit against Apple, Acer, HTC, LG, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, Spring, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and AT&T. It accuses these companies in infringement of 14(!) separate patents about mobile processors.

The lawsuit was filed few days ago in a District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a place where patent complaints are filed commonly in hopes to get a favorable outcome. The devices named in the document are iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (32 Gb and 64 Gb versions), Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Nokia N900.

The patents that were named in the suit are listed below:

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It seem like Apple have always been concentrated on Macs and iPhones/iPods/iPads, so their Apple TV product may be considered more like a hobby. But the company's main rival thinks of  it as of another field to work on.

Intel, Sony and Google created a team to work on the device called GoogleTV. The latter already has its prototype. The New York Times says it consists of Intel's Atom processor and Android OS with Chrome web-browser. The project has been under development for a few months and there is still a work to do, but preliminary the device will be introduced this summer. To test their set-top box Google cooperates with Dish Network.

The NYT's source say:

“Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there.”

It sounds plausible, because GoogleTV device is planned to allow users to browse the Internet, watch YouTube videos, check out Hulu content and even run Web apps and games.