Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android

“The case of Apple v. Samsung shows no sign of abating,” Paul M. Barrett reports for Businessweek. “Apple returned in February to the federal courthouse in San Jose to sue Samsung again, claiming the Korean manufacturer ‘slavishly copied’ Apple. An unrelenting recidivist, in Apple’s portrayal, Samsung has ‘continued to flood the market with copycat products, including at least 18 new infringing products released over the last eight months.’”
“The battle also signals a broader conflict pitting Apple against multiple mobile-device manufacturers in some three dozen legal and regulatory actions pending in 10 countries,” Barrett reports. “Beyond Samsung, Apple’s notable antagonists include Motorola Mobility and HTC. As Silicon Valley sophisticates underscore, however, the phone and tablet makers are mere proxies for another foe—Android, the operating system Google gives away to manufacturers. Google employs a come-one, come-all business model radically at odds with Apple’s and, in the late Steve Jobs’s view, existentially threatening to his company.”
Barrett reports, “In the last 18 months of his life, Jobs, who died on Oct. 5 at age 56, was obsessed with crushing Android. He explained to his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the litigation against device manufacturers was meant to communicate an unmistakable message: ‘Google, you f–king ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft.’ Jobs swore he would ‘spend my last dying breath’ and ‘every penny’ in Apple’s coffers ‘to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.’”
Much more in the extensive full article here.

Transparent, flexible ’3D’ memory chips may be the next big thing in iPhones, iPads

“New memory chips that are transparent, flexible enough to be folded like a sheet of paper, shrug off 1,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures — twice as hot as the max in a kitchen oven — and survive other hostile conditions could usher in the development of next-generation flash-competitive memory for tomorrow’s keychain drives, cell phones and computers, a scientist reported March 27,” ScienceDaily reports.
“Speaking at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, he said devices with these chips could retain data despite an accidental trip through the drier — or even a voyage to Mars. And with a unique 3-D internal architecture, the new chips could pack extra gigabytes of data while taking up less space,” ScienceDaily reports. “‘These new chips are really big for the electronics industry because they are now looking for replacements for flash memory,’ said James M. Tour, Ph.D., who led the research team. ‘These new memory chips have numerous advantages over the chips today that are workhorses for data storage in hundreds of millions of flash, or thumb drives, smart phones, computers and other products. Flash has about another six or seven years in which it can be built smaller, but then developers hit fundamental barriers.’”
“Current touch screens are made of indium tin oxide and glass, both of which are brittle and can break easily. However, plastic containing the memory chips could replace those screens with the added bonuses of being flexible while also storing large amounts of memory, freeing up space elsewhere in a phone for other components that could provide other services and functions. Alternatively, storing memory in small chips in the screen instead of within large components inside the body of a phone could allow manufacturers to make these devices much thinner,” ScienceDaily reports. “The easy-to-fabricate memory chips are patented, and Tour is talking to manufacturers about embedding the chips into products.”
Read more in the full article here.

Apple working on new device with 5-inch Retina display, says source

“Apple is developing a new device with a 5-inch Retina display, according to Japanese site Macotakara, citing a Chinese source,” iPodNN reports.
“The new hardware will allegedly ship in 2013, and have a resolution of either 1280×960 or 1600×960,” iPodNN reports. “Apple is also said to be working with LCD suppliers to prepare for the device, but even the category it might fall under is still unknown.”
iPodNN reports, “Apple could theoretically be working on a larger iPod touch, or the long-rumored ‘mini’ iPad, though in the latter case recent reports have specified a 7.85-inch screen.
Read more in the full article here.

Google proposes Android revenue for Oracle; Oracle rebuffs offer as too low; trial starts April 16th

“Google proposed to pay Oracle a percentage of Android revenue – [0.5 percent of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015 percent on a second patent until it expires in April 2018] – if Oracle could prove patent infringement of the mobile operating technology at an upcoming trial, but Oracle rebuffed the offer as too low, according to a court filing late on Tuesday,” Dan Levine reports for Reuters.
“Oracle Corp sued Google Inc in 2010, claiming the Internet search leader’s Android technology infringed Oracle’s Java patents,” Levine reports. “A trial is set for April 16 before U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco.”
Levine reports, “Oracle also sued for alleged copyright infringement. Oracle has contended that Google should pay hundreds of millions of dollars on that claim, which is separate from the patents… Oracle said… [it] would not give up the possibility of winning an injunction against Android. ‘Oracle cannot agree to unilaterally give up its rights, on appeal and in this court, to seek full redress for Google’s unlawful conduct,’ the company said in the filing.”
Read more in the full article here.

Microsoft and Apple embrace OpenStreetMap

“One of the many areas where Google is far ahead of Microsoft is mapping, with Google Maps by far the dominant map service on the Internet,” Preston Gralla reports for Computerworld. “Microsoft is employing an under-the-radar approach to fighting back, lending big support and big dollars to the open source map project OpenStreetMap. It looks as if the tactic is starting to pay off.”
“The New York Times reported recently that a variety of companies have started to defect from using Google Maps because of the high fees charged for the service, and instead have turned to getting mapping data for free from OpenStreetMap,” Gralla reports. “The mobile social media service FourSquare has jumped ship, and for iPhoto, the iOS photo management app, Apple has switched from Google to OpenStreetMap.”
Gralla reports, “Behind the scenes, spurring all this on, is Microsoft. Microsoft hired OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast to work for Bing as Principal Architect for Bing Mobile. Coast works on both Bing and OpenStreetMap… The Times reports that Coast is working on developing open-source software that will make it simpler for developers to get data from and use OpenStreetMap. And it also reports that Microsoft has been donating “valuable map data” to OpenStreetMap. Bing also uses OpenStreetMap data for its mapping service.”
Read more in the full article here.

How much Apple stock is too much?

“Like many Apple fanboys (and fangirls), David Howard owns an iPhone, iPod and an iPad — not to mention a sizable chunk of the company’s shares, which comprise about 25% of his portfolio,” Reshma Kapadia reports for SmartMoney. “And the Austin-based mechanical engineer would like to add to his investment, but his financial adviser is trying to talk him out of it.”
“It is a message many financial advisers are preaching, even if clients don’t want to hear it,” Kapadia reports. “Some say they have had clients who rarely comment on portfolio strategies call to complain when an adviser sold Apple shares.”
Kapadia reports, “Amid the near unconditional love from analysts and fund managers for the world’s most valuable company — and the consumers who adore all-things Apple — some financial advisers are questioning how much of a good thing is too much. They say many of their clients are overloaded with Apple shares, not just through individual stock but also through other holdings as fund managers have piled in.”
“To be sure, most investing pros — including the advisers trimming shares — remain big believers in Apple’s long-term growth prospects. Plus, the company’s decision last week to begin paying a dividend of $2.65 a share arguably makes the stock even more attractive to long-term investors and retirees,” Kapadia reports. “But the problem, pros say, is that clients’ growing positions in Apple means less-diversified portfolios.”
Read more in the full article here.

U.S. elections: Time for investors to worry?

“Investors have yet to break a sweat over November’s U.S. elections. That’s likely to change soon,” Steven C. Johnson writes for Reuters. “Investment strategists say the contests are among the most important in recent memory: a new government will need to tackle the deficit and start containing the national debt or the United States risks further credit rating downgrades that could erode the dominance of the dollar in global financial markets,” Johnson writes. “That will mean tough decisions on spending cuts and tax reform at a time when a few missteps could easily derail a fragile recovery in an economy that has only just escaped from the worst of the post-financial crisis torpor.”
Johnson asks, “So, what should investors do? What would a second Obama administration mean for tax policy? Would a Republican or even Democratic sweep be best, or can a divided White House and Congress learn how to work together again?”
Here’s a look at how to navigate four possible scenarios:
• Obama Re-Elected With Divided Or Republican Congress: If the elections yield the same political gridlock that brought the country within hours of default in 2011, financial markets could slide…
• Republican White House, Divided Congress: This outcome also worries those who fear gridlock. Even if they lose the White House, Democrats may block initiatives of a new Republican President if they hold the Senate…
• Republicans Win White House And Control Congress: Initially, markets might see a Republican sweep as by far the most pro-business result. U.S. stocks and the dollar could rally…
• Obama Re-Elected, Democrats Control Congress: This is probably the least likely scenario given the hurdles for the Democrats to regain control of the House. But just as a Republican sweep could rely too heavily on spending cuts, analysts fear this may lead to higher taxes and more regulation…
Johnson explores all four scenarios in much greater depth – along with his investment winners and losers for each – in the full article here.

PC Magazine: ‘Android tablet apps suck’; Apple’s new iPad named Editors’ Choice

“I just gave the new iPad an Editors’ Choice award for large tablets, but frankly it was a foregone conclusion,” Sascha Segan reports for PC Magazine. “”The iPad doesn’t get the award because of its hardware, lovely as the hardware is. It gets the award because its apps are generally better than the apps available for Android tablets.
“Comparing app availability is difficult. You can’t just compare the number of apps available, especially when Google won’t give a number for Android tablet apps,” Segan reports. “Finding tablet-oriented apps for Android is a hunt, a chore, and a grind… Still, though, I wanted to collect a list of popular brands and see how they compared on the Transformer Prime versus the iPad.”
Segan reports, “The problem is that the Android apps are often formatted for phones. They’ll work on tablets – barely – but they’ll be ugly, with less functionality than their iPad counterparts. Items that could be pop-down menus or swipeable content require screen reloads. Little information is displayed per page, for instance, on the eBay app. Graphics sometimes appear low-resolution, distorted (as on the CBS Sports Football app), or are overlapped by ads. The number of clicks to do things increases dramatically. I was wrong to say about Android tablets, ‘competing tablets don’t have apps [vs. iPad].’” Rather, competing tablets have apps that usually suck.”
Read more in the full article here.

Could Google+ ever have been anything but a failure?

“Could Google+ ever have been anything but a failure?” Devin Coldewey asks for TechCrunch.
“To attempt to build something new, a la Apple, with the assurance that company likes to make (‘This is the best way, which is why we made it the only way’) is not a Google strength,” Coldewey writes. “They just aren’t good at making new things. Never have been. Making existing things easier, faster, more accessible — sure. But inventing them? Not so much. So the idea that they were going to invent a new way to share should have rung alarm bells to begin with.”
“Sharing was never broken; Google merely found that they were losing a battle [for which] they had not even prepared,” Coldewey writes. “Their declaration of war was a declaration of defeat.”
“Is Google+ the iPhone to Facebook’s Palm Pilot? Surely not. Who judged that it was? That person is incompetent,” Coldewey writes. “What was Google+? A single product, made to compete with an entire ecosystem. A product, moreover, lacking the single most important ingredient: users. Now, unless you are sure that your product is far, far better than what’s out there, you are not the hawk. Steve Jobs knew he was the hawk in 2007, and he knew that what he was doing would break its prey. The look on his face while he describes the competition is one of sheer predatory glee.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.

Why was Apple CEO Tim Cook in China?

“Thanks to a quick-thinking customer who spotted him, snapped a couple photos and posted them on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, we learned Monday that Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Beijing, at least for a few hours,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Leaving aside the iconography of an Apple CEO setting foot in the world’s largest market for iOS devices, something Steve Jobs apparently never bothered to do, what do we suppose Cook was doing there?” P.E.D. wonders. “We can imagine any number of issues that might benefit from high-level face-to-face meetings between Cook — whom the Chinese press have nicknamed “Captain Cook” — and Chinese officials.”
Among them:
• China Mobile and iPhone
• Slower-than anticipated roll-out of Apple Retail Stores
• Foxconn and Apple’s supplier code of conduct
• iPad trademark in China litigation
Read more in the full article here.

How Apple is cornering the market in mobile devices

“I have been speaking with various vendors of tablets lately and more then once, the topic of Apple ‘iPodding’ them has come up,” Tim Bajarin writes for Tech.pinons. “iPodding basically refers to the fact that although Apple has had the iPod on the market for over 10 years now, they still have over 70% of the MP3 portable digital music player market. This fact is giving many of the tablet vendors nightmares. Although they see this tablet market as a very large one and believe there is room for multiple tablet vendors given the potential market size and potential world wide demand, they know very well that Apple has done a great job in cornering the MP3 player market with iPods and are afraid that Apple could do the same with tablets.”
“While all of them think that they can compete with Apple when it comes to hardware, and maybe even software, what they all pretty much know is that the secret to Apple success is that they have built their hardware and software around an integrated ecosystem based on a very powerful platform,” Bajarin writes. “And it is here where their confidence level lags and the ‘iPodding’ fears raise its head. And to be honest, this should really concern them.”
Bajarin writes, “Apple is in a most unique position in which they own the hardware, software and services and have built all of these around their eco-system platform. That means that when Apple engineers start designing a product, the center of its design is the platform. For most of Apple competitors, it is the reverse; the center of their design is the device itself, and then they look for apps and services that work with their device in hopes that this combination will attract new customers. In the end, this is Apple major advantage over their competitors and they can ride this platform in all kinds of directions… We will see this same concept repeated when they eventually release anything for the TV.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.

Apple: CEO Cook met Chinese government officials in Beijing

“Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook met Chinese government officials in Beijing on Monday, a company spokeswoman said, as the company moves ahead with an expansion of its operations in China,” Loretta Chao reports for MarketWatch.
“Cook ‘had great meetings with Chinese officials today. China is very important to us and we look forward to even greater investment and growth here,’ said Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu,” Chao reports. “She declined to give further details on the meetings.”
Read more in the full article here.

Intel and Microsoft’s secret weapon against Apple

“Intel and its partners are about to launch the biggest promotion of a new product category called Ultrabooks since the company’s Wi-Fi based Centrino launch early last decade,” Tim Bajarin writes for TIME Magazine. “And Microsoft is about to launch a major update to Windows called Windows 8 that introduces the new ‘Metro’ touch user interface. Together they are critical products for the future of each company individually.”
“For mainstream users who have had to lug around their rather bulky laptops for the last five years, they would be justified in asking Intel and the PC vendors ‘What took you so long?’ given that Apple has had their MacBook Air on the market for five years and defined what an Ultrabook should be,” Bajarin writes. “And with Windows 8 and Metro, Microsoft is also following an evolutionary path towards touch UI’s with its Metro based smart phones and soon to be Metro based tablets and PC’s. Again, consumers could ask Microsoft “What took you so long?” since Apple has had their touch UI on the iPhone for five years and on their iPads for two years.”
Bajarin writes, “I believe Intel and Microsoft have a secret weapon in the works that could win them kudos from the marketplace and be a key driver in getting users really interested in both companies again. The secret weapon is a new form factor often referred to as ‘hybrids’… But in the latter case, the design resembles more a slim laptop or Ultrabook-like casing, and the screen can be taken off and used as a tablet. I believe this latter design is the secret weapon that Microsoft and Intel can use against Apple and at least on paper, give Apple a run for its money, especially in business and enterprise. And to a lesser extent, it could be hot in some consumer segments where the keyboard is critical and users want a laptop-centered experience as well. This is where Apple’s current strategy can be challenged… If Apple applies their innovative design knowledge to create a hybrid that blends the iPad and the MacBook Air into a single device, it could have an impact on their ability to dominate this market.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.

Apple and the risks of trading 29,000 times per second

“By now anybody who reads the business pages knows that BATS Global Markets screwed up its initial public offering big time Friday by mangling trades in a bunch of stock symbols at the top of the alphabet, including Apple (AAPL) and BATS, its own stock,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Apple’s shares briefly fell by more than $55 per share,” P.E.D. reports. “BATS, which had been trading for more than $15, fell to less than 4 cents. NASDAQ quickly erased all those trades and BATS was allowed to cancel its IPO.”
P.E.D. reports, “The official explanation for what happened — or at least the one BATS and the Security Exchange Commission worked out Friday — is that software in a server covering stock symbols from A to BFZZZ went a little haywire, spitting out what are known on the Street as ‘false prints.’”
Read more in the full article here.

Amid Privacy Concerns, Apple Has Started Rejecting Apps That Access UDIDs

Amid extra scrutiny from Congress around privacy issues, Apple has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs, or identification numbers that are unique to every iPhone and iPad, this week.
Apple had already given developers a heads-up about the change more than six months ago when it said in some iOS documentation that it was going to deprecate UDIDs. But it looks like Apple is moving ahead of schedule with pressure from lawmakers and the media. It can take more than a year to deprecate features because developers need time to adjust and change their apps. A few weeks ago, some of the bigger mobile-social developers told me that Apple had reached out and warned them to move away from UDIDs.
But this is the first time Apple has issued outright rejections for using UDIDs.
“Everyone’s scrambling to get something into place,” said Victor Rubba, chief executive of Fluik, a Canadian developer that makes games like Office Jerk and Plumber Crack. “We’re trying to be proactive and we’ve already moved to an alternative scheme.” Rubba said he isn’t sending any updates until he sees how the situation shakes out in the next few days.
For those unaware, the UDID is an alphanumeric string that is unique to each Apple device. It’s currently used by mobile ad networks, game networks, analytics providers, developers and app testing systems, like TestFlight, for example.
Playhaven, which helps developers monetize more than 1,200 games across iOS and Android, said several of its customers had been rejected in the last week. The company’s chief executive Andy Yang says that developers should try and stay as flexible as possible by supporting multiple ID systems until there’s a clear replacement.
“This is definitely happening,” Yang said. “In the next month or two, this is going to have an impact on all ad networks and apps using advertising. Everybody’s trying to make their own choices about what to use instead.”
At least one of the apps that faced issues a week ago came from a publicly-traded, multibillion dollar company, I confirmed. But they declined to be named so as not to jeopardize their relationship with Apple.
So here’s what I’m hearing. Two of the 10 review teams started doing blanket rejections of apps that access UDIDs this week. Next week, that will rise to four the ten teams, and keep escalating until all 10 teams are turning down apps that are still using UDIDs.
This is a big deal because mobile ad networks use these ID numbers to make their advertising better targeted. Using UDIDs, mobile ad networks can track consumers from app to app to understand more about ads they respond to and apps they use most often.
“The UDID is essential for managing the conversion loop,” said Jim Payne, who runs a real-time bidding platform for mobile ads called MoPub and was early at leading mobile advertising network AdMob before it sold to Google for $750 million. “All the performance dollars that are spent on mobile are going to impacted by this not being there.”
At the same time, however, there are very real privacy risks tied to the widespread use of UDIDs. They’re more sensitive than cookies on the web because they can’t be cleared or deleted. And they’re tied to the most personal of devices — the phones we carry with us everywhere. Apple has been facing pressure from lawmakers in the last week about how apps can share consumer data without their knowledge. Two U.S. House representatives Henry Waxman and G. K. Butterfield sent letters to 34 iOS developers a few days ago asking about how they collect and use consumer data.
It’s still not obvious what developers will use instead. Some companies turned to the Wi-fi MAC Address, or media access control address, but it has a lot of the same privacy flaws that the UDID did. Another company Appsfire is behind an open-source solution called OpenUDID, that it hopes developers will adopt instead.
Yang and others are seeing a few developers get through approval process if they ask users for permissions first before storing their UDIDs. If so, this mirrors the approach that Facebook and Google Android take in making developers show a permissions dialog to consumers when they first install the app.
However, Yang’s not so sure that this is a good user experience or that enough consumers will say yes to make this strategy effective.
“I just don’t think the opt-in rate will be that high,” he said. “It feels like a Band-Aid solution for now.”