Ericsson Extends Patent Lawsuit Against Apple to Europe
Ericsson has filed lawsuits against Apple in Germany, United Kingdom and the Netherlands after failing to reach a global licensing agreement with the company over both standard-essential and non-standardized patents.
Ericsson claims that Apple continues to sell the iPhone, iPad and other products that infringe upon its patented technologies, some related to 2G and 4G LTE standards, even though its licensing agreement expired in January.
Ericsson has been attempting to license its standard-essential patents with Apple on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND), but the two companies have failed to reach an agreement following over two years of negotiations. Unable to resolve the situation outside of the courtroom, Ericsson has since filed patent lawsuits against the iPhone maker in the United States, and now Europe, for mediation by the courts.
“Apple continues to profit from Ericsson’s technology without having a valid license in place,” said Kasim Alfalahi, Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Ericsson. “Our technology is used in many features and functionality of today’s communication devices. We are confident the courts in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands will be able to help us resolve this matter in a fair manner.”
Ericsson, the world’s largest provider of mobile network equipment, originally filed two complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission and seven complaints with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Apple earlier this year. In late March, the ITC agreed to investigate the patent infringement claims, involving 41 wireless-related patents.
Apple originally filed suit against Ericsson in January, arguing that it was demanding excessive royalties for patents not essential to LTE standards. Ericsson, which holds over 35,000 patents, countersued in a Texas courtroom just hours later, seeking an estimated $250 million to $750 million in royalties per year for Apple to continue licensing its patented wireless technologies.
Apple Watch Uses 28-Nanometer Samsung Processor
Since the Apple Watch was released on April 24, several teardowns from iFixit, Chipworks, and ABI Research have divulged information on the inner workings of the device, detailing everything from battery capacity to the manufacturers who created the miniaturized parts for the device.
A report last week took a deep look at the S1 chip that runs the Apple Watch, pointing towards 512GB of RAM, a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, an accelerometer/gyrometer from STMicroelectronics, and today further investigation from Chipworks (via Ars Technica) has revealed 30 individual components inside the 26mm x 28mm S1 chip, a feat Chipworks calls “quite an accomplishment.”
Apple and/or their suppliers have designed and manufactured a 26 mm x 28 mm package that is very unique. Let’s consider its construction for a moment. We have a common motherboard to which all of the components (wafer scale packages, PoPs, BGAs, etc.) have been attached. The entire motherboard, with all of its components, is then overmolded with a packaging compound containing silica or alumina spheres suspended in a resin. We see this same type of material in conventional IC packaging, but we have never observed this being used over a 26 mm x 28 mm motherboard.
Among the more interesting discoveries Chipworks has made is the manufacturing process for the APL0778 application processor (CPU/GPU) on the S1 chip. It was made with Samsung’s 28 nanometer LP process, which, as Ars Technica points out, is no longer cutting edge technology. A 28-nanometer processor was also used in the iPhone 5s, while the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus used 20-nanometer A8 processors.
A 28-nanometer chip in the current-generation Apple Watch suggests Apple could size down to a newer process in future devices, bringing a jump in performance alongside a reduction in space to make room for additional components. Samsung’s chip technology has progressed to a 14-nanometer process, which we may see in the next-generation iPhone, among other products.
In short, the use of a 28-nanometer processor suggests there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to processing power in future Apple Watch devices. Though the Apple Watch has only been available for two weeks, we’ve already heard some rumors about the next version. According to reports, health sensors that did not make it into the first-generation device may be added to the second-generation version, perhaps allowing it to track health-related metrics like stress levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.
We’ve also seen rumors suggesting the first update to the Apple Watch will come in the form of additional casing options, perhaps later this year. A second-generation device with upgraded internals is not expected until 2016.
‘Redacted’ Hits Number 8 Spot in Mac App Store With Just $302 in First-Day Profit
App developer Sam Soffes today published a blog post detailing the early monetary performance of his new app Redacted [Direct Link], which allows users to easily obscure sensitive information on personal photos.
Screenshot of Redacted’s image obscuring features
After launching the app earlier this week, the $4.99 Redacted app quickly broke into the top paid app lists on the U.S. Mac App Store. Specifically, by the end of its launch day on May 5, Redacted was eighth in overall paid apps and first in top paid graphics apps. After some friends began questioning him about his expected profit, Soffes realized he hadn’t really even begun to think about the possible profit the photo-obscuring app would rake in for him.
Yesterday, Soffes tweeted out a question, asking his followers to guess how much profit the app received in its first day on the market. While the guesses averaged $12,460.67, Soffes revealed his app had achieved just 87 paid downloads, earning him a mere $302 worldwide for the eighth top paid app in the U.S. Mac App Store.
There were 37 guesses. I threw out the lowest and highest guesses which were both hilarious. The average guess was $12,460.67. 7 of those units were promo codes I sent out. Only 59 of those units were in the US. It’s pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.
In response to Soffes’ blog post, Dan Counsell, a developer of popular organizational app Clear, shared a few numbers on the app’s profits over a single day. Counsell tweeted that Clear earned $453 the day before the tweet, noting the list app is third in productivity and fifteenth overall in the top paid app list for the United States.
The top paid ranking is a measure of download volume (with some tweaks to account for sales momentum), not profits, so developers of higher-priced Mac App Store apps are in some cases certainly doing better than Redacted. Even so, with a drop in sales following the launch surge, Redacted is currently the #81 top grossing app in the U.S. Mac App Store while sitting at the #19 spot in paid apps.
Towards the end of his blog post, Soffes mentions that he nearly decided to continue working on another indie app, Whiskey, in an attempt to make a living off of that app. “I’m glad I didn’t,” he states honestly. He now is employed at mobile payments solution Venmo as of early this week.
How to Send and Respond to Messages on Apple Watch [iOS Blog]
One of the main focal points of the Apple Watch is communication, and as such, it offers a Messages app much like the one on the iPhone. It’s not quite as robust as the Messages apps available on other iOS and Mac devices, but Messages on Apple Watch lets you send pre-made replies, animated and non-animated emoji, and full voice-to-text messages.
For those of you who want to learn the ins and outs of creating and responding to messages on the Apple Watch, we’ve written up a detailed tutorial on the Messages app. Plus we’ve also got some tips on customizing the available options for communicating with others.
Sending a Message
Press the Digital Crown to go to the Home screen on Apple Watch.- Open the Messages app.
- Firmly press on the Messages list until the icon for New Message appears.
- Tap “New Message.”
- Tap “Add Contact” to select the recipient.
- Tap the icon to add a contact. (It looks like the silhouette of a person with a plus (+) symbol next to it.)
- Select a contact. Then, select the phone number or Apple ID you wish to use for that person.
- Tap “Create Message.”
- Use the Default Replies, Emoji, or Dictate Text to send the message.
Sending a message can also be done quickly by tapping the button underneath the Digital Crown to bring up your friends list, where you can select a favorite contact. From there just tap the Message icon to get to the messaging options. If you’ve already got a list of conversations available in the Messages app (which you likely do if you use Messages on the iPhone), you can also just click there to continue a conversation from your wrist.
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TestFlight Experiencing Extended Downtime for Many Developers
It has not been a good week for Apple’s developer services. Less than a day after iTunes Connect experienced a lengthy outage that lasted several hours, TestFlight is now unavailable for many developers. The beta testing service for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps has been returning a “currently unavailable” message since as early as Wednesday afternoon around 6:00 PM Pacific.
Because hardly a day can go by without #itunesconnect or #testflight screwing up. pic.twitter.com/682GTFEm5g
— dhcmrlchtdj (@dhcmrlchtdj) May 7, 2015
Apple has yet to update its system status page for developers to reflect the outage, although the company has historically been rather delayed at doing so. The outage has been confirmed to be affecting developers in the United States, Canada and Europe, and likely elsewhere, preventing developers from seeding pre-release versions of their apps for testing for the meantime.
AT&T Scales Back Throttling of Grandfathered Unlimited Data Plans
AT&T has quietly updated one of its policies to reflect that it will now only throttle customers that are connected to a cell tower experiencing network congestion, reports Ars Technica. The carrier previously throttled all grandfathered customers with unlimited data plans that exceeded 5GB of 4G LTE data usage in a single monthly billing period, regardless of network congestion.
The updated policy reads as follows:
“As a result of AT&T’s network management process, customers on a 3G or 4G smartphone or on a 4G LTE smartphone with an unlimited data plan who have exceeded 3 gigabytes (3G/4G) or 5 gigabytes (4G LTE) of data in a billing period may experience reduced speeds when using data services at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion. All such customers can still use unlimited data without incurring overage charges, and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle.”
Last October, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a federal court complaint against AT&T, accusing the carrier of misleading its smartphone customers by charging them for unlimited data while reducing their data speeds by up to 90 percent. The FTC claimed that AT&T did not adequately inform its customers that they would be throttled for using more than a certain amount of data during a billing cycle. AT&T could still face penalties from the FTC if it loses the case, despite changing its policies.
AT&T customers with unlimited data plans have experienced speeds as low as half a megabit per second when being throttled, according to the report, resulting in barely usable service. By throttling unlimited data plans, AT&T is naturally encouraging customers to switch to one of the tiered data plans that it introduced in the years after discontinuing unlimited plans. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have similar throttling practices where there is network congestion.
Apple Executive Jeff Williams to Speak at Code Conference in Late May
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams will speak at the annual Code Conference, held this May 26-28 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, reports Re/code. Williams joined Apple in 1998 and leads a team responsible for the company’s supply chain management, and during the past two years has also overseen development of the Apple Watch and health initiatives such as ResearchKit.
Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi spoke at the inaugural Code Conference last year, with Cue discussing how today’s TV experience “sucks” and is a complicated problem to solve. Code Conference is a successor to the D: All Things Digital Conference that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, among other Apple executives, have participated in the past before Dow Jones closed technology website AllThingsD and replaced it with WSJD.
Williams will participate in Code Conference just over one month after the Apple Watch launch, which some customers believe has not gone as smoothly as past product releases. Much of the criticism has been directed towards Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts, although Williams is directly in charge of Apple Watch development and manages the worldwide supply chain.
Other notable Code Conference speakers announced include GM CEO Mary Barra, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and editor-in-chief Ben Smith, Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, GoPro CEO and founder Nick Woodman, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Google business lead Omid Kordestani.
Giant phones are finally a big deal in the US
Extra-large phones have been hot stuff in some countries for a long while, but not so much in the US. The country must have had a change of heart in the past few months, however. Kantar Worldpanel estimates that gigantic devices jumped from 6 percent of American smartphone sales in the first quarter of last year to 21 percent in early 2015. Why? If you ask Kantar, the launch of the iPhone 6 Plus was partly responsible — it racked up 44 percent of all supersized phone sales despite being just a few months old. The analyst group isn’t saying much in public how other brands were doing, although it’s safe to say that category pioneer Samsung grabbed a large slice of the pie thanks to high-powered behemoths like the Galaxy Note 4.
Android still rules the roost worldwide, although there’s signs that this is changing ever so slightly. Google’s mobile OS was the top choice in the five biggest European countries with a 68.4 percent share, but the iPhone grew its stake by 1.8 percent. The biggest leap was in China, where Apple’s gangbuster iPhone sales saw it grow from 17.9 percent of the market in early 2014 to 26.1 percent a year later. Reportedly, that’s due in part to Apple courting more than just well-off buyers. While Android still dominates the budget space (35 percent of European Android buyers said price was a major factor), it doesn’t have the free rein that it enjoyed in the past.
Photo by Will Lipman.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung
Source: Kantar Worldpanel (1), (2)
Apple Releases Safari 8.0.6 With Security Improvements [Mac Blog]
Apple today released Safari 8.0.6 for OS X Yosemite, bringing new security fixes to the browser. There’s little information about the update in the release notes, but Apple continually releases updates to its browser to address vulnerabilities. Apple has also released Safari 7.1.6 for Mavericks users and Safari 6.2.6 for Mountain Lion users.
The Safari 8.0.6 update is recommended for all OS X Yosemite users and contains improvements to security.
Today’s Safari 8.0.6 update is recommended for all OS X Yosemite users and can be downloaded using the software update mechanism in the Mac App Store.
The Safari 8.0.6 update comes almost a month after the launch of Safari 8.0.5, which was bundled into the OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 release on April 8.
Former Apple Retail Chief Ron Johnson Discusses ‘Enjoy’ Launch, Apple, Angela Ahrendts and More
Ron Johnson, who served as Senior Vice President of Retail Operations at Apple between 2000 and 2011, today unveiled his new online retail startup called Enjoy Technology that will begin selling high-end consumer electronics, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, speakers and drones. The Menlo Park, California company will sell about 60 products starting today.
Enjoy aims to differentiate itself from Amazon and other competitors by providing free personal in-home setup service for products, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. When you purchase a product, Enjoy will send a representative to your home to help set it up, with visits lasting approximately one hour. AT&T, GoPro, Microsoft, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard are among the early partners with the service.
Johnson was interviewed by CNBC today to discuss the Enjoy launch and a handful of other topics, including Apple and the company’s current retail chief Angela Ahrendts, the future of physical retail and more. In particular, he offered praise for Ahrendts, who has led Apple’s retail operations since May 2014, and noted that he owns an Apple Watch and thinks it’s an “incredible product.” He also said to “stay tuned” about the availability of Apple products through Enjoy in the future.
http://player.theplatform.com/p/gZWlPC/cnbc_global?playertype=synd&byGuid=3000376642
Kayla Tausche: It was bizarre to think about an Apple product launch without those lines around the corner. Stretching for miles and miles. I’m just wondering if you look at this new era for Apple products and Apple retail, and you think that there is a lot of change and that it’s sort of doing away with the way you used to do product launches?
Johnson: I don’t think that’s true. I’m Angela’s biggest fan. I knew her before she came to Apple. I had the chance to meet her in London. The teams love her at Apple. They love her leadership. She made it clear that the Apple launch was being launched in this way and future products might go back to something that Apple has done before. I wouldn’t overread the launch as a change in direction. It’s the right thing for this intensely personal products.
Courtney Reagan: You have 60 products on GoEnjoy.com right now from 11 companies. But Apple isn’t one of them. Why not?
Johnson: I say stay tuned. We’re not talking about it but I didn’t want, our customer would love Apple products. You know there’s no doubt about it. And we serve the iPhone through AT&T. You can go to AT&T’s website and buy an iPhone and use enjoy. We’ll be embedded in on AT&T’s website on May 19th. We do help with all the Apple products. Stay tuned when they might be on our personal commerce site.
Enjoy launched in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday.
AIVAnet 