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Patent-Infringement Reversed: Apple Wins Court Battle For $625.5 Million

Penalized 208.5 million for three patent violations, Apple wasn’t going to give up a fight for a few of the most prominent features of today’s OS X: Spotlight, Time Machine, and Cover Flow. On October 1st, 2010, a jury initially awarded $625.5 million to Mirror Worlds LLC in the Texas Eastern District Court (a court which has been scrutinized for appealing to patent trolls). However, the verdict was postponed by U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis – additional post trial arguments were slated to last until November to the dispute.

Computerworld: Apple asked Davis to delay his final ruling on the verdict, claiming that the award amounted to “triple dipping” because the jury penalized Apple $208.5 million for each of the three patent violations.

The case dates back to 2008, as Yale University professor David Gelernter (the founder of Mirror Worlds Technologies) accused Apple of infringing on patents revolving around data manipulation. Specifically, the claims against Cover Flow involved how documents, pictures, and media were displayed on a computer via the Finder and iTunes (the patents also applied to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad). Today it was decided that the patents do not infringe on Mirror World’s technologies and that the damages were also too high.

Bloomberg: “Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law,” U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis wrote.

Apple has also recently won an initial patent battle with cellphone giant Nokia, as the International Trade Commission ruled Apple did not infringe on a set of patents related to mobile phones, computer technologies, and portable music players.

[via Bloomberg]

Image via Engadget

Woz: “The Tablet Is For The Normal People”→

Woz: “The Tablet Is For The Normal People”

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, speaking at the Storage Networking World in Santa Clara, California:

The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room,” Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. “It’s for the normal people in the world,” Wozniak said.

“I think Steve Jobs had that intention from the day we started Apple, but it was just hard to get there, because we had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do … normal consumer appliance things,” Wozniak said.

The roots of the iPad can be easily found in the first Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us”. I have no doubt Steve Jobs thought from the beginning that, someday, a single screen to hold in our hands would become many people’s standard way of using a “computer”. This is happening now – almost 30 years later –  thanks to technological and engineering advancements.

And if you think that the concept of the iPad as we know it came years before the iPhone – it makes you wonder what the next 10 years are going to be like.

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iPhone Homescreen Organization→

iPhone Home Screen Organization

I know all of this is pretty silly. But by tweaking my setup over the years, I’ve gotten to a point where I can easily and simply hop into an app, do what I need to do, and get out, all with one hand. That saves time, which adds value to my life. Isn’t that what all of these fancy gizmos and apps are supposed to do?

Stephen Hackett is right: discussing about iPhone homescreen organization might sound silly and way-too-nerdy for the average iPhone user, but I think it’s important to cover these details for devices that are making us more productive every day – devices that, ultimately, help us save a lot of time. Personally, I keep the apps I go frequently go back to in the central part of the screen, as that plays nice with my hand holding the iPhone and my thumb waiting to tap around. Cody on the other hand says, “I just put icons everywhere like a normal person.”

Check out my iPhone homescreen in the screenshot above. The red rectangle indicates my most launched apps these days. And yes, Tweetbot is coming out soon and it’s fantastic.

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Prycast: Pandora Radio Player Review & Giveaway

While I don’t think Pandora itself needs any introduction, you may not be familiar with one of the latest Mac Apps to bring your Pandora account to your desktop. Pyrcast is a menu bar radio player for your Pandora stations, allotting access to all of your favorite music and controls that can be tucked away into a standalone player, or via a drop-down menu. Pyrcast allows for global keyboard shortcuts for restarting the song, liking and disliking the current track, and for play/pausing. Additionally accessibility has been added with Growl support, though I found the Rate Up and Rate Down icons to be unintuitive in the player (just bring over the thumbs up and thumbs down guys). Pyrcast looks similar to Ecoute in terms of navigation, though you can just quickly jump to another station by clicking “Stations” at any time. Pyrcast is $4.99 in the App Store, and we’re giving away three copies in a quick giveaway to a few lucky readers. Jump past the break for contest rules.

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Rumor of Sony Camera In iPhone 5 A Misunderstanding?

During the weekend, a rumor about Sony being selected by Apple as the only supplier for the image sensors in the next-generation iPhone quickly made the rounds of the Internet following some statements from Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer in an interview with Walt Mossberg at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The report came as a surprise to Apple fans and market watchers as the company has been using camera lenses provided by OmniVision in the iPhone 3GS (3.2 MP), iPhone 4 ( 5 MP), iPod touch 4th gen. and iPad 2 for the past few years.

The rumor suggested that, due to the earthquake and tsunami that damaged Sony’s Japanese facility in Sendai, shipments of image sensors to Apple would be delayed.

Stringer just said that their camera image sensor facility in Sendai was affected by the tsunami. Getting image sensors to Apple will be delayed.

The Wall Street Journal also published a blog post with a partial transcript of the interview:

Early on, he raised the irony of Sony supplying camera components for Apple devices. It “always puzzles me,” he said. “Why would I make Apple the best camera?”

It is unclear what devices he was talking about as Sony isn’t known to supply key camera components, known as image sensors, to Apple; A Sony spokeswoman declined to comment and an Apple spokesperson couldn’t be reached for comment.

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Pogoplug iPhone App Updated With New UI and Faster Media Players

If your digital life is in the cloud as much as mine is, you’ve probably heard of the Pogoplug: in its Pro version, the $99 device can be configured on your local network to share content from attached external drives over the Internet. That means your music, movies and photos stored on regular USB drives can be easily accessed from anywhere thanks to the Pogoplug’s sharing capabilities; plus, the device also allows you to share files, “cloud print” and add unlimited storage as long as you keep attaching external drives to the Pogoplug. Basically, it’s a great way to put your media library in the cloud with minimal setup and, at the same time, get a bunch of additional features depending on the Pogoplug you choose. The great news is, Pogoplug is getting a lot better for iOS users thanks to the recent 4.0 update for the iPhone app.

Pogoplug 4.0 for iPhone adds a new dashboard design with slick icons that allow you to easily navigate between the various sections of the app; among these, a completely new music player that sports new indexing features which don’t force you anymore to manually load songs by letter from the library, but continually index the existing contents of your Pogoplug. The music player is faster, works in the background, and it’s got a new bottom toolbar to switch between songs, artists, albums and genres. The photo and video players have been updated in version 4.0, too, with a cleaner look and faster performances.

Last, the entire file browsing section of the iPhone app got a facelift and a huge speed boost to feel more stable and responsive. As reported by Peter Redmer at Pogoplugged, “navigating through your multiple Pogoplugs, attached drives, and desktops is now much easier and more streamlined”.

You can find the Pogoplug app for iPhone here. You can check out Pogoplug devices on the official website.

 

Q&A: MLB.com Boss Bob Bowman on Android Owners, Facebook Video and Apple’s Subscription Rules→

Q&A: MLB.com Boss Bob Bowman on Android Owners, Facebook Video and Apple’s Subscription Rules

Peter Kafka: You’ve complained publicly before about the difficulty in supporting multiple flavors of Android for your apps. But this year you’ve expanded the number of Android handsets you’re supporting from 6 to 11. Did you ever consider not working with Android at all?

Bob Bowman: The short answer is no. But what we have done is that we don’t support every Android phone. Because at some point, it’s diminishing returns. The Android user typically is less likely to buy, and therefore the ROI on developing for Android is different than it is for Apple.

In comparison, the NFL Network announced that 76% of NFL Mobile Only From Verizon customers subscribed to watch video of Combine events, with a 128 percent increase in NFL.com’s total video streams from last year. The NFL Network also announced a record 2010 season with 6.6 million viewers.

In the first season of NFL Mobile Only from Verizon, a record number of fans turned to their mobile devices for NFL coverage as NFL Mobile is one of Verizon’s most successful apps.

The success of NFL Mobile was only available to select Android phones on Verizon, and I’d argue the MLB would do just fine support a few of the worth mentioning Android phones in the market. Kafka and Bowman also discuss Apple’s subscription model, and the MLB’s desire in primarily supporting the iPhone and iPad.

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Official Facebook App Updated, Gets Map View and “Unfriend”

An update to the official Facebook app for iPhone was released in the App Store a few minutes ago, and it adds a number of new functionalities and design improvements. The app, which reaches version 3.4, introduces a new Map view for Facebook Places: friends that have checked in places nearby are now displayed through thumbnail previews on a Google Map; also, the app can now let you check in to Events you’re attending.

The app feels slightly faster and more responsive than before; the News Feed and Notifications UI have been improved (although I still haven’t noticed visible changes) and, overall, switching between sections from the main dashboard should be snappier now.

Perhaps more importantly, Facebook now lets you “unfriend” people directly from the iPhone. Tap on the Friends tab, select a person and hit “Unfriend” in the action button. Previously, this feature was only available on the desktop.

You can find Facebook for iPhone here. More screenshots below.

Update: MG Siegler at TechCrunch details how the new event check-ins work:

To be able to check-in to an event you have to (obviously) be invited and RSVP’d “yes” to attending. Your location also has to match the location of the listed event venue, and it has to be the correct time of the event. All of this will help with gaming.

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Social and App Tabs to Play Big Role in Firefox 5

Mozilla has stepped up to the plate with their launch of Firefox 4, which has now garnered well over 59 million downloads as of its launch on March 22nd. With App Tabs, much improved performance, and some incredible features like Panorama baked right in, I’ve adopted Firefox 4 as my browser of choice for the time being over Chrome and Safari. While I leave my love of WebKit behind (perhaps only temporarily), ConceivablyTech dug into the Firefox UX planning pages to give us a glimpse of what’s next for Firefox 5.

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