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Apple Sues Nokia Again In The U.K.

Back in September of last year, Apple sued Nokia in the U.K. over 9 patent infringements for technologies developed by engineers in Cupertino. The Finnish company had already sued Apple in the U.S., U.K., Germany and the Netherlands over 37 patent infringements claiming that Apple “owed it royalties for using Nokia technology that allows such basic mobile tasks as sending email or downloading applications”.

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple has fired back in High Court in London challenging one of the seven patents filed by Nokia in its lawsuit against Apple in Germany. The patent covers scrolling on touch-enabled devices:

Apple Inc., maker of the iPad tablet and iPhone, sued Nokia Oyj in the U.K. over claims that one of the Finnish company’s European patents for scrolling technology on touch-screen handsets is invalid.

“Nokia is confident that all of the 37 patents it has asserted against Apple” are valid, Durrant said in the e-mail. “We are examining the filing and will take whatever actions are needed to protect our rights.

The lawsuit is another piece in the complicated puzzle of patent infringement claims that are going around between Apple, HTC, Motorola and Nokia, among others. Perhaps this can help.

iPad 2 Event on February 9?

In case you didn’t know, Apple’s icons are full of secrets. From the Maps icon to the Mail one, they come with references to internal Cupertino jokes the average consumer may or may not understand by looking at a simple graphic file. But sometimes, the reference is obvious.

Take the alleged “iPad 2 Springboard” preview image found in the iOS 4.3 beta: it shows the Camera, FaceTime and Photo Booth icons, but it also comes with an updated calendar icon. Which, unlike the calendar icon used in promo material for the iPad 1, doesn’t have a 27. But why does the calendar app on the original iPad have a 27 on it? Because the device was announced on January 27th, 2010. See the reference?

On this new preview image, the number is 9. The updated icon may or may not suggest that the iPad 2 will be announced on, say, February 9? That’s a Wednesday, and it would be two months before the rumored April 9 release date. This would give Apple a 60-day timeframe to announce the device and get developers ready with their apps.

If Apple doesn’t change the icon again in the next weeks, there’s a good chance we’ll have an iPad 2 announcement on February 9. At least, we hope so. What do you think? [via Shimanke]

Update: Too bad the same “Calendar 9” icon can be found in the current iPad under Settings, Brightness & Wallpaper. We wanted to believe.

Leaked Screenshot of Internal iPhone with Gestures?

Well after the 4.3 Beta that previewed multitasking gestures on the iPad, there is now some supposed evidence that suggests that the iPhone is also being considered by Apple to have gestures thanks to an internal build that BGR claims to have gotten some screenshots of.

Obviously there is an issue with the supposedly leaked pictures, gestures on the iPhone would likely have to be different to those previewed on the iPad that used four or five finger swipes because they would be pretty unreasonable to use on the iPhone’s smaller screen. That said it remains possible that the text is left over from the iPad and whilst being tested internally has not been edited to reflect the iPhone’s gestures.

Engadget notes that information from it sources says that since the lost iPhone 4 debacle Apple made significant changes to how it keeps track of it’s devices and that it added clauses to screens saying “Confidential and Proprietary, if found, please contact…” listing a Cupertino 408 number. The photo’s BGR have gotten a hold have this message, adding credence to this leak. All three pictures posted after the break.

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Nuance Allowing Developers to Easily Add Speech Recognition to their Apps

If you’re an App developer you might be interested in Nuance’s (known for their speech recognition software) latest pursuit. Nuance is now enabling other developers to incorporate and take advantage of their speech recognition software and place it into third party apps, expanding any app’s functionality in a very cool way.

Nuance has previously teamed up with Ask.com to deliver their speech recognition technology to the Ask for iPhone app and have now opened up the Nuance Mobile Developer Program for all developers. By joining, Nuance says developers will gain access Dragon Mobile SDK with support for more than eight languages plus assorted support forums and documentation.

If you’re interested in using Dragon’s Mobile SDK to add speech recognition, head over here. Full announcement is posted after the break.

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Further Evidence of Camera in iPad 2 and Photo Booth and FaceTime Apps

After digging around the 4.3 Beta 2 of iOS for iPad, Mac Rumors has found fairly solid evidence that pretty much confirms not only a camera addition to the iPad but also the addition of a Camera app (obviously), FaceTime and Photo Booth apps.

An image (homeScreenOverlayFaceTime~ipad.png)  used by the iPad in the Setting’s app to preview the wallpaper was found by Mac Rumors to contain three extra icons that do not exist on the image contained in iOS 4.2, those additional icons were those for a FaceTime, Camera and Photo Booth app.

FaceTime and Photo Booth are also largely dependent on the presence of a front facing camera, whilst a Camera app would seem rather redundant without a rear facing camera and so it could be thus presumed that this latest discovery seems to confirm previous reports of both a front facing and rear facing camera on the iPad 2.

Mac Rumors also says they found filters for Photo Booth that included the effects of Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl and Stretch.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Apple Updates iWork Suite for iPad With Bug Fixes

Earlier today Apple issued an update for the entire iWork suite for iPad (which includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote) to address bugs found in version 1.3, released in November.

The minor 1.3.1 update for all the three apps of the suite fixes an issue with the predictive text menu when using Chinese or Japanese characters; Numbers for iPad went under a deeper bug-fixing procedure with a resolved crash due to Region Format in the Settings and the inability to save cells when the app was quit and restarted.

You can find the updates here. [Thanks, Willy]

New iOS Features? An Apple Social Network? Photo Stream and Media Stream

Digging into the latest iOS 4.3 beta build seeded to developers a few hours ago, we found references to two new features related to MobileMe called “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream”. There are several files, folders and code references buried deep into iOS that point to these new features as part of MobileMe and accessible through a device’s Settings.app.

As detailed by the folks over at 9to5mac, who also found out about these new features and went ahead to discover more of the implications of “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream” in iOS, Apple may be working on a serious MobileMe overhaul to offer social networking functionalities that would allow Apple to directly fight Facebook in the future, perhaps with iOS 5, with a social network built into iOS and tied to MobileMe and the Cloud. Read more

Cydia Adds Ability to Easily View All Your Past Purchases

Cydia, the App Store equivalent for all those jailbreak required apps that Apple has or would deny, has just received a handy new feature that allows you to view in one place all the packages that you have purchased from the Cydia store.

Jay Freeman, creator of Cydia has been working hard in recent months to improving Cydia in many ways from decreasing the all to common “Reloading” times, improving the polish and adding new features. This new feature has been a fairly common suggestion not only for Cydia but the App Store too, which whilst present in the Mac App Store has yet to reach iOS App Store - something which those of us at Macstories are hopeful Apple will add in the near future.

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