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The Complaint: Apple’s Patent Lawsuit Against HTC Is All About Android

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:45:38 +0000

Earlier today, Apple issued a press release stating that it has filed suit against cell phone manufacturer HTC for patent infringement. No mention of Android or Google was in the press release. But one of the actual legal complaints, which we’ve obtained and embedded below, makes no bones about it. As expected, this lawsuit is about Android. HTC, of course, is one of the largest manufacturers of Android handsets.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware targets: “certain mobile communication devices including cellular phones and smart phones, including at least phones incorporating the Android Operating System (collectively, “the Accused Products”).” By going after the biggest Android manufacturer, Apple is putting all Android cell phone makers—and by extension Google— on notice. Is there any doubt now why Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to resign from Apple’s board last year? The battle lines are now drawn.

At least one of the patents (No. 7,479,949) lists Steve Jobs as an inventor, and describes a method to use a touchscreen as a graphical user interface “detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display” (i.e. multi-touch). The complete list of patents the complaint says are being infringed include:

Patent No. 7,362,331: “Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation Of User Interface Objects Between States”
Patent No. 7,479,949: “Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics”
Patent No. 7,657,849: “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image”
Patent No. 7,469,381: “List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display”
Patent No. 5,920,726: “System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera Device.”
Patent No. 7,633,076: “Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices”
Patent No. 5,848,105: “GMSK Signal Processors For Improved Communications Capacity And Quality”
Patent No. 7,383,453: “Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor”
Patent No. 5,455,599: “Object-Oriented Graphic System”
Patent No. 6,424,354: “Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods”

Another complaint was filed with the ITC and may include other patents, since there are only ten here and Apple claims 20 patents are being infringed altogether.

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Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:17:09 +0000

Apple is using its strong patent portfolio to fight iPhone competitors in court. Its latest target is HTC. Apple has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the cell phone manufacturer. The suit involves “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.” Steve Jobs is quoted in a press release saying: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner)

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Last year, Apple's iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia's Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share. Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm's WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share.

Google Goggles Getting OCR Translations

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:59:42 +0000

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate. Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating "Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon" from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don't speak the language.

AIR For Android, And Adobe’s Plan To Deliver Apps Across All Mobile Devices

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:08:47 +0000

The bane of all mobile app developers is the need to rewrite the same app over and over again for different devices: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile. Adobe is positioning its Flash platform (which includes the Flash player, AIR, developer tools, and media servers) as the write-once, deploy-anywhere solution for both the mobile Web and apps. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, it will announce plans to bring Adobe AIR to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones. AIR is currently used to create desktop applications, but it will soon be used to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile AIR apps will be able store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phones such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps. Adobe wants developers to create their apps using its developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web.

Relax, You Can Still Buy An iPhone In New York City. Just Not Online.

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:03:27 +0000

If you live in the New York City metropolitan area, as I do, and try to buy an iPhone from AT&T’s website, you will probably get the same message I did after I entered my zipcode: “Sorry this package is not available in your area.” Apparently, this is a big story. (Hey, it’s the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and there is nothing else going on). For instance, the Consumerist called some hapless AT&T customer service rep who confirmed that “the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone.”

The Google Phone, Unlocked (Confirmed And More Details)

Erick Schonfeld — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:54:50 +0000

Last night, we started seeing some Tweets from Google employees and others about a new Android-powered Google phone that was apparently handed out at an “all hands” meeting. Now Google is confirming that this indeed “dogfood” testing a new Android device with employees around the world. But this isn’t just another Android phone. Very trustworthy sources who have seen the phone say that it is the Google Phone we first wrote about last month (despite the uninformed saying we were dreaming). It will be branded Google and sold by Google as an unlocked phone, which could change everything. The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google.

Leaked Video: Swyping Versus iPhone Typing. (Swype For Android Is Next).

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:14:40 +0000

A year ago, Swype launched a new way to type on a touchscreen phone at TechCrunch50. Swype was created by the inventor of the T9 predictive typing system used on most phones today because he felt that new text input methods for small touchscreens are sorely needed. Today, the startup announced the first phone to use the technology will be the Samsung Omnia II on Verizon. As you can see in the video above, which shows a side-by-side comparison of typing on the Omnia II versus on an iPhone, the way you type with Swype is you literally swipe your finger from one letter to the next as fast as you can. In the video, the Swypist beats the iPhone typist hands down, so to speak.

Apple And Android Now Make Up 75 Percent Of U.S. Smartphone Web Traffic

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:55:25 +0000

When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob's October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009. The iPhone is miles ahead of everyone else, but Android is quickly rising as a strong second. While Android phones managed to increase their share from 17 percent in September, 2009 to 20 percent in October, 2009, the iPhone and iPod Touch gained even more, going from 48 percent to 55 percent share. Meanwhile, during that same month the Blackberry 's mobile Web traffic share went down from 14 percent to 12 percent, and Palm's webOS shrank from 10 percent to 5 percent (Ouch).

Schmidt: “Android Adoption Is About To Explode”

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:26:11 +0000

During Google's third quarter earnings conference call today, one message came out loud and clear: Google's mobile strategy is starting to pay off. "Android adoption is about to explode," declared CEO Eric Schmidt, explaining that all the "necessary conditions" are set for growth: There are now 12 Android phones out there (most recently the Motorola Cliq) across 32 carriers in 26 countries. The whole Android strategy, of course, is to offer an low-cost, fully-featured, open-source OS and hand that to the cell phone manufacturers so that they can concentrate more on designing desirable hardware. And what does Google get out of all that? More mobile searches, which could be one of its biggest sources of growth in the coming years.

About a Quarter Of Facebook Users Connect Via Mobile Phones

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:50:48 +0000

Facebook's quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser. Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more.

Nokia And Microsoft Make An Unholy Alliance To Bring Office Mobile To More Phones

Erick Schonfeld — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:17:27 +0000

As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks "the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones," says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually. But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia's E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

Android and iPhone Apps Cost About The Same, Except For Games And Dictionaries

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:55:14 +0000

Do the prices people are willing to pay for a phone app depend on the device or the type of app? A comparison of July prices in the iPhone App Store and the Android Market by app analytics firm Distimo found that across broad categories such as entertainment, navigation, and tools the average price for the Top 100 paid apps was very similar for both mobile computing platforms. There were a few exceptions. The average price for a paid reference app on Android is close to $9, which is more than twice the average price for the same category on the iPhone. This disparity is mostly due to some dictionary apps on Android priced between $15 and $30 (mostly from Paragon Software). I'm not sure those are big sellers, but it bumps up the average. Finance and social networking apps are also slightly more expensive on average. Games are on average about the same as on the iPhone, around $2.50. But if you look at the price distribution, that tells you a different story. While most of the top paid games on the iPhone go for $0.99, on Android many more games are priced between $1.99 and $4.99.

Facebook coming to Android

Erick Schonfeld — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:21:26 +0000

Well, we never thought it would happen because of its intense rivalry with Google, but Facebook is almost ready to launch an official app for Android phones. Hints are already popping up here and there, but I've been able to confirm it. The app could hit the Android Market (its version of the App Store) as soon as the end of this week. Facebook's Android app will launch with a more limited set of features than its current, and very popular, iPhone app. For instance, it won't have an inbox, I'm told by a source who has seen it. But it will have the full Facebook stream, which is really all you need. The Facebook Android app is built around the stream and status updates. It was built with Facebook's new Stream API. Your updates keep coming in, with a notification number telling you how many new items are available at any given time.

Nokia Buys Social Addressbook Startup Cellity For The Team

Erick Schonfeld — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:15:31 +0000

German mobile startup Cellity is getting acquired by Nokia. The sale price was not disclosed, but it is not likely to be more than $10 million to $20 million. About a year ago, Vodafone bought Cellity's competitor Zyb for 31.5 million Euros. Nokia didn't actually buy the whole company, only "certain assets" and the team, which is usually code for a fire sale. Cellity had a Series A round of funding in 2007, led by Mangrove Capital Partners.

“World’s Sexiest App”? Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models Now Clutch Themselves On The iPhone.

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:18:26 +0000

The print magazine business isn't doing so hot right now, but Sports Illustrated might just have found a new business model: selling an iPhone app featuring models from its 2009 Swimsuit Issue. Although the Swimsuit issue came out in February, the app just hit the iTunes store today (iTunes link). Marketed as the "World's Sexiest App" with a 17+ age rating, it costs $2.99. I'm sure it's going to make a mint. What do you get for $2.99? Photos of 20 models including Brooklyn Decker and Danica Patrick in various states of bikini nothingness and "breathtaking bodypainting videos." There are also other "intimate" videos for each model. Does Playboy have an iPhone app? It might save them too.

Analyst Finds Palm Pre Sales Stabilize At Ho-Hum Levels

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:27:15 +0000

Despite the early fanfare and limited inventory at launch, Sprint doesn't seem to be hitting it out of the park with the new Palm Pre. Earlier this month we reported on some channel checks by JNK Securities analyst Mike Ehrlich, who called 50 Sprint stores and found out that sales were lackluster. Yesterday, he issued a new report based on channel checks from last Thursday and Friday, Week 5 after the Pre's launch. Of the stores willing to discuss sales volumes, here is the breakdown of demand on a per-store basis:

Week 5 Palm Pre Sales Per Sprint Store

10 units or less: 30% (vs. 40% the prior week)
10 to 20 units: 45% (vs. 33% the prior week)
20 to 30 units: 18% (vs. 16% the prior week)
30 to 50 units: 12% (no comparable)

NTT Docomo Buys 35 Percent Of PacketVideo For $45.5 Million

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:46:30 +0000

Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash. The investment indicates how important PacketVideo's technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan.

iPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Developers Adjust To OS 3.0; Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:29:50 +0000

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions. Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).

Geodelic Raised $3.5 Million For Location-Aware Recommendations

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:45:17 +0000

On a mobile phone, the more you can automate search, the more likely people are to use it. Or at least that is the principle which seems to be guiding Geodelic Systems, a startup which is creating a "search-less search" experience for mobile phones. Today in a press release, it revealed that it raised $3.5 million in an earlier round possibly in 2008 from Clearstone Ventures (where it was incubated) and Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast in 2006. Geodelic is creating a location-aware search engine for restaurants, movies, stores, flights, hotels, and local attractions which recommends results based on their distance from you. A "location carousel" brings up nearby results on a map by category and it learns from you behavior which places, stores, and brands you like the best, and will target you accordingly. The app is designed to be as passive as possible, eliminating or minimizing the amount of typing required. However, it doesn't go as far as some augmented reality tagging apps such as Layar or Sekai Camera, which add a data layer on top of the view through a phone's camera.

Occipital Brings Seamless Barcode Scanning To The iPhone With RedLaser

Erick Schonfeld — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:20:56 +0000

Now that the new iPhone 3G S has a video camera, TechStars startup Occipital has released an update to its RedLaser app (iTunes link, $1.99) which speeds up barcode scanning by not requiring you to first take a picture. Occipital claims that its "realtime barcode scanner" is the only one which works on phones with both autofocus (the new 3G S) and without (the older iPhone and iPod Touch). Other barcode scanning apps, such as ShopSavvy's, can also take advantage of the autofocus camera on the 3G S, but can't do on-the-fly scanning on the older models. (Video after the jump).

Ngmoco Hires Away Sega President Simon Jeffery To Head Up iPhone Game Network

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:01:54 +0000

iPhone game developer ngmoco is announcing today its own cross-promotion publishing network fro iPhone games. The publishing network, called Plus+, will be headed up by Simon Jeffery, the current president and COO of Sega of America. Prior to Sega, Jeffery was president of LucasArts. His new title at ngmoco will be chief publishing officer. This is a major hire for the iPhone game startup, whose CEO Neil Young is also a former star executive from the console gaming world (he came from Electronic Arts). Ngmoco is already one of the top game developers on the iPhone. Its hits include Rolando, Mazefinger, Star Defense, Topple, and WordFu. Jeffery will be running a new business for ngmoco, Plus+ Publishing. The company already cross-promotes its own games. For instance, about 15 percent of Rolando sales come from cross-promotion, according to Young. With Plus+ Publishing, outside iPhone game developers will be able to apply to become part of this cross-promotion network also. Ngmoco will offer to publish and market iPhone games under its own Plus brand, as well as simply cross-promote other games using its own popular games and the other games which become part of Plus+ (with different revenue splits depending on the level of service). Developers who want to apply can email gamemakers [at] ngmoco [dot] com.

How The Different Mobile Data Syncing Services Stack Up

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:45:35 +0000

As the phones in our pockets become our second computers, it will become increasingly important to sync data between the two. Not just emails, but contacts, calendars, photos, music, apps, browser bookmarks, files, and more. Nearly every Web phone out there comes with at least some sort of rudimentary syncing app. Apple has MobileMe, Nokia has Ovi, Palm has Synergy, Blackberry has Internet Services, and Microsoft has My Phone. An open-source competitor to all of these is Funambol. The startup evaluated all of the syncing services and scored them based on criteria such as how many kinds of data each one supports, cost, usability, and number of supported devices. (Full study embedded at bottom of post). It came up with a score for each out of a maximum of 40. Naturally enough, Funambol scored the highest, but if you throw that out you end up with the list below (with accompanying scores).

It’s Gonna Be A Summer Of SmartPhone Love

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:31:27 +0000

Can you feel the tingling in the air? If you haven't found it already,you will. This is going to be the summer of love. I am talking, of course, about smartphone love. The serenades have already begun for the June 6 launch of the Palm Pre. Next week, Apple will reveal it's next iPhone (you know MG is going to get one). Blackberry might come out with its second Storm by summer's end. And the lovefest will continue throughout the year with launch after launch of new Android phones as well. It will be practically nonstop. I hope you can handle it.

The Spoils Go To The Smartest. Apple And RIM Take Majority Of Cell Phone Industry Profits

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:05:22 +0000

When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year. But when you look at what really matters—their share of revenues or operating profits—the picture looks a lot different. Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff calculated the share of operating profits going to each major mobile handset manufacturer and came up with the eye-opening chart above. It shows Apple (pink) and RIM (turquoise) increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia's diminishing handset operating profits (blue).