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Displaying items by tag: Apple

Monday, 01 August 2011 20:55

Pantent fights are anti-consumer

73You know, there are times when I think that companies spend more on lawyers than they do on developing better products. A case in point is the way that companies will file for patents based on concepts over real technology or buy up others to “strengthen” their position in the market. As an example let’s take a look at the legal battle between HTC and Apple.

According to the story, Apple filed a patent suit against HTC because HTC was in violation of ten core patents that Apple holds. Why did Apple file this? Their premise is that HTC is using their intellectual property and by doing that they are taking revenue away from them. However, when you see this type of suit pop up it is usually more about finding a way to stifle the competition. After all that is exactly that Apple is saying about the Lodsys suit. So Apple files a suit claiming that HTC has violated 10 Patents.

The US International Trade Commission (How can it be international if it is a US Government body) decided that HTC was guilty of violating 2 of those 10 (which HTC is trying to appeal). HTC, for their part are working to fight back by the attempted purchase of S3 Graphics. You see HTC wants this very badly because Apple is rumored to be using several S3 patents without paying. If HTC can get this portfolio then they would have a bargaining chip to work with.

But the purchase of S3 is not yet final so HTC is in a bit of trouble and could be forced to halt sales of certain handsets (the ones that have technology that is in violation of Apple’s Patents). To combat this HTC has now taken to the UK courts. Our guess is that they feel that Apple will not have the upper hand off of their home turf. So now we start another round of legal battles that are intended to delay the halt of HTC sales in the US while HTC pushes forward their attempt to buy S3 and have something they can hold over Apple.

Meanwhile Apple is growing more concerned about the Android movement and is surely dumping more and more money into their legal budget just like HTC. In a normal business the first budget to get cut is the IT budget (I should know having been there). In a technology company the first thing to get slashed is the R&D budget. This means that while HTC and Apple are sending money hand over fist in court their products will suffer.  With Apple they will spin these until the masses feel they really wanted this in the first place, while HTC will more than likely just push out refreshed products. In the long run the only ones that suffer are the consumers.

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Published in Editorials

FirefoxWhile cruising around the web looking for something interesting to write about I stumbled upon a hastily written article about a new mobile OS from Mozilla. Thinking this was something interesting I headed over to Mozilla’s Wiki website to read more, what I found was as concerning as it was interesting. For those that do not know, Mozilla is the creative force behind such open source applications as FireFox and Thunderbird. These two have been in competition with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and to a lesser degree Outlook. The question is can they compete with companies like Google and Apple in addition to Microsoft. Now all of this is the interesting part, what is concerning is the fact that they want your mobile OS to be all cloud based. They do not come out and say this directly but they say “Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike”

Published in Editorials
Tuesday, 26 July 2011 21:03

Kingston's Wi-Drive launches in the US

Wi_DriveKingston’s Wi-Drive hits the retail and e-tail stores in the US today. With the low price of $130 this new device for the iPod, iPhone, and iPad (probably a contractual item) will be followed by one for the Android later this year. It brings the ability to carry up to 32GB of extra storage for your iDevice.

Published in News
Saturday, 23 July 2011 19:48

Apple Macbook batteries vulnerable to hack

News_iPhone-battery-1776Anyone remember Charlie Miller? He is the guy that has hacked more than his share of Apple products (and won a few PWN2Own contests). Well Charlie is back; this time he has found a hole in Macbook Batteries that can allow full control of the Macbook including uploading small programs that are undetectable by virus scanners. The reason they are undetectable is that the code is hidden inside the battery firmware.  Charlie was able to get inside the firmware after digging through it and finding the passwords that allowed him access. Due to Apple’s tendency to use the same password for each line of its products (like the iPhone) it was very easy to spread this exploit to other systems.

Published in News

17So today most of the big companies had their quarterly earnings calls. We heard from Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and many others.  Most had both good news and bad some of this was surprising, some not so surprising. Despite assurances that Intel will “atomize” us (thanks for that one Francois) Intel reported that sales of the Atom CPU have dropped off. One of the big reasons for this is the increase in ARM’s presence in the market and a small showing by AMD with their new E350 CPUs.

Published in News

News_3d_Apple_Logo_102You may have heard that Apple’s new OS, Lion is making all of the NAS appliances incompatible. Well, we can tell you that the reports of these appliances demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact three days before the launch we heard from multiple vendors that they have new firmware updates that will be available to keep compatibility with Lion and its new version of Time Machine.

NETGEAR has even sent us theirs and we are at work testing is on their ReadyNAS Pro 6. So when you hear about how this or that product does not work, remember… you are listening to people that are ALWAYS trying to get a scoop sometimes they might not take the extra time to verify things before they push something like this out.

Keep checking back as we work to demystify some of what is out there on the net and give you the straight information.

Published in News
Wednesday, 13 April 2011 23:10

Asus' EEE Slate EP121 1A011M Poked and Prodded



EP121With every new product that hits the market there are going to be winners and losers. This is true from CPUs to GPU s and everything in between. There is one place where this is more true than any other segment of the market; this is the mobile market. Now the mobile market does not just mean phones (smart or dumb). This market includes everything from portable power sources to fully fledged desktop replacement notebooks. Currently the most competitive market is in the Tablet world. To most people Apple is king. They have the most successful tablet device out and are well into the second generation of the iPad. But first does not always mean best nor does popularity alone indicate complete success (although it certainly helps). Today we have the chance to take a look at one of the competitors to Apple. Not necessarily the iPad, although it will challenge that device in a major way, this is more of a direct threat to the Apple fan base and their tablet/ultra-portable devices. This is the EEE Slate EP121 (also called the EEE Pad) from Asus; a product launched at CES and one that packs quite a bit of hardware including an Intel Core i5 Dual Core CPU and up to 4GB of RAM. So sit back for a good read and decide for yourself if this one falls into the winner’s group or the losers.

Published in Pro Systems
Thursday, 07 April 2011 21:48

Sometimes, size does matter




TransWhile working on my latest round of reviews (making a few calls etc.) I stumbled upon the one thing that could hurt the burgeoning slate market. It was not some great epiphany nor is this hard to spot. This biggest issue that slates will have is storage space. Looking around the market at the various offerings (especially the PC/Windows offerings) I found a disturbing trend. Most of the devices have very limited storage space. Even Asus’ vaunted EEE Slate which comes with a maximum of 64GB of storage. Out of all of the tablets/slates on the market today the one with the largest amount of storage appears to be the Gigabyte S1080 with a whopping 320GB 5400 RPM HDD.

Published in Editorials
Friday, 04 February 2011 19:12

Dating Apple



LevoniThinSkinJPG_09In business it is often said that you need to have a thick skin to survive.  Now that may be true when you are dealing with vendors, manufacturers and even consumers but for your products sometimes thin is better.  We had the chance to talk to Troy Rutt at True Power about their new ThinSkin product for the iPhone 4.

Published in Editorials



73Have you ever wondered how Apple does it? I mean how they really get the best information. Those low prices and just seem to be on top of things so well. Many have said that Steve Jobs just has his finger on the pulse of today’s computer consumers.  Now, I will grant that Steve is a marketing genius but there has to be something else. One of these things was the former inclusion of Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board (until an obvious conflict of interest came up) this gave Apple some amazing information into consumer wants and trends (after all Google is in the business of selling ads and collects a ton of data for this purpose).  But we have always had a feeling that there was something else going on behind the scenes.

Published in Editorials
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