Edible Apple

Earlier this week, a judge in the UK not only ruled against Apple regarding allegations that Samsung slavishly copied Apple’ s iOS devices, but also ruled that Apple must post a statement on its UK website and in British newspapers alerting the masses that Samsung didn’t copy the iPad when coming up with their own tablet designs.

Oh the embarassment!

The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered designs, Judge Colin Birss said today. It should be posted on Apple’s U.K. home page for six months and published in several newspapers and magazines to correct any impression the South Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product, Birss said.

The order means Apple will have to publish “an advertisement” for Samsung, Richard Hacon, a lawyer for Cupertino, California-based Apple, told the court. “No company likes to refer to a rival on its website.”

Now how’s that for some cruel and unusual punishment.

via Bloomberg

As Samsung and Apple head into the homestretch before their long-anticipated trial begins next week, the lady calling the shots will be US District Court Judge Lucy Koh.

Having followed Samsung and Apple’s legal proceedings for a few months now, it’s clear that Koh has a solid grasp on the issues and delivers rulings based on a careful and complete consideration of the facts. In short, she’s not a fangirl of either company.

Recently, the Washington Post profiled Koh and gave us a bit of background on the woman who will be overseeing the Apple and Samsung legal circus at the end of July.

She is an expert on intellectual-property law, having practiced patent litigation for about a decade in private practice. In 2006, as a lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, she represented Creative Technology in a federal suit accusing Apple of infringing patents with its iPod music player. Apple countersued but ended up paying Creative $100 million for licensing fees.

On the other hand, she is a rookie judge who was appointed by President Obama in 2010. In just one year, she has taken on hundreds of cases, and she now grapples with the massive attention the tablet and smartphone patent suits have drawn from the captains of the high-tech industry.

Notably, Koh recently rejected an Apple motion that sought to heap the recently released Galaxy S III with the preliminary injunction that covers the Galaxy Nexus, her reasoning being that her caseload was already cumbersome enough.

Described as an extremely hard worker prone to working long hours – even on weekends – Koh has been known to cut vacations short in order to get back to work.

Lastly, a profile on Koh from the Institute of Corean-American studies adds:

She received an award from then FBI Director Louis J. Freeh for prosecuting a $54 million securities fraud case. Lucy also worked in several positions in Washington, D.C., including as Special Assistant to the United States Deputy Attorney General and as a United States Senate Judiciary Committee Fellow. Lucy received her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. She is married and has two children.

About 3 weeks ago, Apple won a preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Explaining her ruling, US District Judge Lucy Koh stated,

Although Samsung has a right to compete, it does not have a right to compete unfairly by flooding the market with infringing products. While Samsung will certainly suffer lost sales from the issuance of an injunction, the hardship to Apple of having to directly compete with Samsung’s infringing products outweighs Samsung’s harm in light of the previous findings by the Court.

Since the, Samsung has tried twice to get the preliminary injunction stayed, falling short both times. Most recently, Samsung filed a motion seeking a stay with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit only to have it rejected.

Florian Mueller writes,

The opinion published today does not provide much detail. It does, however, recall that “[t]o prevail [on a motion to stay], a movant must establish a strong likelihood of success on the merits or, failing that, must demonstrate that it has a substantial case on the merits and that the harm factors militate in its favor”. Samsung’s motion, which even contradicted Samsung’s own public statements that it wasn’t really harmed by the injunction, failed to meet those requirements.

And so Samsung will have to wait and hope for a favorable outcome in its upcoming trial with Apple if it wants to get the Galaxy Tab 10.1 back on the market.

But as Mueller notes, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the least of Samsung’s worries. After all, they have a more recent Galaxy Tab tablet already out on the market. Further, what Samsung is most likely more worried about is the preliminary injunction pertaining to its Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

Samsung’s resurgence has been on the back of its smartphone business, and with the Galaxy Nexus positioned as the flagship Ice Cream Sandwich device, that injunction affects Samsung’s bottom line a whole lot more.

A new report from Boy Genius Report claims that Apple’s next-gen iPhone, unofficially referred to as the iPhone 5, will feature smaller SIM cards dubbed nano-SIMs.

Multiple carrier sources have exclusively told BGR that Apple is supplying nano-SIM adapters so its carrier partners can test how nano-SIMs work on their networks in standard test devices before they are widely deployed when the new iPhone is introduced.

via BGR

In addition to a number of new features, iOS 6 will also enable iPhone users for the first time to Facetime chat over 3G networks. Naturally, actually enabling this feature also requires the participation of mobile carriers and it goes without saying that some mobile carriers are more hesitant than others.

Over the past few days, it’s been reported that the nation’s largest iPhone carrier – AT&T – may charge users extra for the ability to Facetime chat over 3G. And while such a decision, if it comes to fruition, is of course easy to criticize, AT&T may have learned a thing or two about the perils of unlimited data from the early iPhone days. And as an iPhone user, the last thing I want is for my data speeds to slow to a crawl because everyone and their mother is video chatting up the wazoo.

Now on the other hand, there’s Sprint. Coming late to the iPhone game, Sprint has a lot of ground to cover, as evidenced by their allegiance to unlimited data plans for iPhone users. And, whadya know, Sprint will keep their unlimited data plan in effect even for iPhone users wishing to Facetime over 3G.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

Meanwhile, AT&T rival Sprint Nextel Corp, which still offers unlimited data to new and existing users on its network, said it has no plans to erect pricing barriers to FaceTime.

“We are committed to our unlimited data and that means not charging for data consumption based on the application,” a spokeswoman said.

Of course you have to take the good with the bad. While Sprint does offer unlimited data, the speed of its network is noticeably slower than both AT&T’s and Verizon’s.

With Apple and Samsung gearing up for trial in just two weeks, there’s a whole lot of activity going on as both companies try to angle for advantages.

Recently, Apple was able to successfully preclude Samsung from bringing up Jobs’ famous anti-Android quote where he vowed to go thermonuclear and destroy Android even if it meant spending every last penny in Apple’s coffers.

Looking to introduce Jobs’ sentiment at trial, Samsung argued that it “speaks to Apple’s bias, improper motives and its lack of belief in its own claims in that they are a means to an end, namely the destruction of Android.”

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, however, sided with Apple and said that Jobs’ statement was irrelevant to the proceedings at hand.

“I really don’t think this is a trial about Steve Jobs,” Koh added.

The Jobs statements at issue were of course revealed in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography which was released in November 2011, shortly after Jobs’ death.

Not one to mince words, Jobs’ full quote reads: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

via Reuters

Well before it ever crossed Steve Jobs’ mind that Apple should get into the smartphone business, the company had for a few years been tinkering with various tablet designs. The story goes that when Jobs was shown a tablet prototype with multitouch, he had a lightbulb moment and decided that Apple should make a phone.

Now, thanks to the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Samsung, Network World has unearthed photos of a tablet mockup Apple had designed sometime between 2002 and 2004.

The mockup is referred to as the 035 mockup and was referenced by Jony Ive in his deposition with Samsung attorneys.

Asked if he’d seen the mockup before, Ive responds in the affirmative and adds:

My recollection of first seeing it is very hazy, but it was, I’m guessing, sometime between 2002 and 2004, some but it was I remember seeing this and perhaps models similar to this when we were first exploring tablet designs that ultimately became the iPad.

So interestingly enough, Apple’s work on a tablet form factor may date back as many as 10 years ago. And fascinatingly, despite some obvious size differences apparent below, the overall design isn’t all that different from the modern day iPad.

Here’s a front facing photo below, and you’ll note that there’s no home button.

Also, the thing was huge. Check out how thick it was.

And thanks to buzfeed, there are some color photo comparisons of this old mockup to an iPad 2.

BGR reports that the iPhone 5, in contrast to earlier reports, may not have entered the final production phase in China just yet. The report, citing a trusted source, claims that the iPhone 5 has not yet entered the DVT (device verification test) stage of production. As such, the final version of what the iPhone 5 will be is not yet set in stone.

It’s certainly possible Apple is producing engineering samples of new iPhones and has started manufacturing device enclosures to iron out any problems with the manufacturing line before real production starts, but that’s all that is happening at this point in time. The final version of Apple’s next iPhone — the one that you will buy — has not started production yet.

Additionally, we have confirmation that the units Apple is currently testing have 1GB of RAM, doubled from the iPhone 4S’s 512MB, and integrated 4G LTE radios. We can also confirm that NFC hardware is present in the phones as well.

9to5Mac reports:

Like it does with the iOS Personal Hotspot feature, U.S. carrier AT&T appears set to control and charge for the iOS 6 FaceTime over Cellular feature. This iOS 6 enhancement brings the formally WiFi only iOS device video calling feature into a more useful state, letting people use the feature practically anywhere they may be. AT&T provided us with the following statement:

We’re working closely with Apple on the new developer build of iOS6 and we’ll share more information with our customers as it becomes available.

Fox Business News reports that a German Court has ruled that the Motorola Xoom tablet does not violate Apple’s design patents for the iPad. At the same time, the Court refused to deem Apple’s design patent as invalid.

Apple initially sued Motorola for allegedly infringing three iPad designs with the Xoom. It sought to have the device banned across Europe.

Although the judges ruled Motorola’s Xoom doesn’t infringe on the iPad, the court rejected a counterclaim brought by Motorola alleging the iPad’s design patent is invalid, a spokesman for the court said.

As the court ultimately rejected both parties’ claims, it ordered Apple to pay two-thirds of costs and Motorola to pay a third, the spokesman added.

The Wall Street Journal reports how Apple will manage to slenderize its next-gen iPhone by utilizing in-cell touch display technology.

The technology integrates touch sensors into the LCD, making it unnecessary to have a separate touch-screen layer. The absence of the layer, usually about half a millimeter thick, not only makes the whole screen thinner, but the quality of displayed images would improve, said DisplaySearch analyst Hiroshi Hayase…

For Apple, the new technology would also simplify the supply chain and help cut costs as it would no longer have to buy touch panels and LCD panels from separate suppliers.

Apple.pro has posted a photo of what it claims are front panels for the next-gen iPhone 5.

I guess we can speculate that there won’t be a holdup in white iPhone 5 production like there was with the white iPhone 4.

Apple’s next-gen iPhone is largely expected to launch sometime in the Fall (early October is a good bet) and will reportedly sport a larger 4-inch screen along with 4G LTE functionality.