Apple using patents to delay adoption of WWW open standards again

  An initiative to standardize the way touch enabled devices interact with web content has had a wrench thrown into the works, at least temporarily, by Apple.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Events Working Group was created last year and tasked with standardizing the way touch devices, from smartphones and tablets to drawing pads and spatial sensors, interact with web applications. One of the specifications they have been working on is called 'Touch Events.'

  As part of the standard development process, the working group sent out multiple requests for patent exclusions. In layman's terms, these are requests for disclosure of any existing or pending patents which might be required to implement a standard.

  Responding to the third of three calls for exclusions this year, Apple provided the group with a list of four patents, one of which has already been approved, two which are pending approval, and a fourth which is in the early stage of application, which they say are related to the Touch Events specification.

  A developer for the Opera browser who blogs under the name Haavard is crying foul on Apple's move, and says they are simply trying to impede the creation of the Touch Events spec. He points to similar occurences in 2009 and 2010, when Apple made exclusion claims with respect to the W3C Widgets specification.

  Of the three patents listed in those claims, two were found to be nonessential, while the third was deemed both nonessential and invalid due to prior art.

  When a patent exclusion claim is made to a W3C working group, the organization must appoint a team to examine the patents in question to determine whether they are, in fact, necessary to the spec in its current state. This means delaying finalization until the determination is reached.

  Perhaps the key technology which Apple has used as a cornerstone for their multitude of patent lawsuits against handset and tablet makers around the world are is the touch screen. Simply put, Apple wants to use patents to restrict other companies' touch implementations.

  Of course that's despite the fact their touch screen technology isn't necessarily as revolutionary or original as their patents suggest. In some cases they cover technology which was in production by other companies before the Apple patent application was even filed.

Apple tries to reboot it's lost lawsuits

  In keeping with its strategy for world domination in consumer electronics, Apple has inconspicuously transferred a dozen patents that it previously "owned" to a non-existent corporate entity called Cliff Island LLC.

 Tech crunch have done a little digging and it appears that Cliff Island is a shell company, sharing a physical address with Altitude Capital, the main investor behind patent trolling company Digitude Innovations (ironic name, n'est pas?).

  Cliff Island then "transferred" those same patents to Digitude who have now filed a suit with the ITC (International Trade Commission) in the US against basically all the smartphone and tablet makers selling in America (RIM, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Amazon, and Nokia (note that Apple is not on this list). How mysterious.

  Digitude was founded in 2010 and raised $50 million from Altitude Capital Partners, with aims to “acquire, aggregate, and license key technology areas within the consumer electronics and related technology fields in a patent consortium” — in other words, it buys up patents and then sues other companies until they settle and agree to pay licensing fees, because it’s generally less expensive than actually going to court.

  So what we're seeing here is Apple suing its competitors out of the market, yet again, for patent law suites it already lost, but this time by proxy. And it's interesting that the patent transfers have taken place under some sneaky back-room sleight of hand. For new readers this might seem unethical even for Apple - what we know, is only the tip of the ice berg, unfortunately.

Burning iPhone endangers Australian flight, hundreds of passengers

   Australian airline reports case of burning iPhone on flight. Regional Express, Australia's largest independent regional airline, issued a press release on an incident shortly after a flight landed late last week. Flight ZL319 had just landed when a passenger's mobile phone started emitting a significant amount of dense smoke, and started glowing red.

   A flight attendant extinguished the burning phone immediately and no passengers or crew were harmed. Regional Express reported the incident to the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).

   The mobile phone in question is identified as an Apple iPhone, which shows a significant amount of damage to the rear of the phone. Reports online indicate that the iPhone shows evidence that the burning came from the battery, which would explain the red glow and the release of smoke.

iOS fragmentation - Is it worse than Android's?

How do we define fragmentation?

This is what fragmentation (frgmn-tshn) actually means:
The scattering of parts of a computer file across different regions of a disk. Fragmentation occurs when the operating system breaks up the file and stores it in locations left vacant by previously deleted files. The more fragmented the file, the slower it is to retrieve, since each piece of the file must be identified and located on the disk.

Below we will try to explain the FUD term propagated by Steve Jobs and spread by Apple fans that also have a very vague idea of it's meaning.

• the inability to update the OS because of the manufacturer?
• the user's choice not to update?
• the coexistence of multiple app stores?
• exclusive apps?
• different hardware configurations?

So let's start with updates

    If we are to consider updates as the sole factor in fragmentation, we would certainly be wrong. Both Android and iOS can run the same Apps. Forcing partial updates like iOS 4 on iPhone 3G and 3GS has lowered the device performance considerably while still not bringing the same features iPhone 4 had. Apple might have reduced fragmentation in statistics, but it has decreased user experience by making 3G and 3GS laggy devices.

So how are iPhone updates doing in 2011?
According to statistics, not too well. So far iOS 5 is only on 38% of all iPhones:

"According to Chitika Insights, one month after release, the new OS is on 38 percent of iPhones, 30 percent of iPads and 12 percent of iPod Touch.

iOS5 distribution in 2011

 The firm uses mobile ad network impressions to analyze traffic."

In comparison, Android's latest major distribution for Phones 2.x.x is spread across 95% of the devices, and the latest subversion, Gingerbread or 2.3.x is spread across 38.2% of the devices.

We should also mention that Android has a market share or 52.5% while Apple has a market of ~15%. Given the fact that there are 443 unique Android devices released and only 7 iPhones, I'd say Apple's closed eco-system idea is doing a lot worse in the real world than it did on paper.

iPhone 4S packs Bluetooth 4.0 - no, you still can't beam anything over

   After a selective benchmark that only displayed the results where iPhone 4S excelled, Apple now tries to claim the title for "the first Bluetooth 4.0" phone. The FUD spread by Apple pretty much consists of obscure features such as collecting data from various sensors or connecting headsets, features that are available for everybody since bluetooth 1.0. Of course as with any bluetooth iteration there's lower power consumption and higher transfer rates - of course useful for phones that can actually beam data; so far the best bet is a jailbroken phone. It's unknown if Apple may allow sending files via iMessages to iOS only devices so Bluetooth is actually in the same status quo it's always been in on iOS.

   Unfortunately for Apple, the file transfer and the remote SIM access protocols are parts of the Bluetooth standard and with those missing it simply "ain't got no standard", just the same way iPhone doesn't really have USB but that is another story.

Kudos Apple for making the news and deceiving your fans all over again!

Apple Siri-ous about copying Android, innovation nowhere to be found

  Samsung                      HTC                           iOS5         

  After succesfully replicating the Android notification system, Apple has made the next step to the voice control feature.

    The next "real hip" thing on every mobile gadgetry website you'll find will be Apple's "Siri", a voice recognition app that can make calls, record messages, play music, launch another application or google something up for you, nothing more than Vilingo could do since 2010 when it was released. I say nothing more because nothing less certainly doesn't apply. But as the process of copying the iPhone 2G from Samsung didn't really go too well, Siri too has a few shortcomings:

• The voice quality on Siri is not quite there yet
• It's harder to activate than the the double tap on Galaxy S2
• It still seems to lack voice activation compared to Samsung's Galaxy series
• It's only available in English and it can't recognize accents

You can check the ripoff after the break:

[iPhone jokes] Apple innovates again, are you SIRI-ous?

iPhone 4S benchmarks out: mixed results for the A5 CPU

   So the iPhone 4S benchmarks are out and it would seem they are nothing less than amazing. Unfortunately the graphics benchmark that was released by Anandtech earlier today is as synthetic as it gets; the tests used were "offscreen", in other words no image was rendered during the test. Offscreen means that the would-be-rendered image is HD but unfortunately none of the tests used an actual 720p output and monitor to verify the results.

   Should you want to play games on an external monitor iPhone 4S is expected to perform better thanks to the fact that the image is mirrored as the iPhone real HDMI output does not consist of a real HD 720p image as Apple kindly informs us:

Apple Digital AV Adapter mirrors exactly what you see on iPad 2 or iPhone 4S so that everyone in the room can enjoy it on your widescreen TV[...]

   Mirrored means that the screen image is actually cloned and scaled to 720p instead of having to be rendered as a second HD output. In this case most android devices suffer a larger performance drop while displaying a better quality output.

Sprint confirms our woes, won't take chances for iPhone 4S cheap plastic

Not even a bumper makes it 100% safe

    Sprint is voting thumbs-down on having its Total Equipment Protection plans available to the iPhone 4S, probably following the bad experience with iPhone 4. According to SprintFeed, the only choice is to purchase the AppleCare+ Protection Plan or go through a third party to have any protection from accidental damage. Hopefully this setup isn’t permanent, but we’re not going to hold our breath. Just as a reminder, that $99 AppleCare+ can only be added at the time of purchase. But ask yourself, what’s worse? Paying $99 (the price of an iPhone 4) upfront, or paying an extra $649.99 for a new 16GB iPhone 4S after dropping your phone?
   Meanwhile you could go for a device with gorilla glass, it's incredibly hard to scratch, almost impossible to break, it doesn't shatter like cheap plastic, it doesn't bend like aluminum. Wouldn't it be awesome if the most beautiful and important part on your phone would also be the most resistant one?

Via: Sprintfeed

iPhone 4S: Antennagate, check! Brain damage, check!

iFixed nothing

    Apple claims that the iPhone 4S features a new antenna design, intended to prevent any risk of 'Antennagate' reoccurring. But did they really fix or innovate anything? Let's start with fixing things. In the mockup on the right you can see that by "not holding it right" you are shorting 3 of iPhone 4S's antennas and you will be jamming the forth one once the phone touches your ear.

   The 4S's new dual antennas can automatically switch when sending and receiving information, a trick Apple claims is "a first" for a mobile phone.

    We won't go into explaining the dangers of SAR and why most manufacturers place the antenna on the bottom of the phone, away from your brain. You should know though that at any given time the best working antenna on iPhone 4S will be the one on top since it's the only one not shorted, it's the one the device will choose for best signal. It's right there next to your gray matter where most of the SAR radiation will dissipate.

   Frølund Pedersen, professor at Aalborg University's Institute for Electronic Systems in Denmark and one of the big names involved in the events of Antennagate last time around, feels that Apple's latest iPhone might be treading on toes stems from patents he and his associates apparently sold to Samsung some years earlier.

At the iPhone 4S launch, CEO Tim C(r)ook and co were quoted as saying,

“Improving on the innovative stainless steel external, dual-antenna design of iPhone 4, iPhone 4S is the first phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to send and receive.”

Pedersen disagrees, primarily with the fact that Apple dubbed this an 'innovation',

"When Apple says that it is new, it’s not true. It has been in use for very long. For example in the DECT cordless phones. Both in these and in some other phones“

Two iOS security breaches and how the hackers got those pictures of you

    Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security discovered a serious security vulnerability in Apple's iOS platform. The security hole allows a malicious user access to the root files of the phone, where they could see personal user information like passwords, call logs, messages, and and your location date if he hasn't done so already. Apple has acknowledged the problem and promises to issue a fix.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Apple spokesperson Bethan Lloyd said Apple is "aware of this reported issue and developing a fix that will be available to customers in an upcoming software update." She did not provide a date as to when the fix would be available.

     In other news, multiple frustrated iPhone 4 owners have complained this week that their device's front-side camera is taking pictures of them when it is supposed to be inactive.

Those photos then show up on the iPhone screen when the user tries to start a FaceTime video call. One angry owner said her FaceTime picture showed her in her office, despite never using the app while at work.

[iPhone jokes] Exclusive Steve Ballmer iPad Review

iPhone 5 and 4S spot defective displays, Apple regrets giving up on Samsung

    The iPhone 4 launch fiasco is about to repeat itself. A defect has presented in some iPhone 5 touch panels produced by Wintek which may affect the ability to meet initial shipment targets for the launch which is expected in October, according to iPhone supply chain makers.

In response, Wintek simply indicated that all of its products are being delivered on schedule.

   Wintek, is the company where n-hexane poisoning took place this time last year. N-hexane, a poisonous chemical was used to quicker manufacture iPhone4 screens. Wintek still accounts for 20-25% (while Taiwan TPK Holding accounts for the rest) as Apple has no problem in putting their worker's health behind profits.

   "The defect, "delayed bubble", is difficult to avoid during panel production, particularly when the defect is not detected during the process of laminating touch panels, and only later found during assembly, the sources said."

    More advanced smartphones use AMOLED or SuperAMOLED screens that are thinner, use less power and to not require the old "lamination" procedure as the display and the touch screen are one and the same panel.

New link for iPhone Fever feeds!

     Hello and welcome! You might have noticed the recent changes around TheiPhoneFever. We have tried to make the blog a lot lighter and more user friendly, be that user an Android, Symbian, Windows or even an iPhone user. And with all the new stuff around, the Feeds link is also changing:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/TheiPhoneFever

Make sure to visit it soon for the latest news Apple doesn't want you to hear!

iOS vulnerability leaves Skype users open to address book theft

    If you are using Skype for iPhone or iPod Touch, the Address Book on your device can easily be stolen via a simple chat message.

    How does it work?: Javascript commands are entered into the user names Skype account, a chat message is sent to the user who is using the newest version of Skype for iPhone, and a program is loaded onto a web server to receive the Address Book content.

    The report claims there is two oversights that are allowing this to happen so easily:

• iOS allows address book contents accessible to every app installed
• Failure by Skype to sanitize potentially dangerous JavaScript commands from the text that gets sent in chat messages

Of course it will be Skype's responsibility to patch the hole as iOS security is currently a complete mess as apple still tries to figure out the hole that made them lose the US Army defense contract.
    Meanwhile any skilled hacker/developer can collect your and your friend's addresses with the simplest app or game imaginable.
Detailed instructions of the hack after the break.

Apple's iPad, iPhone design, "borrowed" from Samsung, LG

    Today we're starting a new trend, the one of pamphlets. It's unjust that Apple steals the credit of so many brilliant people - because it's people, not companies who made them - and claims it "invented" the modern smarphone or the tablet, be it Newton or iPad.

There's solid proof for those willing to hear it on how Apple infringed other's designs; others like Samsung and LG that didn't think for a second that a touch screen phone with one button, a thin white bezel or simply put, the wheel, are things that someone would actually patent.

So head over to the new design section of our blog, "Other designs", and check it out for yourself!

 Don't forget to Share 'em and spread 'em!

OS X Lion disappoints again - it's just like having no password at all

    OS X from apple has not seen a great deal of interest during development (if any) and one million downloads on launch day, reported by Apple, so you can expect that number was rounded. For an $30 OS this is certainly a disappointment.

Not only has one of the sites endorsed by Apple, Gizmodo, called it a failure but the cuts in manufacturing quality at Foxconn and security holes haven't certainly brought more popularity:

     Security blog Defense in Depth has found a glaring security flaw in OS X Lion that enables hackers to change the password of any user on a machine running Lion. “[While] non-root users are unable to access the shadow files directly, Lion actually provides non-root users the ability to still view password hash data,” Patrick Dunstan from Defense in Depth explained in a recent blog post. The result is that anyone could use a simple Python script, created by Dunstan himself, to discover a user’s password. It gets worse. Reportedly, OS X Lion does not require its users to enter a password to change the login credentials of the current user. That means typing the command: “dscl localhost -passwd /Search/Users/Roger” will actually prompt you to set a new password for Roger. Hackers could easily take advantage of the known bug if they have local access to the computer and Directory Service access. Disabling automatic log-in, enabling sleep and screensaver passwords and disabling guest accounts are as efficient to keeping your Mac secure as duck-taping the lid. We recommend upgrading to a Linux based OS or Windows.

Apple's iPhone before the leaked Samsung F700

    Many smartphone blogs and websites have taken the Apple version of the F700, that one that the F700 was showcased one month after the first iPhone. Even if that was true, Samsung engineers must have been freaking geniuses or robots (androids if you will) to build a working phone within less than 30 days.

[iPhone jokes] Think outside the bumper

‘Other designs are possible’

    Apple and Samsung are at odds over patents. In numerous courts, in numerous states, in numerous countries on numerous continents, the pair continue to file complaint after complaint. Apple says Samsung builds copycat devices that steal design elements from its iPad tablet and iPhone smartphone. Samsung says Apple’s mobile devices violate multiple Samsung patents covering communications standards. And round and round we go.

    In the most recent development of note, a German judge on Friday upheld a ruling that will block Samsung’s local unit from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Germany. In her decision, Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hoffman stated, “The court is of the opinion that Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible.” Other designs are possible. The judge continued, “For the informed customer there remains the predominant overall impression that the device looks [like the iPad].”

Well that’s just a tough break for Samsung.