According to Reuters, Nokia is now in support of Apple in its court battle against Samsung over a number of infringed products. Apple filed suit against Samsung to block the sale of products that were previously ruled as infringed. Nokia’s attorney Keith Broyles filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that Judge Lucy Koh was wrong in when she ruled that Apple would have to justify the relationship between the patented feature and the demand for a product before an injunction could be filed.

Apple and Samsung have been locked in an all out legal war, after the two companies disputed over a patent in 2009, which was later settled through a licensing agreement. Nokia’s brief was not filed in direct support of Apple but was instead done under the terms that Koh’s ruling could potentially harm the United States patent protection operations. Without patents being rightfully granted and injunctions being rejected, Broyles believes that innovation could take a negative hit.

Nokia has recently been involved in numerous U.S. patent lawsuits, as both a plaintiff and defendant. Nokia is thus both a significant patent owner that might seek an injunction to protect its patent rights, and a manufacturer in an industry in which patent owners routinely issue threats of injunctions for patent infringement.

In recent months, Samsung has become a serious competitor for Apple in the mobile devices market, particularly with positive sales of its Galaxy S and Note devices. With the patent battle ongoing in court, and competition in the market heating up between the two companies, it is not surprising that a company such as Nokia would come out in support of Apple.

Without injunctions and some products being banned from sale, the innovative drive in the mobile devices market is lost, instead producing a number of clone copies of one device such as the iPhone.

{Via MacRumors}

The mobile research firm revealed that 320,000 smartphone and tablet users in six countries participated in the poll. In the U.S Motorola Atrix HD came in at first followed by Motorola Droid Razr, HTC Rezound 4G, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and then iPhone 5.

Sarah Quinn, marketing manager for OnDevice Research commented on the report and said, “although Apple created one of the most revolutionary devices of the past decade, other manufactures have caught up, with some Android powered devices now commanding higher levels of user satisfaction,”.

In the UK Apple comparatively did better where HTC One X came first, iPhone 5 second followed by Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini and Samsung Galaxy S3.

Perhaps the most interesting result of the poll was that among the rankings for overall mobile device satisfaction Apple came in first followed by Google, Motorola, HTC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and then Samsung. The survey reached out to mobile users in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia and was conducted via the mobile Web.

The report does give an interesting perspective of users satisfaction however, it’s unclear how a device can rank low while the company selling the device rank higher in overall satisfaction.

{via CNET}

Apple surpassed Nokia’s Symbian OS in order to claim the 2nd spot, directly behind Android. In the second quarter of 2011, Apple held the number one spot for world’s largest individual smartphone manufacturer, because of Android’s fragmented manufacturing process and the availability of its OS on multiple hardware.

The problem for Nokia is that demand for its Symbian-based smart phones has dissipated very rapidly, particularly in operator-led markets, such as Western Europe, where it’s been strong in the past. It badly needs the first of its Windows Phone devices to launch as soon as possible to arrest a decline and, hopefully, silence its critics.

Nokia is trailing behind both Samsung and Apple with only 16.7 million units last quarter. Google’s Android, Apple, and Samsung are now the leaders of the smartphone operating system and are setting their foot down.

Apple is shipping iPhones much more rapidly and increasing iOS usage around the world. Apple has now penetrated every major market and is experiencing major success with it’s host of iOS devices.

Apple has the ability to lead ahead of Android if it continues to experience this growth and adoption of iOS in it’s suite of mobile products. With the rumored iPhone 5 expected to be introduced this fall Apple could leap ahead in the third quarter.

{via AppleInsider}

According to market research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple Inc. (AAPL) overtook Nokia in global smartphone market share during the second quarter.

Apple has now become worlds largest smartphone manufacturer as Nokia slipped to number three and Samsung coming close at second position. The global smartphone market saw 110 million units being shipped which represented 76% growth. 

Apple shipped 20.3 million units and controlled 18.5% of the smartphone market whereas Samsung came very close with 19.2 million units in the same quarter. Nokia witnessed major drop as its market share fell from 38.1% to 15.2%.

Expansion in China and other Asian countries helped Apple’s growth in global smartphone market and analysts view the company’s ability to quickly expand in Asian markets as an important factor to retain the momentum.

As Nokia’s Ovi Store failed to gain traction and the fact that the company announced that newer handsets would support Windows platform caused the Finnish giant to lose major market share. 

Samsung on the other hand has shown very positive results as Android platform continues to grow. However, it’s worth noting that even though Apple ships just one new model every year the company has been reporting superb results year over year.

Apple is expected to announce iPhone 5 in September which could help the company post stellar results yet again in Q3 and Q4. With iOS 5 and iCloud iPhones would not need a computer to set up which will help in much higher sales especially in Asian countries.

A report from The Financial Times today mentioned that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has surpassed Nokia to claim the spot for world’s top smartphone vendor. Apple Inc. experienced rapid growth with the introduction of it’s iPhone 4 while Nokia experienced a sharp decrease in manufacturing and production.

AAPL had the ability to close out a 5.5 million unit deficit during the first quarter and turn it into a 3.6 million unit lead in the second quarter. Apple’s 3rd quarter also produced sufficient results and suggests that Apple may be holding this spot for a long time.

Shipments of Nokia smartphones declined by 34 per cent to 16.7m units, compared with the 20.3m iPhones shipped by Apple in its second quarter.

Apple was already the biggest smartphone maker by revenue and profits, but the April-June period marked the first time it had surpassed Nokia in volume.

Nokia and Research in Motion used to be two of the biggest cell phone manufacturers in the world, but failed to hold out after Apple topped RIM in Global shipments during the 3rd quarter of 2010. With this news coming at the beginning of the 4th quarter of 2011 and the introduction of Mac OS X Lion, Apple can expect huge growth in sales of shipments.

Apple has faced competition from Android and HTC, although Apple still remains number one due to Android phones being shipped by more than one manufacturer. Both Android and HTC have shipped about half the number of phones globally when compared with Apple. Android has experienced major growth over the last year, but is still behind in terms of shipment volumes. Apple has yet to formally announce this new achievement.

Nokia recently announced its partnership with Microsoft to bring Windows Phone OS to Nokia’s devices. This has caused a dip in Nokia’s smartphone shipments as users are expecting new handsets to be revealed soon.

A report from Japanese analyst house Nomura, said that Nokia was so far behind in terms of sales and production that Apple and Samsung would surpass them in smartphone shipments this quarter. Nokia is under a lot of pressure to make their OS transition quick and painless, so that they can regain lost time and money in the smartphone market. A

pple’s royalty payments to Nokia will certainly help the company as they continue to improve their services and transition to a new operating system. Robert Cozza, mobile devices analyst at Gartner, spoke about Nomura’s predictions:

In 1Q11 Nokia smartphone sales were double those of Samsung, so it seems optimistic to see this overtake in 2Q. If Nokia’s new Symbian devices will fail with consumers over the next couple of quarters then we could see this overtake from Samsung on Nokia happening in 3Q.

At this point, with much speculation and markets analysis, it is unclear where Nokia is headed with their phones and if they will ever be able to capture the market as they once did, but one thing is for sure, royalty payments from Apple will certainly give the Finnish giant a boost.

According to IHS iSuppli who published these figures shipments for electronic goods generally slow down after the holiday season but the dip in smartphone industry is atypical. In contrast, Apple’s iPhone shipments jumped nearly 15% as the company shipped 18.6 million of its smartphones in the first quarter.

The market research firm credited the launch of Verizon iPhone 4 for strong sales in the first quarter. Tina Teng, IHS senior analyst for wireless communications, said:

Not only did this allow Apple to expand its target market and boost shipments, it also placed additional pressure on rival smart phone brands–including Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC–that focus on Verizon Wireless as a major customer,

Apple continues to remain at number two position on the list of top smartphone manufacturers in terms of total shipments however, companies like Nokia, Motorola saw sequential declines of 14.5% and 16.3% respectively.

Nokia’s tie-up with Microsoft is being viewed as one of the sting factors impacting sales as consumers anticipate newer models to feature the new Windows Phone platform. Ting said, “With the announcement of the deal, Nokia eliminated the incentive for consumers to buy its existing smartphone products, which are based on its Symbian and MeeGo operating systems. Meanwhile, the Microsoft deal is unlikely to yield any products for nearly one year,”

Apple’s clever timing for the Verizon iPhone 4 launch and then the White iPhone is certainly causing a positive impact on sales. The research firm also noted that RIM’s shipments were up 4.2% in the first quarter compared with the fourth. However, Research In Motion failed to catch up and was 4 percentage points behind Cupertino, Calif. based company in terms of shipments, compared with 2.1 points in Q4.

It seems now that Nokia has joined hands with Microsoft and its Windows Phone 7 operating system they’re not scared of anyone. Now they’re going after Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) again over patents relating to various mobile devices.

In a new complaint filed with the US International Trace Commission, Nokia claims Apple violated patents “in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, tablets, and computers.” Not much then!

The two companies have been at loggerheads for a while now, ever since the Finnish phone giant first filed its patent infringement lawsuit in 2009. Since then the pair have exchanged patent claims on a regular basis, with Apple also throwing their weight around in court.

Just days ago Nokia lost the first battle however, with a judge ruling Apple did not violate any of the patents Nokia originally claimed in its first filing back on 09. Unsurprisingly, Nokia “does not agree with the ITC’s initial determination.” according to an announcement today.

Now it seems Nokia is gearing up for another two years of back and forth legal fun with one of the richest companies on the planet.

Good luck with that.

{Via CNET}

We recently reported that Nokia, RIM & HTC were quick to respond to the “Antennagate” conference and today Samsung in its defense said that:

The antenna is located at the bottom of the Omnia 2 phone, while iPhone’s antenna is on the lower left side of the device. Our design keeps the distance between a hand and an antenna. We have fully conducted field tests before the rollout of smartphones. Reception problems have not happened so far, and there is no room for such problems to happen in the future.

Hwan Kim, vice-president of mobile communications recently issued a new statement to Reuters saying:

we have not received significant customer feedback on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia II. Based on years of experience of designing high quality phones, Samsung mobile phones employ an internal antenna design technology that optimizes reception quality for any type of hand-grip use.

The aim of Apple’s conference was to explain to its customers that the “weak spot” issue in not unique to iPhone 4 and continues to be a challenge for the entire industry and by showing the existence of similar issues in its competitors products Apple has been successful in conveying this message.

Some pundits went into the event secure in their own personal mind bubble that Steve knew about the issue with the iPhone 4, it wasn’t fixable, and he was a liar. Others went in equally sure that he didn’t know about it, and it could perhaps be fixed by software, but Apple were struggling with that task. Overall though, a very large percentage of all of them went in assuming that Apple would have to grovel their way out of this situation, offer some kind of mea culpa, recall the iPhone 4 (at least with some kind of voluntary return scheme) and then crawl away licking their wounds.
Unfortunately what a lot of the pundits, who themselves contributed to creating this 22 day circus forgot was that “Pride always comes before a fall”. They also forgot that Apple has said all along that if you don’t like the iPhone 4 you can return it within 30 days for a full refund.

Apple’s senior management wasn’t even on the same planet as most industry pundits when they entered the Press Conference. By that I mean that their perception of the issue was one based in reality, 22 days of hard work and investigation and several years of hard work prior to that. What it was certainly not based on was self-aggrandisation, a grubby search for page-views, or a self inflicted forced feedback loop of rumor and speculation feeding on itself in a piranha pool like frenzy.

The first bullet that Apple dodged was the amount of mileage that other manufacturers were planning to make out of “Antennagate”.

“Every Magic Trick consists of three parts, or acts.”

“The First part is called The Pledge. The Magician shows you something ordinary.”

So Steve started with the iPhone 4. He also softened us up with the now famous iPhone 4 Antenna song, and an admission that Apple makes mistakes.

Steve carefully orchestrated the way his monologue ran so that it led smoothly through a winding tail reenforcing just how good the iPhone 4 is at handling radio signals, and then arrived at a tantalising moment where he flirted with his own “pet theory” about why a minuscule number more calls have been recorded as dropped by AT&T on the iPhone 4 than on the iPhone 3GS.

With the dropped calls figure he gave us something which sounded like a negative, just briefly, before hinting at something a lot of people were salivating for – something free! And then he changed tack. That fleeting proposition seemed to be gone. So we listened all the more intently to what he had to say next…

In my own view the sampling for the iPhone 4 is so small by comparison to the 3GS it seems that comparing the two is irrelevant at this stage, whichever way you lean. But what it did do was put things in perspective and give Apple a really minor piece of bad “hard data” to take responsibility for, which it would later use as a reason to offer an appeasement to its customers.

As Steve continued to lecture us he dragged some of the iPhone 4’s main competitors into the room by the scruff of their necks, metaphorically; in the form of their handsets, and showed us their flaws also.

Now, in the UK it is illegal to produce adverts which criticise your competitors. At least it was the last time I checked. And I am pretty sure that although it used to go on in the US, it is now at least frowned upon, if not illegal in some states.

However, under the guise of a kind of public service announcement, or technical lecture, Steve Jobs spent about a third of his Press Conference showing us some of Apple’s leading competitors mobile devices dropping signals right in-front of our eyes. Just like the iPhone 4 has been reported as doing.

“The second act is called the turn. The Magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary.”

In one fell swoop he had created a global advert, sure to be replayed on news networks around the world, and streamed to people’s computers shortly after the Press Conference concluded. Levelling the playing field in Apple’s most important industry. Undoing harm, and putting previously falsely smug competitors on notice.

It is interesting to note that Apple got the video of the press conference up on its website in record time. And that there were clips from it playing on global news networks even before the Q&A immediately after the press conference had finished on the Apple campus.

This morning, instead of crowing about Apple’s troubles, as they were earlier in the week, Nokia and RIM are on the back foot and rushing to distribute their own Press Releases criticising Apple’s methods at the press conference. They’re in the offices emailing and faxing over the weekend! Apple is not. Apple’s competitors are now finding themselves doing their best to dispute the videos of their devices that Steve Jobs managed to get a global community looking at. But no-one, apart from tech. sites are picking any of this up. Because it’s not Apple, and it’s not interesting, and it’s the weekend now.

But back to the conference…

The second bullet that Apple dodged was the outcry that would come from third party iPhone 4 case manufacturers when they realised that Apple had just killed their business by giving away free Bumpers to a lot of their potential customers.

At the point where we all expected the “free Bumper” announcement I have already mentioned that Steve skilfully wheeled away and took us on another brief joy ride ride through how good the iPhone 4 is, just like that final twist on a roller coaster. And then he threw the free Bumper line out almost casually, as we were all looking the other way.

“But you wouldn’t clap yet because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.”

It was almost as if Jobs had watched “The Prestige” recently, and recalled perfectly how Michael Caine explained exactly the perfect steps a magicians trick should follow. (The quotes I am using are from that great movie, by the way.)
Now, something that had occurred to me a few days before the Press Conference, and one of the reasons I had my doubts about Apple giving out free Bumpers was that it could potentially alienate the entire third party product industry built up around the iPhone ecosystem.

Another reason that giving out Bumpers might be a bad idea is that I think it potentially opens a crack in Apple’s legal defence against the class action lawsuits that some initiated against Apple in the first few days that the iPhone 4 was on the market. But that is a subject for another article.

In any case Apple is giving out free Bumpers to all customers, and they have managed to make sure that there will be plenty on hand, and at the same time they won’t get more bad PR by gutting the relative cottage industry that iPhone third party accessories make up when compared to Apple’s corporate juggernaut.

Apple did that by “admitting”, or seeming to admit, that they couldn’t possibly manufacture enough Bumpers to satisfy all their customers themselves. And that they would get around that “problem” by enlisting the help of selected third party manufacturers, so that they could not only offer their customers a more diverse range of iPhone 4 Bumpers and covers to choose from. But also get them to them sooner rather than later. Whilst there may be some truth in the explanation that they could not produce enough Bumpers, it is certain that the thinking that went into that strategy ran deeper than simple supply issues.

To round the event out Steve confirmed that the white iPhone 4 would be available at the end of July. He assured us that Apple exists only to make its customers happy, and that they take all this very personally.

Finally in the Q&A he called both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journals liars.

“Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be… fooled.”

To be clear though, that last line I am quoting from “The Prestige” is not really where I am at personally. I never really saw there being a serious problem with the iPhone 4.

But that’s because I actually have one, and have been using it since a few days after launch, and have not had a single – not one – dropped call. And I use mine without a case in areas where both Nokia phones and previous iPhones had problems getting and keeping signals. So I don’t need to be convinced that the iPhone 4 is a great product.

Unfortunately Apple wasn’t trying to convince me. It was trying to convince an industry that exists on rumors and smoke and mirrors itself. Ironic when you consider that most rumor sites are the ones who feel they are drawing the curtain back on Apple’s “evil” PR machine. When in actual fact they are at best victims of their own forced feedback loop they create by stealing content from one another on the internet, and at worst vultures trolling for page views.

Overall I give Apple, and Steve Jobs 10 out of 10 for their handling of “antennagate”. So far…

I say so far, because it is not over yet. Those same sites, currently in some disarray as they work out their next move, already have their sights set on September the 30th. A deadline that Apple set for the end of free Bumpers. And one they are already assuming is the date that Apple will produce a hardware fix for the iPhone 4 that will change the laws of physics.

Woe betide Apple if they don’t come up with it. We might all be back at Cupertino in the first week of October otherwise.

Do let us know in the comments how you feel Apple has dealt with “Antennagate” so far…

Included for completeness below are the Press Releases from Nokia and RIM in response to Apple..

Nokia

Antenna design is a complex subject and has been a core competence at Nokia for decades, across hundreds of phone models. Nokia was the pioneer in internal antennas; the Nokia 8810, launched in 1998, was the first commercial phone with this feature.

Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.
In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.

RIM

Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple. – Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie