Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung have been fighting the legal battle of patents in the courts in many countries. AAPL won a significant lawsuit against Samsung last year where the court awarded $1 Billion to Apple after finding that Samsung products infringed Apple’s patents.

On Wednesday the U.S International Trace Commission reached a decision {PDF} on Samsung Patent No, 7,706,384 described as “Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system” and ruled that Apple had infringed on Samsung’s patent.

As a result of this ruling the ITC has issued a “cease and desist” order that would prevent Apple from selling the products that infringe the patent. The devices that would be affected are AT&T iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G.

Under the modified constructions, the Commission has determined that Samsung has proven that the accused iPhone 4 (AT&T models); iPhone 3GS (AT&T models); iPhone 3 (AT&T models); iPad 3G (AT&T models); and iPad 2 3G (AT&T models) infringe the asserted claims of the ’348 patent.

The Commission has further determined that the properly construed claims have not been proven by Apple to be invalid and that Samsung has proven that a domestic industry exists in the United States with respect to the ‘348 patent.

Apple would most definitely appeal this decision. The ban won’t come into effect immediately as this is a preliminary final ruling. Apple will take this matter up to the Federal Circuit Courts to review this decision.

The legal battles between tech companies in recent years is being viewed as a means to prevent competitors from grabbing a large market share by securing bans in the court. However, Apple’s view on its legal battle is to prevent Samsung from “blatantly copying” its products.

{via MacRumors}

Apple is reportedly looking into developing a location based emergency app for the iPhone so that users have easy access to emergency services when using the device. Right now, the only emergency feature the iPhone has is local emergency alerts. Other than that, users can dial the police in their region using the Phone app.

The new emergency feature was a patent filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called “Location-Based Emergency Information” which originated as early as 2007. The feature was also reportedly created in part by Scott Forstall, Apple’s former iOS chief who was removed after issues with Maps and Siri as well as inventors Gregory N. Christie, Robert E. Borchers, and Imran A. Chaudhri.

When a person travels abroad, emergencies can occur. For example, the person can become injured in an accident, be a victim of a crime, or lose their travel documents. In those situations, having knowledge of contact information for local emergency services or the pertinent consular services can be beneficial.

Apple is developing this emergency application, because the company believes that users that travel to multiple cities or countries would neglect to gather the proper emergency numbers for that area. As a result, Apple would make the feature location based and gather the information in case users needed assistance from the medical, police or fire departments.

The feature operates in the style of a regular app icon but when pressed, would give users the option to contact different emergency departments, such as medical or police. This would come in handy, particularly when users are traveling internationally, or even in the United States, where one must dial 9-1-1 and then determine with the operator what service is needed.

{Via AppleInsider}

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) have been competing in the ereader and tablet market for over a year now, since the iPad was introduced. On Friday, a report from Bloomberg mentioned that Amazon is now looking to introduce its own smartphone to take on the iPhone and some of the leading Android devices in the market.

A smartphone would give Amazon a wider range of low-priced hardware devices that bolster its strategy of making money from digital books, songs and movies. It would help Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos — who made a foray into tablets with the Kindle Fire — carve out a slice of the market for advanced wireless handsets.

Amazon has one of the most popular ereaders out on the market, the Kindle and is also leading the industry with some of its other products, including its cloud services and tablet computer, the Kindle Fire. The report mentions that Amazon is set to acquire a portfolio of patents that would allow the company to take steps in competing directly with some of the top competitors.

The rumored smartphone would likely borrow certain aspects of the Kindle Fire, including features such as purchasing books, magazines, and newspapers from Amazon’s store as well as using Amazon’s Cloud Drive as external storage. Amazon currently operates services that control a considerable portion of the digital content available online. By introducing a smartphone alongside its tablet and pairing with its online content, Amazon could very well present the iPhone with a serious competitor in the smartphone market.

{Via MacRumors}

Apple’s retail stores are truly one of a kind, blending materials such as glass and aluminum into intricate pieces of art that dress up any neighborhood they are built in. Apple intends to protect that idea, hoping to be the only one with a one of a kind experience for its customers. The latest act of preservation by the company is to patent the 54 foot tall, 75 foot wide and 30 foot deep glass design on its Apple Upper West Side store.

Details for the patent were revealed in a patent application earlier this week, published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent filing focuses specifically on the curved glass roof of the store, located blocks from Lincoln Center and a few avenues from Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue Store. The support structure of the store are also parts of the filing, which highlights specific sections of the outer shell that adds to the design of the store.

The Upper West Side store opened in November of 2009, and since then has become one of the five stores in Manhattan. This latest patent comes only a week after the USPTO revealed plans to patent the cylindrical design of Apple’s main store in Shanghai, China.

Apple’s obsessive focus on the simplicity of its stores plays very well into the design of the store, which the company goes to great lengths to preserve and shelter from copycats. Much of this personal belief comes from the vision of former CEO and Chairman, Steve Jobs, who believed simplicity was the key to life, and vowed to preserve Apple’s ideas.

Apple Stores around the world receive about 18,000 visitors a week per store, with each store bringing in about $12.2 million in revenue. Apple has continued to expand its retail sector, focusing on countries such as China as well as larger cities in the United States.

{via Apple Insider}

Earlier today a German court ordered two patent rulings which involved Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung. In Mannheim Regional Court Judge Andreas Voss tossed the third lawsuit in a row in which Samsung claimed that AAPL infringed on 3G/UTMS patent.

Samsung has already announced that it will appeal the dismissal of its case. In addition to the ruling in Apple’s favor the German court, according to Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, tossed one of two suits filed by Apple against Samsung over slide-to-unlock.

Apple has seen some success in its legal battle against Android as the Cupertino, Calif. based company won preliminary injunctions against Samsung, however most of them were subsequently lifted.

Samsung still hasn’t been able to enforce any intellectual property right anywhere on this planet against Apple

Mueller on his blog explains that today’s decision does not reduce chances of Apple’s success in other slide-to-unlock lawsuits.

[T]he whole issue here that made Apple lose, for the time being, the slide-to-unlock patent case against Samsung is just the interpretation of certain key terms (“predefined”, “displayed”, “path”). The slide-to-unlock utility model has a large number of claims, and some of those are much broader and don’t have the related limitations.

This week turned out to be great for Apple as the company scored significant victories in German courts. In one of the lawsuits the court ordered that Motorola Mobility cannot enforce standard-essential patent injunction against Apple during its appeal. This suggests that Apple has strong chances in succeeding. We recently reported that in another lawsuit against Motorola, Apple won German injunction over its Photo Gallery patent which enables Apple to enforce the ruling and ask for any infringing product to be destroyed.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) earlier today won an injunction against Motorola in Germany over the photo gallery patent. The judgement was pronounced on Thursday at the Munich I Regional Court by Judge Dr. Peter Guntz.

AAPL and Motorola have been involved in a number of lawsuits and this recent victory over yet another patent allows Apple to enforce the ruling which could force Motorola to destroy any infringing products. Motorola could very well continue to sell its smartphones and tablet by seeding a software update to resolve the infringing feature.

It’s interesting to note that Apple has won this injunction against all accused products which include two smartphones and the Xoom tablet. If Motorola decides to issue a software update to avoid infringing on Apple’s patent then it could possibly impact the user experience who are used to certain behavior when they scroll lists or manage / browse photo galleries.

Florian Mueller, an intellectual property activist-turned-analyst, on his blog FOSS Patents reports that:

The glass is clearly more than half-full for Apple in this case (and even more so when considering that Apple also won the drastic remedies of destruction and recall).

Apple continues to be aggressive in its approach to fight against the Android platform which the Cupertino, Calif. based company claims to infringe on its many patents. In Steve Jobs’ biography it was revealed that Jobs considered Android a “stolen product” and that he would “spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”

Today’s ruling is the second injunction Apple has won against MMI in Germany so far. Those are the first two Apple v. Motorola casees that came to judgment in Germany.

In August last year Google announced that it would acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion and the move was largely seen as an attempt to acquire a stronger patent portfolio. However, with Apple winning injunction in recent lawsuits it remains to be seen if Google’s decision of acquiring Motorola would play out well when the deal finally comes through.

It is worth noting that due a Motorola patent ruling which is under appeal forced Apple to discontinue the “push” feature in iCloud and MobileMe email service within Germany. Users can still receive and send emails however, they would have to manually “fetch” the emails. Apple is appealing the decision and believes “this patent is invalid”.

The latest suit was mentioned in Apple’s complaint against Samsung and later discovered by FOSS Patents. Apple filed a complaint with the same court over the design of the Motorola XOOM. However, it’s worth noting that the filing doesn’t state whether it includes a request for preliminary injunction.

There isn’t a clear statutory limit, but German lawyers usually discourage such motions unless they are filed within one month of finding out about an infringement. It’s possible to get permanent injunctions even against older products, but for preliminary ones there must be a particular sense of urgency. It’s possible that Apple has also been aware of the Xoom for too long to file for a preliminary injunction at this stage.

Apple is potentially making it difficult for Android smartphone manufactures to sell their devices as patent infringement, if proven, could result in high licensing fees.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out between Apple and Motorola.

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.

Here is some potentially exciting news for connectivity geeks, via Patently Apple. Apple has applied for, and been granted a patent on an all new slimline connector which is not only possibly for iOS devices but also for future Macs.

Whilst DisplayPort and USB 3.0 seem to be the main focus here, it seems likely that perhaps Thunderbolt (Intel’s “Light Peak” multi-purpose high speed connection technology, rebranded for Apple as Thunderbolt) may also show up in this connector at some point.

Although “Light Peak” was generally expected to be delayed, and also an optical only technology when brought to market, it made its first appearance on new Apple Macs recently in a form specifically tailored for Apple’s computers. Apple were one of Intel’s partners in the technologies inception.

Apple have a history of trying to reduce the amount of connectors, and the size of them on their devices. They also work very hard to keep connector compatibility between hardware iterations. Some see this as a bad thing as it typically results in expensive, proprietary connectors. But others love the simplicity of this admittedly premium, but space efficient and user friendly model.

Either way, the possibility of all of our devices having one multi-purpose connector, which operates between both desktop and mobile equipment, and offers many different flavours and levels of connectivity speed and complexity, is certainly an exciting prospect.

Will Apple surprise us with this connection technology in its upcoming iPhone 5? Will it be crippled in OS X or iOS so that only certain software can access all the functionality of the cables? Much like the current video cables for iOS are. Time will tell.. Let us know your thoughts in the comments…

{via Patently Apple}

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}

There are four patents which are said to have been infringed, all of which relate to online recommendations and were granted to Interval around 10 years ago. According to Mark Lemley, who specializes in intellectual property at Stanford Law School, the suit from Interval “sounds like the classic patent-troll case.” As AppleInsider describes, “patent trolls are companies that aggressively pursue patent lawsuits against other companies without using their own patents in actual products.”

Apple got together with the other defendants back in October to oppose the lawsuit by filing a motion to dismiss the charges. In the motion, the Cupertino company wrote, “Interval has sued eleven major corporations and made the same bald assertions that each defendant infringes 197 claims in four patents… As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Twombly, it is in this type of situation in which courts should use their ‘power to insist upon some specificity in pleading before allowing a potentially massive factual controversy to proceed.'”

When Allen’s case was dismissed earlier this month, he was given until Dec. 28 to file an amended complaint. In advance of his deadline, Allen has re-filed his lawsuit, this time with examples included of how the 11 companies involved infringe Interval’s patents. Apple infringes the patents with the way in which it displays albums within the iTunes Store.

The four patents that Allen’s suit accuses Apple and others of infringing are as follows:

1. United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
2. United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
3. United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
4. United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

{via AppleInsider}

One of the biggest irritations with both the iPad and the iPhone is having to plug it in to charge or sync. Second only to that is having to place it in a portrait orientation in a dock. If you want to use your iPhone or iPad any other way around you have to buy an accessory, or prop it up against something.

It hasn’t happened to me yet, in several years, and while owning multiple units of iPhones and iPods, but one day I do expect to break the dock connector some way or other on one of my iOS devices. They have always seemed flimsy to me, despite lasting very well.. so far.

Palm for a long time have had their “Touchstone” induction charging system, which simply needs you to place one of their devices on a charging unit to get power. And it seems that Apple are aiming for something similar with a dock which allows “contact” to be made between a device and its dock in any orientation. As long as an area on the device’s back is resting against the dock’s charing and syncing “connector” pad.

Let’s not forget that Steve Jobs has also said that future iOS devices will allow wireless syncing, so this could further simplify any dock Apple have to make.

Looking through Apple’s patent application they seem to still be looking at some kind of physical connection, but one that is connected by touch alone, rather than by a plug, and most importantly one that is orientation agnostic, and “fuzzy” about the exact position you put the device in. i.e. Your device can be in a landscape or portrait orientation, and doesn’t have to be in exactly the right place to work.

Perhaps in the future Apple could use Induction coils, which would give even more freedom, and be akin to Palm’s Touchstone technology. This may have been one of the patents Apple was interested in when they flirted with buying Palm.

But any dock that allows me to have my device propped up, charing and syncing in either a landscape of portrait orientation (without a physical connector) would be a good starting point for improving the current system we have to use.

Would you like to see touch syncing and an “orientation agnostic” dock in the future? Let us know in the comments.