Patents blog FOSS Patents explains:

The judge explained that the court does not hold Apple to infringe claim 9 of EP1053613 on a ‘method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access [CDMA] signal’. In the court’s opinion, MMI failed to present conclusive evidence for its infringement contention.

Motorola had argued that the patent named above was “essential,” meaning that someone — in this case, Apple — would have to use technology covered by the patent if they’re using an industry-standard practice. The problem is, the judge didn’t see it that way and says Motorola didn’t present a convincing case that the patent was essential.

Just a week ago, Motorola claimed victory on two separate rulings related to its ongoing intellectual property battle with Apple. In the first, an injunction was granted against older iPhone and iPad models that infringed on a GPRS-related patent. And in the second, Motorola won an injunction against Apple devices that receive push email notifications from its iCloud system in Germany. Apple said it would appeal both.

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What can SpeakToIt Assistant do?

I spent some time with SpeakToIt on both an old iPhone 3GS and my iPad 2 earlier today, and while it’s somewhat limited compared to Siri — more on that later — the $1.99 app can assist with certain tasks. Using the software, I was able to compose and send text messages and emails from my iPhone and my iPad; note that on the iPad, SpeakToIt appears as an iPhone app with support for pixel doubling.

SpeakToIt Assistant can also search the web for various information. I asked it to search Amazon for a product and the results were spot on. A small window with results opens in the top half of the display, but with one tap, these can be expanded to a full screen. Other searchable items include images, maps, news, stock information, the IMDB site and weather nearby or around the world.

Search results take place quickly; in some cases faster than Siri. That could be due to more people using Apple’s software and servers versus those using SpeakToIt. You can customize the look of the assistant and turn conversation mode on or off.

Multiple skills, but not hooks into iOS

Also in the list of skills are features to organize events or your agenda, tasks, translate words or phrases from English and a calculator for basic math or conversion of currency or measures. I rely on Siri’s “what’s my day look like?” function on a daily basis, and a “what’s on my calendar?” query worked just fine. I first had to give the OK for SpeakToIt to see my Google Calendar; the app isn’t hooked into the native iOS Calendar software.

And if you allow SpeakToIt to access your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can send tweets or update your status by voice. You can also check in to FourSquare, although I didn’t try that function yet. Tweets and status updates worked out really well in my tests; better than the email dictations I tried.

Limitations and voice input

Here’s where the limitations come in. Although SpeakToIs Assistant is powered by Nuance, the same as Siri, I found message dictation to be marginal at best for some reason. With Siri, I can speak multiple sentences, along with punctuation, and the text is perfect nearly every time. With SpeakToIt, even when trying to add punctuation, my dictations became giant run-on sentences without punctuation.

And although the app has a coversation mode, so that you don’t have to hit the microphone button for every command, it’s not quite as conversational as Siri. If you want to talk about weather in several places, that’s fine. But the process of creating a message ends with the message dictation. You have to manually send it by tapping the Send button.

Siri also has better native app integration as well. I tried to create a reminder with SpeakToIt assistant, but it could only do so with Evernote. No such luck setting an alarm with the native Clock app, either. This is where Siri shines: It’s integrated at a lower level with iOS than any third-party option likely ever will be.

Worth a try if you temper expectations

Still, SpeakToIt assistant shows promise as a $1.99 app, as I’d expect it to keep maturing and improving. Folks that don’t want to pay for the app just yet can take a free chance on Valentine’s Day: the software will be free to the first 100,000 people who download it, and $0.99 after that for the remainder of the day.

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Credit: CNET

Updated. The scheduled delivery of petitions asking Apple for better treatment of workers in factories that produce iPhones and iPads happened on schedule in New York City Thursday morning. Observers say there were far more press in attendance than actual protestors, but that the mission — to hand deliver the signatures of more than 250,000 people — was accomplished.

CNET’s Roger Cheng was at the petition hand off at Apple’s store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal and took photos.

Cheng also reports that Apple “was ready” for the representatives of Change.org and SumOfUs.org, the groups who organized the event. In all, there were  a”little more than a dozen supporters” who showed up, some holding up signs depicting an “ethical iPhone.” The Change.org representative who delivered the signatures to an Apple employee told him that the employees of the store “were very polite.”

Update: The same type of staged petition delivery is scheduled for Apple stores locations in San Francisco, Washington D.C., London and Bangalore.

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Credit: Priceonomics

Priceonomics, which keeps track of the resale value of items like cars, bikes and gadgets, published a report Wednesday that shows how the value of iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerrys hold up over time. Short answer: iPhones, even years-old models, retain their value the longest, which means iPhone owners can recoup the most money when they go to resell their phones.

Here’s the method they  used:

We measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.

The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone.

After crunching the data they came up with a series of charts, like one that shows that after owning a smartphone for 18 months, iPhone owners can resell theirs for 53 percent of the original price, Android owners for 42 percent and BlackBerry owners for 41 percent of the original price.

That part won’t be news to people who make a habit of reselling their old iPhone before or right after buying a new one a new one. There are sites like Gazelle.com, eBay and NextWorth.com that regularly buy used iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android phones in order to resell them. The iPhone is always the easiest to resell and will go for a decently high price if you time it right.

But all is not lost for penny-pinching Android owners. One caveat to the data that Priceonomics found is that less expensive Android phones sold by prepaid operators do hold their value much better than their pricier Google-powered brethren, probably because those phones are highly subsidized by the operators. Specifically, the Motorola Triumph, HTC Wildfire and Samsung Exhibit 4G on average keep up to 86 percent of the original value.

Be sure to check out the original post for more interesting data.

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The groups say they will deliver the petitions in person in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Fransisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore and will carry signs and leaflets.

The SumOfUs petition has more than 56,000 electronic signatures so far. According to the grassroots group, more than 35,000 of those signatures belong to people who say they are current Apple customers — 20,000 of them are said to be iPhone owners. The number includes Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, SumOfUs’ executive director, who says she love her iPhone but doesn’t “love having to support sweatshops.”

In the press release she adds:

“Apple’s attention to detail is famous, and the only way they could fail to be aware of dozens of worker deaths, of child labor, of exposure to neurotoxins is through willful ignorance. That’s why our members are asking Apple to clean up its supply chains in time to make the iPhone 5 its first ethically produced product.”

Apple has said it cares about workers and says it’s doing all it can to improve conditions at factories like Foxconn’s. CEO Tim Cook wrote in an internal email to employees earlier this month, “We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us.”

But even if that is true, it doesn’t change the fact that some iPhone owners and other concerned citizens aren’t satisfied with the current status of those factories, how workers are treated and paid, and will do what they can to continue to make this an issue for Apple.

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That’s because of the 1.8 million iPhones the carrier sold, 40 percent of them went to new customers that came to the carrier for the iPhone. We knew the iPhone was fairly popular on Sprint’s network — the carrier sold out of its stock of the iPhone 4S the first day it was available back in October.

Although 1.8 million iPhones may pale in comparison to its competitors, it was Sprint’s first quarter selling the iPhone, after all. AT&T sold 7.6 million iPhones during the quarter, but the carrier had a nearly four-year head start on Sprint. Verizon, meanwhile, sold 4.2 million iPhones last quarter.

While new customers may be coming in the door, it’s still costing Spring some extra dough. The carrier said Wednesday that the costs of subsidies it paid during the quarter went up from $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion in the last year, which was ”primarily due to the launch of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, which on average carry a higher subsidy rate per handset as compared to other handsets.”

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What You Need to Get Started

To start, you will also need an HDTV with an Apple TV attached, an iPhone 4S and a free Skype account. Why Skype and not FaceTime?  Well there are many more Skype users than FaceTime users. And quite frankly, it is much easier to get all members of the family up and running with a free Skype account than to initialize everyone’s iOS and Mac devices with FaceTime.

Prepare the Car Mount

Most iPhone docks are designed for someone sitting at a desk. What is needed is a better mount that can allow the iPhone to be better positioned for larger settings.  Take any decent smartphone car mount with a suction cup, like this one from Arkon for $15 on Amazon. The suction cup needs a smooth surface to attach to, so try mounting it to any household hand mirror. This set up gives extra stability to the video and the added ability to pass the camera in the mount around easily. The great thing about the car mount from Arkon is that it is just about infinitely adjustable, so no matter how or where you need to place the hand mirror you can angle the iPhone the way you want. And if you happen not to have anywhere to place the hand mirror, just tack up a nail and hang the hand mirror upside down on the wall.  Just don’t lock in the iPhone 4S before you make the video call. (The mount’s quick release allows one to attach and detach the iPhone quickly and easily.) Wait until after the call has been established before you put the iPhone into the car mount attached to the hand mirror.

Initiate the Video Call

Placing a video call on Skype with an iPhone is just as easy as chatting or placing a voice call.  To increase the quality of the video once the call is established, be sure to use the back camera of the iPhone. Then double click the phone’s Home button and swipe left twice to reveal the volume and Airplay buttons. To display the call on the big screen, just click on the Apple TV you want to use and turn on Mirroring. Once you’ve done that, mount the iPhone in the car mount and experience video calls on the big screen. As a side note, I have found that when placing Mac-to-iPhone Skype video calls, it is easier to establish a video connection when the call originates from the Mac.

If this solution works great for you, you can always shop around for a more attractive mounting solution.  You could even invest in a mountable surface that permanently affixes itself to the wall just above your HDTV. For instance, the top shelf of my main entertainment system is made of glass, so I don’t really need a mirror in that room of the house.  There are just as many car mounts on the market as there are solutions on how to mount them on or near an HDTV.

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Before you think, “say what?” have a gander at this 400x video scan of a tubular adenoma of the colon, taken with an iPhone 4S and the Skylight, a smartphone adapter for microscopes that’s now a Kickstarter project.

The SkyLight actually works with nearly any other smartphone as well, but it should excel with an iPhone 4S, if not some of the high-end Nokia models that use superb optics. Most focusing is done on the microscope itself, but the SkyLight relies upon a smartphone’s auto-focus feature for fine focusing.

This Kickstarter project already raised more than $22,000, which is greater than the $15,000 goal originally set. CSI types can still get in on the action with a pledge of $60 or more for a SkyLight. The microscope? You’ll have to supply that yourself.

I especially like how you can record video through the microscope with a SkyLight. Kids telling parents about what they saw in biology class is one thing; to share an actual video is quite a different experience.

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Apple’s 37 million iPhones sold last quarter were good enough to just eke out a win in smartphones sold during the final three months of 2011. Meanwhile, Samsung shipped 36 million units during the same time frame, according to IDC.

But for all of 2011, Samsung actually shipped the most smartphones, to the tune of 94 million units, IDC says. That’s an increase in shipments of 310 percent for the company compared to 2010, when the company shipped just 22.9 million smartphones — a huge growth rate.

Apple was very close behind, with 93.2 million iPhones shipped during 2011, which, at 96 percent for the year, is also impressive growth but nowhere near Samsung’s amazing showing.

If you’ve been following along then it won’t be a surprise that the rest of the smartphone pack failed to keep pace with these two. Nokia was a distant third for the year with 77.3 million smartphones shipped, followed by RIM with 51.1 BlackBerrys shipped, and HTC with 43.5 million units.

The final tally for 2011 worldwide market share finds Samsung with a 19.1 percent share, and Apple with a 19 percent share. Some might say that’s too close to call. Whatever the exact numbers are, the real story is clearly how over the course of 2011 the smartphone market has coalesced around these two companies. I’d say 2012 is going to be a very interesting year in smartphones.

Note: This story originally misattributed the data to The NPD Group. The report is from IDC.

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Mini Motor Racing and Mini Motor Racing HD ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) are excellent top-down racing games from The Binary Mill.  A good racing game requires three main features to come together: vehicle control, a variety of challenging courses and a heart-thumping soundtrack. Mini Motor Racing excels at all three. But the real kicker is the game’s head-to-head multiplayer action.

Mini Motor Racing supports four styles of steering and an optional auto acceleration feature to accommodate your prefered style of gameplay. “Wheel” mode uses a virtual steering wheel on the left side of the screen very similar to the iconic d-pad. “Toggle” provides a left and right button on the left side of the screen, whereas “Tank” places the left and right on separately on either side. “Slider” allows the user to control the car by moving a slide bar to the left and right.

Each style of play will cater to different drivers. Some prefer the Wheel, but I found Tank mode to be the easiest to control.  The final control in all modes is a button that gives the car a boost of nitro during the race.  Thanks to the way that the car navigates the track, as well as careful camera placement, you will never find the controls getting in the way of the game regardless of your control scheme of choice.

The opening sequence and smooth 3-D transitions when navigating the game’s menu system attest to the development team’s attention to detail.  There are over twenty different courses to choose from, and variations in weather and time of day keep replay value high. All fourteen cars on offer are  customizable: You can select the color and style, as well as upgrade each as you collect money and customizations along the various tracks.  If you want to upgrade in a hurry, you can use in-app purchases ranging in price from $0.99 up to $14.99.

Even without multiplayer support, the game is worth buying. Being able to play with up to four racers over Wi-Fi or two over Bluetooth, the multiplayer mode just adds to the bargain.

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The original iPhone, 2007.

Here’s a good primer on how Apple’s initial product design and conception works.

Apple Insider has a great account of former iPhone marketing manager Bob Borchers talking to students at an unnamed California school recently. He explains how his former boss, Steve Jobs, originally approached the iPhone team with the challenge of building a device that to date has sold 183 million units in less than five years.

“His [charge] was simple. He wanted to create the first phone that people would fall in love with. That’s what he told us.”

“Now if you’re an engineer, like I am by training, you’re like ‘what the heck does that mean?’,” he said. “But he was right. The idea was, he wanted to create something that was so instrumental and integrated in peoples’ lives that you’d rather leave your wallet at home than your iPhone.” Borchers noted that Apple’s success largely stemmed from focusing on only a handful of fundamental concepts: break the rules but do so in an exceptionally well manner, pay attention to detail and make people “think differently” about the relationship they have with their device, especially given that smartphones already existed in the market.

Notice the lack of numbers or spec goals right from the start. Later in the talk, Borchers says the overall goals Jobs laid out for the nascent device were to “be a revolutionary mobile phone, the best iPod to date, and also let users carry ‘the internet in their pocket.’” He also didn’t mention downloadable apps, GPS, video or photos. Instead, when breaking into a market in which the company had no prior presence, Jobs started with the concept of an emotional connection with the product and an attitude not to imitate or mimic, but to think beyond, what any other company was presently making.

This is useful for thinking about how Apple will approach future markets too.

You can watch the videos, which have much more about Apple’s unconventional relationship with AT&T, obsession with product packaging and more, here.

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The major benefits of the iPhone app are that you get to experience a variety of different dial designs in one place, and that it only costs $0.99 (or free for a more limited version), as opposed to the hundreds you’ll spend on an actual Nooka watch.

The Nooka app provides a basic local time clock, with three different faces to choose from, as well as a world clock, stopwatch and timer. For all of the above, you can choose the color of the clock’s background and time indicator elements using a simple color picker. The app works in both portrait and landscape orientation, which makes it a great candidate for a desk or bedside clock, although the presence of an alarm function would really help that, as would an interface tweak to hide the status bar when the clock is active.

Even though I’d like to see those features added in an update, the Nooka app is definitely cool as-is, and fans of good design and visually intuitive time-telling will not regret the $0.99 purchase price.

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Patent blog FOSS Patents says the two actions are unrelated, and that Apple removing some older products comes because Motorola moved to enforce an important patent victory it won back in December. It was then that a judge ruled that Motorola had a patent on a ”method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.”

The result is that only older devices like the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPads were removed. Why not the iPhone 4S? It could be because the iPhone 4S has a chip from Qualcomm. The affected models have Infineon chips. Qualcomm chips could be safe for Apple in this case, according to FOSS Patents, if we assume “that Motorola and Qualcomm have a cross-license agreement in place (just like Samsung and Qualcomm do)” which would mean that “Apple is covered by extension, as a result of what is called patent exhaustion (a patent owner gets paid only once for the same use of a patent in a product).”

Perhaps more worrisome for some Apple customers who own the iPhone 4S in Germany right now is an injunction that affects iCloud users who want push notifications on their phones. The ruling affects any Apple devices that can receive push email notifications from iCloud or the earlier version, MobileMe. While neither service will get shut down as a result of the ruling, Apple will likely have to come up with a workaround for its iCloud/MobileMe customers there.

Apple won’t be letting this one go. As a company representative told PaidContent in a bit of subtle snarkiness on Friday, “Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid and we’re appealing the court’s decision.”

Update: It looks like the same German court may have suspended the injunction on the older 3G iPhones and iPads and they will be on sale again in “a matter of hours.” Apple told AllThingsD just now: “All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple’s online store in Germany shortly. Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

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Apple’s 37 million fourth quarter iPhone shipments were a far cry from the market leaders, however. Nokia still ruled the roost with 113.5 million handset shipments, while Samsung edged closer to grabbing the top spot with a 20 percent increase compared to the previous year, to a total of 97.6 million units shipped. Samsung succeeded by growing its smartphone sales, but also by increasing its feature phone shipment numbers in an otherwise soft market for those devices.

While Apple was the biggest gainer percentage-wise during the quarter, LG suffered the biggest drop,with a negative 42.2 percent change compared to the same period in 2010. Its total shipments were at 17.7 million for the year, which is on par with 2007 levels. LG definitely felt the hit of the waning feature phone market and was unable to do much to impress consumers with its smartphones, either.

Apple also ranked third overall in terms of  mobile phone shipments throughout the whole calendar year thanks to its fourth quarter results, with 93.2 iPhone shipments and year-over-year growth of 96.2 percent.

IDC predicts that the mobile phone market will continue to experience double-digit growth, despite only seeing 11.1 percent growth year-over-year in 2011, versus 18.7 percent growth between 2009 and 2010.

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Nguyen goes into a lot of detail, and it’s a must-read for anyone thinking about commissioning an iOS (or really any mobile OS) application. Here’s one passage in particular that I know will resonate with a lot of freelance devs:

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert[ing] it to a fuel-powered motorcycle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense. [Emphasis in the original]

A lot of companies may be interested in what an app can do for their business, but without a good sense of what kind of resources need to be invested in order to create the app in the first place, there is bound to be ample frustration on all sides. Nguyen’s no-nonsense primer is a good way to help avoid some of that frustration.

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Munster claims discussions with a “major TV component supplier” which had been contacted by Apple about its TV display parts lead him to believe Apple is still on track to introduce a dedicated television device in late 2012. However, there’s a caveat: Munster thinks if Apple can’t get a revolutionary new content model in place, then it won’t move on the market this year.

The analyst then goes on to suggest three possible scenarios that might constitute a unique Apple approach to the television market. Those potential solutions break down roughly as follows:

1. Changing the experience, not the service

In Munster’s first scenario, Apple would basically leave TV programming to existing operators and simply layer its own interface software on top, including menus, guides, DVRs and content discovery. Munster notes that Apple was expected by some to manage its own wireless network in the U.S. ahead of the iPhone launch, but instead partnered with AT&T and focused on UI and UX instead of content. Remember that apps came after the iPhone’s original introduction.

2. A hybrid content model

Apple could also partner with existing networks to offer live TV, and at the same time, deliver on-demand content from providers like Netflix, Hulu Plus or any other content partner willing to play via an App Store-style distribution channel, Munster suggests. It’s a “best of both worlds” type solution, and would probably still come complete with an overhauled UX, but might be trickier to negotiate than option number one, since it involves negotiating with two different types of content providers.

3. A la carte

Munster’s last option is a completely customizable, a la carte option that would see users subscribe to live TV packages from content providers. This would be the most revolutionary of the options in terms of the existing TV experience, but it would also involve a dazzling shift in the way providers make their content available, and the negotiations involved in doing so would be challenging, at best. In the end, there’s also no real guarantee that selective programming is what viewers are after, especially if existing, less flexible bundles from other sources cost less.

GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler wrote last year that Apple’s television effort was more about experience than about content, and described a likely outcome of Apple’s TV endeavors that pretty much mirrors Munster’s second scenario listed above.

Given the challenges involved in negotiating the third solution, I have to agree that a system that works with existing content sources, but also opens up the possibility of apps for different kinds of content makes the most sense as a solution that could still make big waves in the TV industry while also remaining realistically possible in the near-term. Which of Munster’s Apple TV predictions, if any, make the most sense to you?

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