The Northern District of California court granted Apple’s request for an expedited trial on Thursday, FOSS Patents reports, although it didn’t quite give the company everything it was looking for. Apple had asked that the trial, which will issue a decision based on Apple’s original complaints of infringement related to mobile patents it holds as well as counterclaims made by Samsung, take place in February 2012.

Samsung objected to any sort of expedited timeline, arguing that there are 43 distinct claims to be addressed at the trial and that such complexity required more time. The median time for a similar case to come to trial in the district is 23 months, which would make for a March 2013 start date.

While the court didn’t agree to the proposed February date, it did set one much earlier than what Samsung called for. The trial will take place on July 30, 2012, just 15 and a half months after Apple’s original filing. FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller believes this will work out in Apple’s favor, since the schedule is ambitious and Samsung is on the defensive and will therefore have less time to organize its case.

Samsung also won a smaller victory in that some of Apple’s legal team withdrew in the face of a motion from Samsung to disqualify them, because they had previously worked for the South Korean company on cases in the same general ballpark, which might give them an unfair advantage. Mueller thinks this victory is relatively minor, considering the wealth of talent available to Apple in terms of high-quality intellectual property lawyers.

Apple isn’t running away with the game when it comes to its legal struggle with Samsung, but it is chalking up small victories that could lead to larger ones down the road. When the trial proper gets under way next summer, I expect we’ll start to see some real sparks fly, since the stakes should be even higher by then.

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In case you missed our coverage at launch, Office for Mac 2011 is a marked improvement over its predecessor, Office 2008, in almost every regard. It more close resembles recent Windows releases, thanks to the omnipresence of the ribbon command interface, and yet it manages to seem much more at home on the Mac than previous iterations of Microsoft’s productivity suite.

To get your hands on the free trial, simply head over to Microsoft’s Mac trial download page, register and hit the resulting download link. Registering takes all of about 20 seconds, and doesn’t require an account. The download itself is around 900 MB, but you’ll need around 2.5 GB of clear hard drive space for a full install. The trial includes unrestricted versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook 2011 (which is only available in the $280 Home & Business edition, should you decide to make a purchase).

It’s good to see Microsoft offering users a chance to try before they buy. Somewhat ironically, Apple did not build the ability to do the same into its recently launched Mac App Store (where Office for Mac is not yet available). Maybe this is a subtle indication of the changing relationship between the two companies and consumers?

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That’s according to new documents released late Thursday. The new updates surrounding Mac App Store policy appeared in Apple’s News and Announcements for Apple Developers Thursday evening, in anticipation of the approaching launch of Apple’s new OS X software sales and distribution platform. The Mac App Store is expected to go live sometime in January, if Apple keeps to Steve Jobs’ stated timeline.

The new info told developers to keep demo versions of their software out of Apple’s arena:

Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.

Of course, on the iOS App Store, while the word “demo” never actually appears, publishers are free to release trial versions of their programs, most often appearing as standalone “Lite” applications. These are distributed for free, and contain a limited preview of the full version’s gameplay. Apple not allowing these types of apps on the Mac App Store could have a serious impact on sales.

Apple’s logic seems to be that if users can access demos elsewhere, it’d rather not deal with them at all. With iOS, which is a completely closed ecosystem (not counting jailbreaking), the only way for a user to download and install software is through the App Store, so Cupertino has no choice but to allow Lite editions, lest developers abandon the platform altogether.

I won’t miss trials, since I’ll track them down wherever they may reside, but I don’t think the Mac App Store isn’t designed with users like me in mind. It seems tailored toward the casual Mac owner, who would otherwise not download much or any third-party software. My worry is that without quick and easy access to demos, that crowd won’t pony up for the full versions in anywhere near the numbers they might otherwise.

How do you feel about this particular Mac App Store limitation, as both consumers and developers?

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The Zune isn’t all bad. First of all, there’s the Zune HD, which at least looks really good. And then there’s the ability to share music and other media content via Wi-Fi with your other Zune-toting friends (is there really a group of people where more than one member has a Zune?) so that they can check out what you’re into without making a purchase they might regret or getting your headphones all gross and earwaxy.

Apple looks to be thinking about borrowing a page from Microsoft’s playbook for once, in that if BusinessWeek is correct, the company is planning on doing a similar thing with apps downloaded from the iPhone and iPod touch’s App Store. According to BusinessWeek’s source, who is listed only as someone familiar with the technology, Apple has baked into iPhone 3.0 the ability for users to share software with one another.

The apparent intent behind the app-sharing service is that users will then be prompted to buy apps they enjoy that their friends have shown them. The source seems unsure whether Apple plans to flip the switch that would render the sharing services active. An Apple spokeswoman, when contacted, said only that the company has “made no announcements at this time.” I wish I was an Apple PR rep. You spend all day coming up with new ways to say “no comment.”

The ability to share apps via peer-to-peer connections helps Apple in two ways. First, it solves the problem of not offering try-before-you-buy limited versions of all apps for users to test out (“lite” and other duplicate apps released at the discretion of developers notwithstanding). Second, it builds a “street team” that’s millions of users strong, so to speak. Why pay for promotion when you can enlist your own users to do it for you?

Sharing will definitely be temporary, so don’t start imagining an app exchange community where you pool your resources and split the cost of, say, every major game release that comes out. Little else is mentioned about the program’s specifics, though. In a perfect world, you’d have the option to purchase right away following an instance of app sharing, and you’d be able to set strict privacy settings to prevent just anyone on the street from trying to share apps with you.

I agree with BusinessWeek that the future of the iPhone (and all smartphone devices) lies in more and improved P2P functions, and a way to share content directly between devices without any third-party intermediary definitely seems like the next logical step. Then again, opening those doors could also open the floodgates to more and improved piracy, too, which maybe explains why the tech is lying dormant for now.

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The MobileMe trial began to seem like it was going to go on forever, since Apple kept tacking on more time to make up for having released a half-baked service to begin with. Sadly, not so. My own trial term recently came to an end, but by the time it did, I’d become fairly dependent on the service, so I quietly acquiesced while Apple charged my credit card for the full subscription.

Some others did not go so quietly, and promptly canceled their account rather than be caught paying. The result? All of their data not only no longer synced, it no longer existed. Part of the downfall of storing info in the cloud is that when you stop paying for said cloud, it has a very short memory. What had happened was that users who’d forgotten to disable sync in their devices’ settings had indeed synced. With their information gone from the MobileMe servers, what replaced it was blank information. Long story short, sync with nothing and you end up with nothing.

It looks like the only way to recover the data is to pay for a full year’s subscription, and then cancel said subscription. Alternatively, you can just remember to turn off MobileMe syncing before canceling your account, if you haven’t already done so.

I’m conflicted as to who’s to blame here, but I’d say Apple should probably have made people more aware that this sort of thing might happen if they didn’t continue their MobileMe subscription or at least disabled the ability to sync to the account. A perfect time to do so would’ve been in those reminder emails they send out shortly before your trial subscription runs out. As a cautionary tale, the whole mess is a good reminder that the cloud is not yet the be all and end all of computing.

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