Microsoft secures Android patent license deals with Acer and Viewsonic

Microsoft is no stranger to making money off patents. Since early 2010, the company’s legal team has been knocking on the doors of Android OEMs. The goal: strike licensing deals for Microsoft patents that are being infringed upon by the Android implementations shipped on millions of smartphones and tablets.

Even at seemingly small dollar amounts like $4 per device, the licensing fees pile up in a hurry — and deals with the likes of HTC, Huawei, and ZTE have provided a nice boost to Microsoft’s bottom line. At the end of August, Microsoft decided to go after Google’s Android BFF, Motorola.

Such a bold move — coupled with previous successful strikes — sends a clear message to other Android OEMs, and Microsoft has capitalized on its patents again as a result. This time, it’s Acer (who makes the sexy-but-underwhelming Ferrari Liquid E pictured above) and Viewsonic signing on the dotted line.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that they’re please the companies are “taking advantage of [Microsoft's] industry-wide licensing program” to address Android’s IP issues. That’s an interesting statement, since previously most of the talk had been about modifications made by the OEMs causing the infringement issues — not Android itself.

It could just be a simple semantic slip-up, and ultimately it doesn’t matter if Android does infringe on Microsoft patents. Since it managed to make more money off HTC than it did off its own Windows Phone 7 licenses in the early going, Microsoft is probably quite content to continue seeking deals with the people actually making and selling Android devices and waiting for the residual money to roll in.

More at the Microsoft News Center

HTC sues Apple for patent infringement using newly-acquired Google patents

It seems like if it’s not an iPhone 5 rumor, it’s another report on a patent infringement lawsuit. Though news was buzzing today about a picture of a plate of sushi taken with what may or may not have been the iPhone 5, we also heard news that HTC filed another patent infringement suit againstApple. This would normally just be another “ball’s in your court” type of thing in the ongoing battle between the two companies, but what’s interesting about this filing is that the nine patents listed happened to be acquired by Google.

Google acquired these nine patents over the past year from Motorola, Palm, and OpenWave, and then transferred them all to HTC on September 1. We should point out that the Motorola patents in question were actually acquired by Google before Google acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion on August 15.

The big question on everyone’s mind is why didn’t Google just sue Apple itself? If indeed the nine patents are strong enough, why didn’t Google just go after Apple with a settlement that would cover all Android phones — including HTC phones? It’s curious that Google had to transfer the patents over to HTC instead of just keeping them and suing Apple itself, so it appears that Google is having HTC do its dirty work this time around.

HTC filed for patent infringement in a Delaware federal court on four of the nine patents, and filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission for the five others — two of which originally came from Palm, and three that came from OpenWave.

It’s believed that Google bought Motorola, the company who more or less pioneered the cellphone,for its patents. Motorola has over 17,500 patents and 7,500 patent applications that relate to mobility products. The thought is that Google would be able to defend Android better with all the patents it got from Motorola.

There aren’t a ton of details as of now, which has a lot of people speculating about why Google did this so close to acquiring Motorola. It also begs the question of whether or not Google will do the same thing with other Android vendors who are also facing legal battles with Apple, such asSamsung and Motorola?

via Bloomberg

Android for HP TouchPad port nearly ready to download

Two developer teams are working feverishly on bringing Android to the HP TouchPad —CyanogenMod and TouchDroid — and it now looks like the former is within striking distance of a fully-functional port.

In a video posted over on YouTube and included below, a CyanogenMod team member has shown off its progress so far, and nearly all of the TouchPad’s hardware is now supported. All that remains is to sort out the TouchPad’s wireless NIC. Once that has been completed, an easy-to-install CyanogenMod 7 download should be available for all those new $99 TouchPad owners who aren’t in love with the stock webOS experience.

One other important thing to note about the CyanogenMod port for the TouchPad is that it’s not going to replace webOS on your tablet. It’s a dual-boot system, so you’ll be able to reboot and switch from Android to webOS and vice versa. That’s pretty slick, and it’s an option none of your Android tablet-toting friends will have, since there are no webOS ports running on other hardware.

While CyanogenMod will bring Android to your TouchPad, it won’t bring the tablet-focused Android Honeycomb. CyanogenMod is built on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, though the team has made several tablet-friendly tweaks, such as adding the Honeycomb software navigation buttons to the bottom of the screen.

Even if the OS is a version behind what you’d find on a brand new, $400-plus Android tablet, you’ve still got bragging rights. With a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and $99 price tag, not even your chums that picked up a subsidized Honeycomb tablet got anywhere near the deal you did

Velocity Micro Cruz T408 is an 8-inch Android tablet for $240

If the recently revealed 10-inch Cruz T410 from Velocity Micro isn’t your thing, maybe the 8-inch version might be. The Cruz T408 is now available for pre-order from Amazon and FCC approval has been secured, so it will be arriving on North Amercican shores soon.
The Cruz T408 is listed for sale at just $239.99, but as I mentioned with the news of Amazon’s $250 Kindle Tablet, that price point isn’t as hot as it once might have been. Lenovo dropped a $199 bomb at IFA with the IdeaPad A1, and Android tablets makers are going to have to get very aggressive on price if they can’t compete in other ways.
Amazon, of course, has a tremendous number of value-adds it can offer customers — from Amazon Prime shipping deals and video streaming to discounts on online purchases of downloads and retail merchandise. Velocity Micro doesn’t have that advantage, and the Cruz T408 isn’t a stand-out piece of hardware, either. It sports just 4GB of internal storage, a single-core 1GHz processor, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and a front-facing camera.
You will get a free copy of Angry Birds Rio and the full version of QuickOffice preinstalled, but youwon’t get access to the Android Market. Amazon’s AppStore is on board, but if you’re after a smaller-screen Android tablet with Amazon integration why not just wait for the real deal to go on sale in a couple months?
One thing’s for certain: Microsoft is probably cheering for the Cruz to be a hit — since it struck an Android patent licensing deal with Velocity Micro earlier this year.
More at Engadget

New Firefox download manager appears in UX build

It’s been known for a while that Mozilla wanted to overhaul the Firefox download manager. The current implementation hasn’t changed much since the arrival of Firefox 3, and many of the browser’s other core UI bits (like the add-on manager) have already been re-tooled. And so with Mozilla’s sights set squarely on delivering a more unified UX throughout Firefox, the first cut at a new download manager has been pushed to bleeding-edge Firefox builds.

As it was shown in early mockups, the new download manager rests on the Firefox tab strip. It’s movable, of course. Just right-click the toolbar, choose customize, and drag the download arrow as you would any other toolbar icon. When you first launch Firefox, however, the download icon won’t appear — even if you have active downloads the resume after start-up. The old hotkey is still wired, however, so you can tap control + j (command + j on a Mac) to call up the panel and force the icon to be displayed.

If the icon is hidden and you start downloading a new file, it’ll appear on your toolbar. Immediately to the right you’ll see a very rough estimate of the time until completion (with multiple downloads, the longest time remaining is used). The drop-down only retains history for the current browsing session. If you quit Firefox and re-launch later, you’ll need to head to the downloads history page to check out previous transfers. While the pause icon has disappeared from the right side of each download’s progress bar, you can still right-click to put individual transfers on hold.

There’s still no timeline listed on the Incontent Page Design project outline, but if the overhaul is slated for the current UX build we won’t see the new download manager until the arrival of Firefox 9 early next year.

Download at Mozilla Nightlies

Windows 8 will run Windows Phone X apps, says Nvidia chief

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is kind of like the Mark Cuban of chip companies. He’s never been afraid to speak his mind, a fact that was certainly the case at a roundtable discussion with reporters yesterday where Huang stated that he’s confident Windows 8 will be able to run Windows Phoneapps.

There’s plenty of evidence to support Huang’s statement. For one, we already know Windows 8 will run on ARM processors. That’s a critical piece of the puzzle, since it’s the architecture utilized by Windows Phone handsets. Next, there’s the fact that Windows Phone apps and games are largely built using Silverlight and XNA, both of which are right at home on the desktop as well.

Then there’s the new AppX package that will help power the Windows Store. AppX manifests allow developers to create a single package that can deploy specific versions of an app to different architectures and operating system versions, and its packages are strikingly similar to those currently used to deliver Windows Phone 7 apps.

Rounding things out is the fact that Microsoft is known to be working at unifying the user experience across its three main platform: desktop, mobile, and the living room (Xbox 360). Allowing apps coded for one Microsoft platform to run on the others as well would simplify the development process — and that simplification would no doubt be welcomed by developers.

And haven’t we also heard rumblings about the successor to the Xbox 360 running an ARM-based processor as well? That would make things even more interesting, since it would deliver a truly code-once-play-everywhere experience.

China gives Google green light to operate for another year

Google’s relationship with the government of China has been a tad tense over the past couple of years. There have been accusations of state-sponsored hacking, interference with access to services, and, of course, Google’s flat-out refusal to censor search results.

China also wasn’t pleased with the introduction of Google Plus in Gmail this summer, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The Chinese government is widely regarded as being afraid of social networks and some officials even believe that they are being used by the U.S. to destabilize China.

But despite those fears and tensions with Google, a government spokesperson has announced that the license Google requires to continue operations within Chinese borders has been renewed for another year. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that the Google license was one of more than a hundred that were renewed following “adjustments” to operations, though no details about those changes were given.

It’s worth noting that the Internet content license doesn’t actually belong to Google, and that could very well have something to do with the renewal. The license actually belongs to a Chinese partner who works with Google, since the Ministry doesn’t allow foreign companies to own such licenses.

Since the spat began, Google’s presence in China has diminished greatly. Its search market share has been devoured by Baidu, who now has its sights set on Google Chrome and Android. Baidu recently announced the Baidu Yi mobile operating system, which will begin shipping on Dell tablets and smartphones in China in the near future.