When it comes to headsets, it all comes down to audio quality and controls, and those sadly are the two areas where the LG HBS-250 bluetooth headphones fall short. While fairly beautiful in design execution, the HBS-250 headphones suffer from annoying static and frustrating controls that made it less than a joy to use. They do have at least one redeeming characteristic: the headphones are somewhat comfortable to wear.
As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.
In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned – Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.
Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.
[via: EETimes]
Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!
Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.
The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.
App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.