Court Clears Samsung Galaxy Nexus For Sale But Patent Battle Continues

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

The Galaxy Nexus is at the center of a patent dispute between Apple and Samsung and, after a week of being banned from sale, is now cleared to be sold again. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Winning a minor victory in its patent battle with Apple, Samsung entered the weekend with its Galaxy Nexus cleared for sale — at least temporarily.

Last week, a U.S. federal court handed down a preliminary sales ban on Samsung’s flagship Android phone. In a San Jose court, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh granted Apple the preliminary injunction after deciding that the Nexus smartphone may violate a patent Apple owns regarding “unified search,” a feature in which Apple’s Siri voice assistant searches both the web and the contents of a mobile device.

On Friday, however, a U.S. appeals court overturned Koh’s ruling, which would have barred the Galaxy Nexus from being sold until July 30, the date on which a patent trial concerning the dispute is set to begin.

The Galaxy Nexus is now back on sale in the Google Play storefront, but the reinstatement remains tenuous. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a document that it is lifting the sales ban, but could decide to put it back in place after hearing arguments from Apple. The appeals court gave Apple until July 12 to respond, according to a report from Foss Patents.

Officials at Samsung were unavailable for comment by press time on Saturday. While not named in the patent suit, Google has said it is readying an imminent software update for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) that will allow Samsung to sell the Galaxy Nexus without facing any patent conflicts. On Saturday, the Nexus’ listing in the Google Play store was updated, stating that the phone “ships soon” and when it does, will be running the latest version of Android, 4.1 Jelly Bean, which also includes the software changes.

In the same patent fight, Apple has also won a temporary sales injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, which Apple argues looks and feels illegally close to the iPad. The appeals court has not overturned that sales ban.

Via The Verge.

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Shanghai Company Targets Apple’s Siri for Patent Infringement

A Chinese company is suing Apple over alleged Siri patent infringement. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

A Shanghai-based company thinks Siri is a little too similar to their own voice-recognition software and is now suing Apple for alleged patent infringement over the technology.

Zhi Zhen Internet Technology developed a piece of software called “Xiao i Robot” that shares some similarities with Siri: It communicates through voice recognition, can answer questions, and can hold short conversations with the user. It’s currently available for iOS, Android and Windows Live Messenger, and can also be found on products from Chinese telecom firms like China Mobile and China Telecom.

“We have a 100 million users in China, and many companies are using our product,” company head Yuan Hui told IDG News in an interview.

Zhi Zhen was granted a patent for their personal assistant software in 2006. It first contacted Apple over the issue in May, and filed suit in Shanghai, China in June.

Just this week Apple settled a trademark dispute with another overseas company, Taiwanese PC and display maker Proview, over the iPad name in China. Apple ended up paying out $60 million to the cash-strapped electronics company to secure the name in the country.

Apple is also currently being sued for $80,000 by another Chinese company over the Snow Leopard name, which the company claims it owns the rights to in Chinese. Funnily enough, the company isn’t even in the tech space — Jiangsu Snow Leopard Daily Chemical Co. is a household chemical company that makes products like toothpaste and laundry detergent. And Apple does not even use the Chinese characters Jiangsu is suing over in its marketing of Snow Leopard OS in China.

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Review: Teva Fuse-Ion Water Shoe

These new Tevas repel both water and hacky sacks. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

While it may be effective in the field, most technical footwear makes you look like a tool the second you step indoors. Nobody wants to see you rocking a pair of waders at the brew pub.

Thus, one of the most welcome trends in the outdoor goods market is the emergence of technical gear that also looks good when you head back to civilization. Footwear company Teva has a new offering in this category, the Fuse-Ion shoe. It attempts to blend innovative outdoor performance with a good amount of style points, and it succeeds.

Designed as a “casual” water shoe, the Fuse-Ions are tailor-made for the wet stuff. They have plenty of traction on wet and moss-covered rocks, and thanks to a special coating that repels water on a molecular level, they dry quickly. They’re perfect for a hike to a waterfall or for staying comfortable during and after a downpour. Best of all, they still look good when you’re walking around town.

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Why an Amazon Smartphone Launch Makes Perfect Sense

The Amazon Store app is currently available for Android and iOS. Releasing a Smartphone could enhance that mobile shopping experience. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Amazon is having a banner week in the rumor department. On Wednesday, the China Times reported that Amazon is spinning up production of a next-gen Kindle Fire for a release date sometime in the next two months. And now the huge online retailer is once again the target of smartphone speculation — not bad for a company that was best known for book, garment and small appliances deliveries just 12 months ago.

Bloomberg reports Friday that Amazon is currently developing a smartphone to compete with iPhone and Android phones already on the market. The report cites two sources with knowledge of the matter.

According to one of the sources, Amazon is working with Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone and iPad supplier, to bring the smartphone to the market. Unfortunately, the Bloomberg report doesn’t include a timeframe for the Amazon phone’s arrival.

Today’s news harkens all the way back to November 2011 when Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney told investors, “Based on our supply chain check, we believe FIH [Foxconn] is now jointly developing the phone with Amazon.” Mahaney noted that the smartphone could be expected in the fourth quarter of 2012. Just in time for the holidays.
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Apple Fixes ‘Appageddon’ DRM Issue, Re-Updates Affected Apps

Users who updated some apps earlier this week experienced crashing due to a DRM issue.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Apple developers received a nasty surprise earlier this week when a botched DRM update ended up crashing apps that users recently updated.

Apple issued a statement on Thursday evening explaining the bug: “We had a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded, it affected a small number of users. The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again. Users who experienced an issue launching an app caused by this server bug can delete the affected app and re-download it.”

Unfortunately, those updated apps suffering from the bug (totaling around 100) may have also been subject to angry users who didn’t understand that Apple, not the developers, had caused the problem and left negative reviews and low ratings for crashing apps. To amend this issue, it looks like Apple is re-updating the affected apps. The fixed binaries show up in the App Store as an update for users to download, while reviews for the “current” version of the app have been reset.

The old reviews have not been deleted; they’ve simply been moved from the “Current Version” section to the “All Versions” section of reviews. For example, Instapaper and GoodReader for iPad now have zero reviews for the current versions of the apps.

Instapaper’s Marco Arment wrote in a personal blog post that making the fixed binaries an app update is a “big deal” — in a good way. “Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store,” Arment writes. And for apps that store data locally rather than in the cloud, this update method also means users won’t risk losing their data.

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