Asymco has compiled the profits, revenues, and unit shipments among all of the major manufacturers, and as you can see in this graph, Apple is still kicking everyone’s behind when it comes to smartphone profit share. Though the revenue share gap with Samsung is a bit smaller than the one for profits, Apple is still decidedly in the lead. After all is said and done, Apple is claiming 75% of the profit share, 40% of the revenue share, and 9% of the unit share of the mobile market (though that last number might be closer to 8%).

After Apple’s monstrously successful first quarter it’s no surprise that Apple is profitable. Heck, it’s no surprise they’re the undisputed God-King of the mobile industry, and they probably have a giant pool of money where employees can get all Scrooge McDuck on lunch breaks. However, the fact that Apple is pulling in so much money out of the entire industry really illustrates just how successful the iPhone has become. Of course, if you ask any Android fan, financial success doesn’t necessarily equate to product quality (and I’m inclined to agree with them), but you can’t argue with the results. There’s another great graph here that shows just how much the iPhone’s market share has increased on multiple fronts since launch in 2007.

With this much of a lead, how much does Apple really have to worry about? Will it suffer death by a thousand cuts from a bajillionty Android devices? Or will Windows Phone eventually come into its own and give iPhone a run for its money? Looking at this graphs, it’s hard to imagine either of these things happening. The best the competition can reasonably hope for now is to get comfortable in second place. Let’s put it this way — what would the competition have to do to win you over?

Source: Asymco

Kodak will be filing lawsuits against both Apple and HTC related to possible infringements on some of their digital imaging patents.

The claims from Kodak are that both smartphone manufacturers are infringing upon some of their digital imaging patents. While they already have an existing lawsuit directed at Apple, this one brings more devices to the table. HTC meanwhile are being targeted through their EVO View 4G, Flyer, Jetstream, Vivid, Amaze 4G, Desire, EVO Design 4G, Hero S, Rezound, Rhyme, Sensation 4G and the Wildfire S devices. That’s a lot of Android. Notably missing from the list are any of HTC’s Windows Phone devices.

Florian Mueller from FOSS Patents speculates this may be due to Kodak attempting to gain attention with their patent portfolio while they shop around for a potential buyer.

Source: AndroidCentral via mobileburn

According to Nilay Patel at The Verge, Apple has won an International Trade Commission (ITC) ban on some HTC devices. Not much else is known at this point, but if you’re following the patent wars the way normal folks follow the soaps, then stay tuned. It’s getting serious.

Update: Android Central scored a statement from HTC:

We are gratified that the Commission affirmed the judge’s initial determination on the ‘721 and ‘983 patents, and reversed its decision on the ‘263 patent and partially on the ‘647 patent. We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it. However, the ‘647 patent is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.

And Jerry Hildenbrand capped it off perfectly:

While fans on one side will cheer, and fans on the other side will call foul, we all will lose. Justice really is blind, and when it comes to technology and innovation, it also seems pretty damn stupid.

Source: The Verge, Android Central

Apple is once again taking exception to the counter-charges HTC is filing in their ongoing legal dispute.

• Apple denies that its correct name is Apple, Inc. The correct name of Respondent is Apple Inc.

Things are either getting snarkily passive-aggressive, or passive-aggressively snarky:

Denny Crane!

Source: FOSS Patents

A new UBS survey suggests Apple currently holds the top spot in smartphone retention rates by a long shot, holding a strong 89% rating over the nearest hardware competitor HTC at just 39%. Apple also had no trouble beating out the Android platform in general, although being a platform gave Google an added “stickiness” of around 60% retention among consumers.

Despite Android holding a higher rate than most other hardware manufacturers in this space, roughly 31 percent of current Android device owners are planning on jumping ship to the iPhone as their next purchase.

UBS also noted that the app catalog for platforms has had limited importance in the determining factors involved when consumers choose their next smartphone. That really says something about the iPhone 4 specifically, of which the hardware is over a year old yet still continues to beat out the newest, cutting edge smarthphone offerings.

[AppleInsider]

Martin Fichter, the acting president of HTC America has been talking at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle. He claims that college kids no longer find the iPhone to be cool. The information that he shares is not exactly based on hard facts; he talked with a few of the kids on his daughter’s floor and came to this rather strange conclusion!

“Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”

What do you think? Is the iPhone losing the coolness factor with the younger generation?

[GeekWire via 9to5Mac]

According to Bloomberg, Google — who previously never missed an occasion to whine about patents and patent litigation — seems to have been quietly buying patents of its very own from Palm, Motorola, and Openwave Systems, then sold them to HTC so HTC to use them to sue Apple. Pretty slick.

The lawsuit contends the Mac computer, iPhone, iPod, iPad, iCloud and iTunes are infringing patents for a way to upgrade software wirelessly; a way to transfer data between a microprocessor and a support chip; a method to store user preferences, and a way to provide consistent contact between application software and a radio modem.

HTC also amended a complaint with the International Trade Commission today, adding five of the former Google patents to a case that targets many of the same products. Three of those patents Google bought from Openwave and two others had been owned by Palm, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) last year.

Apple originally sued HTC, and HTC has countersued before. The part that caught my eye is that HTC says they “will continue to protect its patented inventions” when Google just bought said inventions for HTC last week? Apple buys patents as well, from Fingerworks for multitouch to Nortel for LTE, and no doubt won’t waste any time asserting them, it’s just interesting wording on HTC’s part.

With Apple still suing Android manufacturers instead of Google directly, and Google now supplying arms to those manufacturers instead of going after Apple directly, one thing is for certain — we’re going to need a lot of popcorn.

[Bloomberg]

Long title, longer legal filing, but the gist is Apple seems to be claiming Android founder Andy Rubin was working for Apple and reporting to the man who filed for a patent on Apple’s behalf that Apple is now suing HTC for violating in their Android phones. Even longer:

Android and Mr. Rubin’s relevant background does not start, as HTC would like the Commission to believe, with his work at General Magic or Danger in the mid-1990s. In reality, as the evidence revealed at the hearing, Mr. Rubin began his career at Apple in the early 1990s and worked as a low-level engineer specifically reporting to the inventors of the ’263 [realtime API] patent at the exact time their invention was being conceived and developed. [...] It is thus no wonder that the infringing Android platform used the claimed subsystem approach of the ’263 patent that allows for flexibility of design and enables the platform to be “highly customizable and expandable” as HTC touts. [...] While Mr. Rubin’s inspiration for the Android framework may not be directly relevant to the pending petitions for review, that HTC felt compelled to distort this history is illustrative of the liberties it takes in attacking the ALJ’s [initial determination] and the substantial evidence supporting the ALJ’s findings.

FOSS Patents Florian Mueler says that since Rubin works for Google, not HTC, this would be far more meaningful if Apple eventually sues Google directly, or if/when Google’s Motorola purchase goes through.

Google (or a Google subsidiary like [Motorola Mobility) would almost certainly be found to infringe the relevant patent intentionally, and willful infringement would greatly increase Apple's chances of obtaining an injunction as well as triple damages.

Mueler also points out Rubin and co. may have willfully infringed Oracle (formerly Sun) Java patents in Android as well.

Regardless of where you fall on the whole Apple vs. Android and patent system issues, right now it's just more fuel for the legal soap opera.

[FOSS Patents]

Apple sued HTC, HTC counter-sued Apple, and now HTC has sued Apple, again over 3 additional patents in both Mac, and iPhone/iPad platforms. (HTC currently pays Microsoft a reported $5 per Android device licensing fee.)

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware seeks to halt Apple’s importation and sale of infringing products in the United States. It also seeks compensatory damages, triple damages for willful infringement and other remedies.

It comes a day after Google announced its intent to purchase Motorola Mobility and their 17,000 and growing patent portfolio.

Time to flex a little green robot muscle, is it?

[Reuters]

There have been a few interesting developments lately in Apple’s ongoing patent disputes with HTC and Samsung, and a switch up inside their own legal team. First, Reuters reports that Richard “Chip” Lutton Junior, the man who was responsible for managing Apple’s patent portfolio, is no longer with the company. Now, BJ Watrous, former deputy council for HP, is lists himself as the new guardian of iPhone, iPad, and Mac IP.

Lutton’s voicemail was still set up at Apple on Monday, but he will be leaving Apple soon, perhaps in the next month, said the source familiar with the situation. Watrous was deputy general counsel at Hewlett-Packard in charge of IP licensing. An HP spokesman declined to comment. Apple’s intellectual property team has been on a hiring spree lately, snapping up litigation specialist Noreen Krall from Sun Microsystems.

Meanwhile Samsung, whom Apple has sued for being a “copyist”, thinks just one lawyer leaving isn’t enough and, according to FOSS Patents now wants Apple’s external lawyers disqualified over purported conflicts of interest.

Samsung’s motion is 20 pages long. The gist of it is that Samsung wants the recently-founded law firm of Bridges & Mavrakakis barred from the case because at least five of its lawyers — including one of its founders, Kenneth Bridges — previously represented Samsung while they were with another firm, Kirkland & Ellis. Samsung then goes on to argue that this fact “taints all attorneys at Bridges & Mavrakakis through imputation”. But not enough: Samsung additionally demands that Apple’s two other law firms involved with this federal lawsuit (Morrison & Foerster and Wilmer Hale) “provide affidavits confirming they have not received any Samsung confidential information from attorneys at Bridges & Mavrakakis” while those firms were coordinating Apple’s representation so far or, absent such assurance, be disqualified as well.

Apple’s outside counsel, of course, deny any such conflict.

Lastly, a couple more salvos have been fired in the ongoing Apple vs. HTC dispute, with Apple filing a asking the International Trade Commission (ITC) to ban imports of HTC devices… again. The devices targeted this time are the HTC Droid Incredible, Droid Incredible 2, Wildfire, T-Mobile mytouch 3G, T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile G2, Evo 4G, Aria, Desire, Hero, Merge, Inspire 4G, Evo 4G, Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 4G, and the HTC Flyer tablet. Apple’s goal might be to get those new devices into litigation, and bring new patent infringement charges along with them. HTC was nonplussed.

“HTC is disappointed at Apple’s constant attempts at litigations instead of competing fairly in the market,” said HTC general counsel Grace Lei in a statement. “HTC strongly denies all infringement claims raised by Apple in the past and present and reiterates our determination and commitment to protect our intellectual property right.”

For more on all of this, check out our special edition iPhone Live podcast from Saturday, World War Patents with guest Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents.

(And yes, I still think Judge Judy should be given juris-her-diction over all Apple and Android patent lawsuits. For our sake.)

[Reuters, FOSS Patents, AFP]

When Apple next announces their financial results, they should have close to $70 billion in the bank, which according to Asymco will be enough to buy all their manufacturing competitors with the exception of Samsung. That includes HTC, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. (Google and Microsoft aren’t manufacturers, they’re platform vendors.)

The more remarkable thing is that as market values of phone vendors continue to decline, Apple’s cash will continue to grow dramatically. Indeed, a time may soon come when Apple’s cash will be worth more than the entire phone industry.

I’ll say it again — North Carolina isn’t a data center, it’s a money bin.

[Asymco]

One of the greatest tricks Apple pulled off at the iPhone 4 press conference was changing the dialog from death-touch — a single point of antenna trouble on iPhone 4 — to death-grip — a device-wide point of antenna trouble faced by the entire industry.

Apple for their part did cop to making iPhone 4′s point of attenuation very external and incredibly visible. Steve Jobs called it “x-marks the spot”, but then Apple very quickly moved on from this death-touch to a wider death-grip and demonstrated it on handsets from RIM’s BlackBerry to HTC’s Droid to Samsung’s Windows Mobile.

I initially thought this was a mistake on Apple’s part — that they were spending too much time deflecting onto the competition. Turns out I underestimated Apple, but not as badly as the competition. What Apple very neatly managed to do there was conflate their own widely reported iPhone 4 death-touch into the very real but widely under-reported death-grip phenomena that does indeed affect the entire industry.

What’s more, by those very competitors responding that the death-grip either didn’t affect their devices, was minimal at best, or wouldn’t affect future devices, they cinched it for Apple. They became part of the problem. Why?

Because their devices absolutely suffer from the death grip. Instead of pointing out that yes, Apple was correct, the death-grip was an industry-wide problem but the death-touch was thus far unique to Apple, RIM BlackBerry, Samsung, and Nokia denied the death-grip, thus ensuring everyone with the issue — or just an itch for attenuation attention — would fire up YouTube and make a video clearly discrediting their statements.

HTC for their part just said they didn’t have many reports of the problem. However, as David Chartier points out, HTC effectively white-labels their phones to Verizon and they didn’t make it clear whether the number of complaints they reported included Verizon numbers. This is similar to Apple citing AT&T return numbers for iPhone 4, not gross Apple return numbers. It’s what brought about the saying “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.

My original take on Apple’s press conference was that Steve Jobs should have just stressed that making the iPhone 4 antenna the way they did was a trade-off, better battery life and stronger signal in many cases in exchange for that single point of problem — the lower left hand corner death-touch. Andy Ihnatko made the same point, if more eloquently. Arguably a modern smartphone has any number of tradeoffs — AMOLED screens offer better color and blacks that utterly fail in direct sunlight. (Free sun-screens anyone?)

I still think Apple should have been crystal clear about that trade-off, but it’s looking increasingly like they didn’t have to. In their rush to get comments out in front of the media RIM, Samsung, Nokia, et al have let the conversation get changed from death-touch to death-grip, and they’ve let videos on their own handsets propagate across the web. One look at BlackBerry on Boy Genius, Nokia on Electronista, Samsung on InformationWeek, HTC on Engadget, many others via Daring Fireball, and even manufactures’ own warnings against touching their antennas in their own manuals via 1FPS shows how they’ve become part of a story that last week was all about Apple.

Sure a few sites like Ars Technica and When Will Apple? will raise a fuss over it, but it’s done. Competitors dove headlong into it. And since Apple has now effectively priced the death-touch problem as one free case per phone, all that remains to be seen is if competitor’s denials + customers videos = free cases for other phones too.

So I underestimated Apple but they didn’t underestimate their competition.

Note: this editorial is based on a Twitter conversation with Seth Weintraub from 9to5Mac who is absolutely right, one day college courses will be taught on these PR tactics. Check out his article on Fortune.

Update 1: Dilbert‘s Scott Adams comes to the same conclusion, which he calls the “high ground maneuver”, and wonders if Jobs has had hypnotist training.

Update 2: I said above that while many smartphones have the death-grip, only the iPhone has the death-touch. Daring Fireball links to a YouTube video showing the Samsung Galaxy S having, if not the death-touch, then at least the death-finger. Again, from now on no smartphone is safe.

HTC’s Eric Lin has responded in statistical fashion to Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference where Steve Jobs showed off a Droid Eris losing singnal when death-gripped:

“Approximately .016% of customers [have complained]. We have had very few complaints about signal or antenna problems on the Eris”.

Which could also just mean there hasn’t been the attention or scrutiny placed on signal strength attenuation in the past, and again it will be open season now with any number of YouTube videos popping up showing everything from the HTC Droid Eris to HTC Droid Incredible to HTC Nexus One succumbing to the death-grip, just like Apple demonstrated.

However, HTC does have the forethought to warn customers not to touch the spot over their antenna (see image, top).

[Pocket-Lint via Android Central, Daring Fireball, Engadget]

HTC has just announced that they’re counter-suing Apple for infringement, claiming Apple treads on 5 specific HTC patents.

“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America, HTC Corporation. “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”

Apple originally sued HTC for patent infringement on April 2, citing 20 patents in a move widely speculated to be directed towards Google’s Android platform in general. HTC had since agreed to license patents from Microsoft — counter-intuitively — for Android, again speculated to me a move directed towards Google.

Just like the Nokia vs. Apple suit and counter-suit, these types of suits can take months if not years to resolve, especially in the still forming smartphone space.

[HTC via Android Central]

Apple has sued HTC for patent infringement with Android almost certainly being the target, now it turns out Microsoft believes Android also infringes on their patents and HTC has just paid up.

That means the free-as-in-Google smartphone OS isn’t free anymore — it’s just Microsoft who’s getting the money for it, and from the maker of the Nexus One, Desire, Legend, and Droid Incredible no less. That hurts Android.

How the deal affects HTC’s position in the Apple patent infringement case, however, is unclear. If HTC can point to a licensed Microsoft patent for technology Apple claims HTC is infringing upon then that no doubt helps HTC and hurts Apple and the iPhone.

With Windows Phone 7 series fast approaching, it looks like Microsoft took the opportunity to get more than a little Sun Tzu on their smartphone rivals last night.

Now lets see how Google — and Apple — respond.

[CNET via Android Central]

Our sibling site Android Central has just published a full review of the Verizon Droid Incredible — the latest Google superphone Android competition to the iPhone. (And yes, it does seem like they’re coming more than once a month now — we feel bad for Phil!).

It’s pretty much a gussied-up Nexus One with Sense UI, which you’d think would make it a Desire but it bumps a few specs (like an 8mp camera with dual LED flash) and a CDMA radio (which the Nexus One was supposed to do but hasn’t yet, and the iPhone keeps being rumored to do but hasn’t yet either).

All three devices are by HTC, who Apple is suing for patent infringement, and their ability to keep dropping high-end Android bombs like this is likely the reason why. Say what you want about software fragmentation, highly restricted app storage, and OLED screens you may or may not be able to see out in the daylight, the absolutely relentless improvements in UI and hardware both is very much in keeping with the robotic nature of the brand.

Apple of course is widely expected to counter this summer not only with the multitasking iPhone OS 4 (see our complete preview and feature walkthrough), but with 4th generation hardware leaps of its own — front facing camera, huge 960×640 display, and only Jobs knows what else.

Whether those iPhone on Verizon rumors finally pan out along with it, or in September, or only in 2011 we don’t know, but our advice to potential buyers remains the same as in our iPhone vs. Nexus One: which should you buy?. Check that post for details, but in broad strokes:

• If you have to get a new phone right now and you want AT&T, the 2009 iPhone 3GS (see our review) remains head of that class. If you want Verizon, however, the Incredible is certainly a credible choice. The original Droid has a hardware keyboard (lackluster though it may be) and the Nexus One has the Google rather than HTC Sense UI (though who knows when it will actually ship?) so it’s an embarrassment of Android riches over in Big Red land. (If you’re on Sprint, it’s EVO 4G ‘natch).

• If you can wait until the summer and aren’t fussy about carriers, Google may have another (two, three?) Androids on the market by then, but we have a sneaky suspicion Apple and iPhone HD (it won’t be called iPhone 4G) along with iPhone OS 4 will be the ones to watch in 2010. Again.

Head on over to Android Central’s complete Verizon Droid Incredible coverage for more, and let us know what you think — is it incredible?

While Apple will almost certainly release a 4th generation iPhone this June or July, it won’t be an iPhone 4G because 4G LTE networks in the US won’t be up and running in significant enough quantities until 2011 or 2012 but Sprint is slowly rolling out a competing 4G WiMax network and has just announced a competing uber-phone to go with it — the Android 2.1 powered, Sense UI shellacked HTC EVO 4G.

Our buddy Phil Nickinson from Android Central is on the ground at CTIA 2010 and bringing us back the full Sprint EVO 4G video and hands on, but suffice it to say, once again HTC is just showing off. The specs are obscene. Total. Gadget. Porn.

First and foremost, the thing is a beast. A 4.3-inch LED touchscreen — same as the HD2 — and the same 1GHz Snapdragon processor. A gigabyte of ROM and 512 of RAM round out what’s under the hood.

Like taking pictures? There’s an 8-megapixel camera and dual flashes — for sheer candle power — to take care of that. Wanna record moving pictures in 720p? No sweat. Plus, there’s a basic 1.3MP camera on the front of the phone — pretty much a first for a U.S. carrier-sanctioned device. Now you just have to have apps that support it.

Of course, if you record in HD, you might as well have HD playback, right? And for that, there’s a mini-HDMI port, so you can go straight from the Evo 4G to an HD television. There’s a cute little kickstand, too, which makes the Evo 4G great for watching movies.

Now Steve Jobs is rumored to have said the iPhone G4 (not iPhone 4G!) will be an A+ upgrade, but what does that mean? Will the lack of 4G networking hurt them? We doubt it. Will less-than-EVO specs?

Apple has repeatedly said they believe software — not hardware — is their key advantage, so will they even try to match specs with HTC or are they hoping iPhone 4.0 (with its rumored multitasking) will be enough to stay ahead of even beefier handsets?

We know Apple has to bring it in 2010, but the bar for that bring might just have been raised again. Take a gander at the new king of iPhone competition (for this month at least) and let us know what you think!

HTC has sent out a press release in response to the patent infringement lawsuit Apple recently fired in their direction. CEO Peter Chou is quoted:

“HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.”

The full presser lists out all of HTC’s “firsts” in the industry but gives no indication about what, if any, counter-suit and patent infringement claims of their own they might use to return fire.

We did say this could take years, right?

[via Android Central]

Apple announced today that they are suing Windows Phone and Android hardware manufacturer, and Sense UI developer, HTC for patent infringement. The suit, filed in US District Court in Delaware, alleges violation of “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware”. Says Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

This harkens back to Steve Jobs’ original introduction of the iPhone at Macworld 2007 when, as a keynote bullet point, he stated emphatically about the iPhone — “boy did we patent it.”

HTC, who produces the Android G1, MyTouch, and Hero and the Nexus One hardware for Google, and a variety of Windows Phones including the Touch Pro 2 and HD2 has built their own multitouch solutions, even when Google was reticent to implement the technology themselves. Curiously, Apple has yet to go after Palm, perhaps due to Palm’s equally impressive mobile patent portfolio. Likewise, does going after HTC allow Apple to go after Android and Windows Phone without taking on Google and Microsoft?

More on this as it develops. Also keep an eye on our sibling sites, Android Central for more from the HTC angle.

UPDATE 2: Android Central brings us an HTC response:

We only learned of Apple’s actions based on your stories and Apple’s press release. We have not been served yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years.

UPDATE 1: Gizmodo has the full list:

• The ‘331 Patent, entitled “Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation Of User Interface Objects Between States,” was duly and legally issued on April 22, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
• The ‘949 Patent, entitled “Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics,” was duly and legally issued on January 20, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘949 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit B.
• The ‘849 Patent, entitled “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image,” was duly and legally issued on February 2, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘849 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit C.
• The ‘381 Patent, entitled “List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display,” was duly and legally issued on December 23, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘381 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit D.
• The ‘726 Patent, entitled “System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera Device,” was duly and legally issued on July 6, 1999 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘726 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit E.
• The ‘076 Patent, entitled “Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices,” was duly and legally issued on December 15, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘076 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit F.
• The ‘105 Patent, entitled “GMSK Signal Processors For Improved Communications Capacity And Quality,” was duly and legally issued on December 8, 1998 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘105 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit G.
• The ‘453 Patent, entitled “Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor,” was duly and legally issued on June 3, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘453 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit H.
• The ‘599 Patent, entitled “Object-Oriented Graphic System,” was duly and legally issued on October 3, 1995 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘599 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit I.
• The ‘354 Patent, entitled “Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods,” was duly and legally issued on July 23, 2002 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the ‘354 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit J.

Yikes. Apple is asking for permanent injunction and triple damages. Some of those also read so broad that I don’t feel safe even making gestures in traffic any more!

What do you think? Is Apple right to sue? Is this their attempt to stop what happened with the Mac from happening to the iPhone? And why HTC in particular?

Windows Phone is only slightly better off in this year’s Smartphone Round Robin than Palm was last year — like we substituted in the WinMo Treo Pro for the aging PalmOS in 2008, we’re using two heavily HTC-skinned devices as WMExperts entries in 2009 — the HTC Touch Pro2 and massive HTC HD2.

And I’m melancholy about that, because I kind of liked the unabashedly Windows Mobile tweaky, geeky Treo Pro last year, and was hoping to see a pure Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 device this year. Scrappy, underfunded Palm was able to deliver webOS after all, Google went Android 2.0, and Apple went iPhone 3.0. Instead we got Windows Mobile 6.5, which was decidedly bashed, and the aforementioned HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo shellacked over it — a UI so opaque I think users might have trouble distinguishing HTC’s Windows Phone devices from their Android ones going forward.

But those are the WinPhos we were dealt, and they’re certainly tremendous in their own rights. To help me make sense of them (no pun intended), Phil Nickinson went over the finer points for me and the WMExperts Forum members really helped me out.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that WMExperts thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Okay, enough preamble, it’s time for the review… after the break!

Windows Treatment

Previously, Phil took me on a tour of the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2:

[YouTube Video link]

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

• WMExpert’s Phil Nickinson, Keith Newman, and Rene on the iPhone Live! podcast.
• WMExperts HTC Touch Pro 2 — All the different versions head to head (yes, they vary by carrier!)
• WMExperts HTC Touch Pro 2 (aka Tilt 2) review (specific version we looked at)
• WMExperts HTC HD2 Review
• 2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Touch Pro 1 (Fuze) video and Treo Pro video
• 2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Touch Pro 1 (Fuze) review and Treo Pro review

Hardware Design

HTC makes great hardware, no ifs, ands, or buts. These are two distinct form-facters, the landscape slider (with tilt!) of the Touch Pro 2, and the massive black slab of the HD2, but they both feel solid, they both feel premium.

HTC Touch Pro2

The Touch Pro2 is one of the better sliders I’ve tried, far less rickety in the hinges than last years devices, and the keyboard, impossibly, is even better. If you’re really one of those people who demand a physical keyboard on your mobile, if you’re really serious about the QWERTY, then this device is for you. It may not be a tiny netbook like the Nokia N900, but it’s got almost a netbook-caliber keyboard. Fear it. The screen is also big and bright, but it’s still resistive and requires you not just to touch and flick but press and drag to trigger interaction. And even though resistive screens are reaching new heights, they’re still nowhere near as visceral, as tactile, as I’m-a-part-of-this-device as capacitive screens. In all fairness, however, none of us ever reached for the stylus, if I recall right, but that’s only because most of us would rather grit our teeth and press and drag.

HTC HD2

On the other hand (or both hands, it’s that huge) the HD2 is the first Windows Phone to have a capacitive screen — supposedly coded by HTC itself. And what a screen it is! I think just the screen is as big as the iPhone. While I won’t use the analogy CrackBerry Kevin did, it really does verge on the ridiculous. The entire device, in fact, is so utterly pimped out I’m certain HTC made it just to show off what their hardware engineers are capable of. It’s the $10K gaming rig of smartphones. It’s gadget pr0n. And because it’s capacitive, it’s size doesn’t stop it from being usable. If your thumbs can reach across its girth, you’re good to go.

Software Experience

I usually break software experience down by device, but in this case while there’s minor version differences in the HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo lacquered over both these devices, by far the biggest difference between the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2 is to the latter’s capacitive screen (which, yes, I’ll keep harping on because I’m an iPhone guy, okay?). Especially for someone coming from the iPhone, it makes all the difference in the world.

HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo

If Sense UI/TouchFlo kind of warbles on the Touch Pro2, having the right notes but missing the rhythm at times, it sings on the HD2. And its eye-candy, frankly, makes the iPhone look dated. It’s got all the bells and whistles and widgets you want, and every time I write about it, I’m compelled to mention that the HTC weather screen is an instant crowd pleaser, and on the HD2 the windshield wiper is almost big enough to really make you think you’re in your car. The UI still isn’t as intuitive and consistent as I’d like — when to move in what direction and so forth — but it’s so far beyond last year’s frustrating TouchFlo experience on the Fuze that I’m hopefully they’ll nail it completely in the near future.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Titanium

One of the huge advantages of WIndows Phone is how customizable they are, especially the HTC devices for which ROMs are readily available. Lots of “cooks” and their “kitchens” whip up custom versions of the entire software stack, giving previews of upcoming, unreleased versions, stripping out carrier bloatware, maximizing speed and/or stability, and so on. And flashing ROMs is fast. I mention this because Phil was able to change the ROM on his Touch Pro 2 in the time between two video shoots. Super fast.

Whether it was a result of this, or simply Phil turning off SenseUI/TouchFlo on the Touch Pro2, I’m not certain (I lost track!) but he also showed me the default Microsoft experience on the phone, Titanium. If you imagine the ZuneHD interface layered on top of a new, “finger friendlier” (please, someone, anyone, kill that term — it’s embarrassing to the implementer in this day and age!) home screen and… pretty much the same Windows 98-esque UI beneath the surface.

Windows Mobile… Everything Else

And SenseUI and Titanium are just two of the many, many, (did I say many?) UI options available to Windows Phone aficionados. Since the iPhone only has one, and even if you Jailbreak you can only skin that one, it’s a huge difference and shows how truly tweak-able Windows Phone really is.

George Ponder rounded a lot of them up over at WMExperts, including SPB Mobile Shell, Winterface, Xperia Panels, Touchwiz, etc. Check it out.

Wherein We Explore the State of the WIndows Phone

While we’re looking at individual phones this year, we’re also looking at the platforms in general, where they are, and more importantly where they’re going. And that’s actually a good thing for Microsoft because where they are is nowhere good. I know a lot of people love their Windows Phones (if they know they have a Windows Phone, but we’ll get to that in a moment). I’m willing to bet these people love them in spite of Microsoft, not because of it, for what they and their community can do with Windows Phone and not what Microsoft has so far done for it. Could that change?

Ghosts of WinPhos Past

One of the questions I had about Windows Phone was — if they were going to try to brand the overall platform, why call it Windows Phone? I mean, Apple didn’t call their device the MacPhone, did they? Sure, it’s Microsoft’s attempt to bring some uniformity to their mobile device strategy, and okay Windows Vista was a consumer disaster but Windows 7 is proving popular and lots of people use Office, right?

But if a consumer walks into AT&T and sees all the phones on the wall, is a Windows Phone going to have any more luck against an iPhone or BlackBerry than an HTC phone?

Microsoft’s most consumer friendly brand is the Xbox. Yet they didn’t name their MP3 device the Xplayer to leverage that name (nor did they bother to integrate the services, but that’s another rant), they called it the Zune. And while the latest ZuneHD is outstanding, it still hasn’t been anything approaching successful. Now people, including WMExperts, have asked Microsoft to make a ZuneHD a phone (just stick a microphone on it, Nickinson oft bellowed), but is slapping a phone on a failed brand really the answer? Instead of Xbox, Zune, and Windows Phone in the commercial space, why isn’t it Xbox, Xplayer, and Xphone? If a consumer sees the Xbox ecosystem next to an iPhone, maybe then it becomes a fight for their mindshare.

But we know why this hasn’t happened. Microsoft isn’t one company, it’s multiple companies, 6 or so, and they don’t get along together. In fact, Microsoft is willing to sacrifice one to benefit another. Instead of keeping Exchange tied to Windows Mobile to combat BlackBerry’s proprietary push service, they’ll license it to everyone, including BlackBerry, iPhone, and Google. Microsoft has Exchange, and Bing, and yes, Zune not so that they can expand their platforms but so that they can offer those services to competing platforms. Maybe you’ll get Zune services for webOS one day. Who knows. On Windows, that’s fine because it has a 90% share. On Windows Phone?

Compare that to Apple. Seen iPod App for Android lately? It looks to this iPhone outsider as if Microsoft has intentionally fractured their offerings and licensed or given them out — or set them up to license or give out — at the expense of Windows Mobile. That’s great for those services, arguably great for the overall internet (though open source, non-proprietary versions would be better), but — again — it’s not great for Windows Mobile.

That’s problem one. Problem two is the same things I mentioned about Google and Android — I don’t think Steve Ballmer cares about Windows Mobile any more than he thinks Microsoft needs the mobile screen in their catalog. He’s smart enough to know the future is mobile and he wants Microsoft to own that future, but he doesn’t care about the end products to the degree that Steve Jobs cares about iPhone or the RIM co-CEO’s love their Berrys, or Jon Rubinstein poured himself into Palm. Even Android has Andy Rubin at the helm, a singular visionary whose vision is hampered by the needs of a larger corporate mandate, but remains singular none the less.

Who has Windows Mobile got in their corner?

Ghosts of WIndows Mobile Future

I just said I don’t think Windows Mobile really has Steve Ballmer in its corner. I don’t think it has its own division honcho, Robbie Bach in its corner either (which may be a good thing). I’d hope it has J Allard, who WMExperts called their savior and is responsible for the Xbox 360 and ZuneHD, given the seriousness of connected mobile. However, given his grand role, he may well be dreaming up the UI for the Xbox 720 or Zune1080p, and not be dedicated enough to give Windows Mobile the attention it needs. Maybe it’s Roz Ho, formerly of Microsoft’s Mac Office Business Unit (sigh) and currently leading up the horribly code-named Project Pink, reportedly based on Microsoft’s acquisition of Sidekick-maker Danger. But anyway, that it’s not widely known, that we don’t see a singular visionary on stage at CES, Mobile World Congress (MWC) or special Microsoft events holding up Windows Phone version whatever, putting his or her name and reputation on it, just like Andy Rubin did for Android and the Nexus One… makes me nervous.

Windows Mobile 7 is delayed. Yes, it’s not fair to call an unannounced product delayed, but if Microsoft didn’t intend to get a new OS out earlier than now, they have bigger issues than a delay. So, yeah, delayed. I don’t know if Microsoft got the same kick in the restarts Palm did after seeing the iPhone, but 3 years have passed since Macworld 2007 and Microsoft still has nothing revolutionary on the market — not for consumers.

If they have restarted, if they’ve restarted more than once or several times already, it’s taken so long now that they can’t just equal or even better iPhone or Android or webOS in terms of user experience. They can’t rely on a Windows Vista-esque bad taste that makes for a Windows 7 equally and opposing-ly sweet reception. Windows doesn’t have the competition Windows Mobile has. No, for Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft has to knock it out of the park so far it lands in the basketball stadium across town and swooshes clear through the basket, no net.

What that revolution is, I have no idea. It’s easy to imagine the Zune UI but that lacks telephony features and other elements a phone would require (think how much more the iPhone is than just the iPod app). And the ZuneHD still suffers from being merely competitive, not revolutionary. Microsoft could go for natural interfaces, the kind Bill Gates has been advocating for years, but Google’s Nexus One already does voice well enough that Microsoft is still only left with better. Current rumors postulate an Xbox “Project Natal”-style gesture interface where you can wave your hands and cameras pick up your movement along with facial detection and voice. Maybe that’s Star Trek enough, but it occurs to me when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and its capacitive display and said, at last, people could “touch their music”, he was exactly right — people like the intimacy and sense of connection provided by touch. Not to go all CrackBerry Kevin on this review, but is waving your hands 5 feet away from your significant other and reading their body language with no contact the best experience you can imagine for human interaction? Likely not.

I have no answers, only questions, but Microsoft will need answers to slingshot Windows Mobile 7 back into the public mind, to become relevant again.

If that sounds harsh, I don’t apologize. 4 years ago I was all in on Microsoft. I had a Windows XP machine, Xbox, and Windows Mobile device, and… none of them worked together in any significant way. Individually I was annoyed enough to change all of them for other platforms. Collectively I was disheartened enough to leave Microsoft entirely and go almost all in with Apple (and Sony, since Apple doesn’t make game consoles or TVs yet). Microsoft could have been the integrated offering a decade ago. They had all the pieces in place and whether they were scared of anti-trust (and I don’t buy that excuse because you can integrate without anti-competitive behavior) or just couldn’t get themselves organized as a company enough to do it, Windows Mobile as much as anything suffers for that today.

Wherein this Review, Lost Track, Attempts to Re-Find it

Thanks in large part to the versatility and partner-centric model Microsoft decided to imbue into Windows Mobile, and the near miraculous deep-skinning ability of HTC, the Touch Pro2 and especially the HD2 are fully competitive devices in this year’s Round Robin. Spec for spec, the HD2 is unrivaled (perhaps only because the Android Nexus One, also by HTC, wasn’t ready in time to enter). I could never have used the Fuze for more than a week last year. If there was no iPhone, I could use the HD2 for a good long while.

If you were to leave the iPhone for the Touch Pro2 you’d get a world-class horizontal keyboard, deeper and better Exchange integration, and a phone that’s as individually tweak-able as your imagination and latest ROM cook-ups allow. You can also find versions across all the major carriers, multitask your heart out, and install Windows Phone apps from anyone and in any which way you please.

If you were to leave the iPhone for the HD2 you’d get… a bigger iPhone-like phone. That’s not a knock, far from it. As you no doubt suspect I love the iPhone. But unlike the different form factor of the Touch Pro2, the HD2 is the same shape, just much larger, with a far more animated if not quite as consistent a UI, and the same integration and ecosystem issues as any other Windows Phone. It’s also only coming to the US on T-Mobile at the moment, which means no 3G for any other North American network.

You’d lose out on the iPhone’s iconic integration and ecosystem, however, which still includes the best user experience and apps in the mobile space. Power users won’t care — they can figure out, and around, almost anything. For new smartphone owners, however, it’s hard to put a price on “just works”.

At the end of the day, however, if Apple running the iPhone like a benevolent dictatorship drives you batty and you don’t trust your privacy to Google and their Androids, if webOS is too abstracted and BlackBerry is too much messenger and not enough computing platform, if you want the latest and greatest hardware and the ability to do pretty much anything you’re smart enough to do with it, Windows Mobile remains the only choice (outside of Nokia, which just isn’t that popular here at home).

More than anyone else in this year’s Round Robin, Microsoft has to bring it next year. It won’t be enough to impress us, they’ll have to astonish us. Here’s hoping they can and do.

From the Forums is a great way to see what all of the current hot topics are on the TiPb forums. Today we would like to go over some of the popular sub-forums for those of you who may not be familiar with our forum setup. Becoming a member is fast and free, so if you have not already already done so, head on over and register now.

• Yes, Facebook 3.1 is still a hot topic. So has their application gotten any better for you? Let us know!
• Crackberry Kevin has been lurking within our forums in search of some iPhone help. If you could, please visit his thread to lend him a helping hand and you may just win a new device.
• We are all aware of the hype that surrounded the Google/HTC Nexus One Android device and so far… it’s turned out to be nothing but trouble with it’s spotty 3G and disappointing initial sales. Do any of you really still feel this device poses a threat to Apple’s iPhone?

See you on the forums!

Week 4 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin brings me face-to-big-glass-face with our most ancient nemesis — Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Phone, this year spawning the killer keyboard of the HTC Touch Pro 2, and the monstrous hardware of the HTC HD2. Yes, that’s 2 times HTC version 2 devices and to help me out, I’ve got the dark lord of WMExperts himself, the one and only WMExperts Phil Nickinson to show me the ropes — and quite honestly to help me lift that ginormous HD2 onto the table!

Remember, every day you post on my WMExperts Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the Windows Phone of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings the yin to my yang, the productivity to my play, my best frenemy forever, CrackBerry Kevin back to TiPb and the iPhone he claims never to use. Head on over to the TiPb forums and help him out, would you? (i.e. show him some neat new games). And get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles.

Video hands-on with the Touch Pro 2 and HD2 after the break!

[YouTube Video link]

The very first time I used the capacitive touchscreen of an iPhone it was clear that there was no other mobile device on the market that could match it’s performance. Now, a few years later, that still holds true for most of us and if you’d like proof labs.moto.com has performed a touchscreen stress test.

The iPhone’s touch sensor showed the most linear tracking with the least amount of stair-stepping. The Droid Eris and Nexus One tied for second with only faint wiggling – but actually performed best at the edge of the screen. Last in the line-up was the Motorola Droid, which demonstrated significant wavy artifacts or “stair-stepping.”

Something to keep in mind, the MOTO Development Group used more sophisticated tools to test touchscreen accuracy but the above video simply demonstrates a technique any of you can use to evaluate the accuracy of your own device.

At the end of the day it all comes down to touchscreen hardware and the integration of that hardware with software and user interaction development. Was there really any doubt of which device would come out on top?

Video after the break…

[labs.moto.com via Techcrunch]

So the oldest 2007 iPhone 2G can easily download and run (most of) iPhone OS 3.1 while the current 2009 crop of HTC Dream and Magic devices on Rogers will officially be stuck on Android 1.5? According to sibling site AndroidCentral.com:

“HTC is not currently planning any Android 1.6 upgrades for Rogers Dream or Magic. Android 1.6 was only made available for “Google”-branded devices such as the G1. It is not available for HTC-branded products such as the Dream or Magic, which use Android 1.5. We believe that Android 1.5 is a stable and reliable software platform that delivers a terrific user experience.”

Google explains this is a consequence of being not evil “open”, again via AndroidCentral.com:

When we open source our code we use standard, open Apache 2.0 licensing, which means we don’t control the code. Others can take our open source code, modify it, close it up and ship it as their own. Android is a classic example of this, as several OEMs have already taken the code and done great things with it. There are risks to this approach, however, as the software can fragment into different branches which don’t work well together (remember how Unix for workstations devolved into various flavors — Apollo, Sun, HP, etc.). This is something we are working hard to avoid with Android.

Working well together isn’t the problem. Rogers, HTC, and Google ignoring an entire country full of early adopters — the very users that help drive a platform — is the problem. How many Dream and Magic owners, likely geeks who form the loving core of Google and Android’s user base, will be happy to here they’re “stable* with 1.5 and don’t need and won’t be getting 1.6 (and who knows about 2.x?) while seeing the Motorola Droid and upcoming Hero updates, never mind Nexus One, splashed all over their interwebs.

There are pros and cons to both the integrated hardware/software/benevolent dictatorship model of Apple and the licensed hardware/software/wild west model of Google, to be sure. Buyers should beware of Apple control over the App Store and ecosystem, but they should also beware of hardware fracture from the hands-off overlords.

Sure, one day Apple will kill backwards compatibility as well, iPhone 2G first, then subsequent devices over time. If you’d bought an iPhone 3G earlier this year, however, how happy would you be if Apple and Rogers announced 2.0 was “stable” and that you don’t need and won’t be getting iPhone 2.x? 3.0? Would you be enjoying all the iPhone 3GS cut and paste and video commercials then? How happy would you were told your brand new iPhone 3GS wouldn’t be getting 4.0 next year?

Maybe it’s me; maybe it’s a fanboy thing; maybe it’s my desire to impose more text on screen about this, but when I read people calling an HTC HD2/Dragon/Passion device absent HTC branding “THE Google Phone” (now officially caught on camera, see above), I can’t help but think that if we go back to 2007 and Steve Jobs had taken the stage at Macworld and pulled out an HTC Excalibur with Apple branding on it, even if it had an Apple OS, it wouldn’t have been “THE iPhone” and it certainly isn’t what Apple did or what we as consumers got.

“This changes everything” say many blogs. Certainly, for Google’s Android partners, competing against the Google brand, and bank, and engineering team changes a lot. And if they sell it unlocked (assuming they put a radio in it that can support all 4 US carriers, including both AT&T and T-Mobile 3G, and Verizon and Sprint EVDO) it will change things for the carriers, and for users who are accustomed to paying subsidized prices.

Before Apple released the original iPhone in 2007 there was talk (read: hope) of Apple releasing it unlocked, and talk (read: more hope) again with the iPhone 3G. (TiPb even predicted that as WWDC 2008′s “one more thing” — and boy were we wrong). It sounds great and we gadget geeks love it, but the truth is unlocked devices coast $700+, as anyone currently trying to import an HTC HD2 or Xperia X10 are no doubt aware.

The iPhone became a phenomenon when it hit $199 and a bigger one when it hit $99 through heavy carrier subsidies. Next June/July when another iPhone comes along, current owners will again be livid if AT&T doesn’t cut them a break on costs, even if they haven’ fulfilled their own end of the 2 year contract again. Google could possibly try to self-subsidize with the intent on making back the money via advertising (or online services, though they traditionally give those away for free in exchange for the aforementioned ad revenue), and that really would “change everything” if it worked. (Hey, TiPb’s joked Google should just give free cell service to everyone in the US. Then it’s game over.)

This might be a great phone. It might be the best smartphone to date. But for an end user, how will it be different than if HTC simply released the Dragon/Passion/HD2 running Android 2.1?

So, unless the above is just an HTC shell for as-yet-unrevealed and totally redesigned-by-Google hardware (or Google just buys HTC like they’re buying everything else), it might well be a Google-branded phone, but it’s not “THE Google Phone”, at least not in the way the iPhone was and is Apple’s.

[Clarification: I'm not commenting on Google or their phone initiative here, I'm commenting on the coverage. Google hasn't announced a Google Phone. As their blog (which we linked to previously) plainly says, they're running tests with a partner, aka HTC, device. It's the coverage that's dubbing it Google Phone and a game changer. At this point, based on the image, it looks like an HTC device -- like an HD2/Passion/Dragon in Hero wrapping. And that's fine. That's great. If it's sold unlocked and runs on standard GSM 3G, I'd probably even buy one just to have fun with, sans contract. Analogies to the iPhone and Foxconn are completely off base, however. Foxconn isn't selling dozens of other devices, and certainly isn't selling other devices running iPhone OS X. Apple produces "THE iPhone". So far, this is a really interesting Android phone packaged by Google (instead of HTC or Verizon). But it's not "THE Google Phone". I suspect that one, running Chrome OS and using only Google Voice and VoIP, is still pending, and that well could be the next game changer.]

Google has issued a statement on the supposed “Google Phone”:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.

And TechCrunch is back again with a roundup of the details: think Google branded HTC HD2-style slab form factor, 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU, unlocked, virtual keyboard with voice-to-text dictation/transcription, likely T-Mo and maybe AT&T.

Finally, Daring Fireball has the supposed user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Nexus One perhaps being a reference to the android-like replicants in Blade Runner aka Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Nice.

Original commentary after the break…

Before I quote AndroidCentral‘s Phil Nickinson, who nailed the intro to the latest Google Phone rumors the way nailing’s meant to be done, let me just ask (again) how giving employees HTC phones running Android 2.1 has anything to do with Google making their own hardware or learning Kung-Fu. Sigh. Take it away, Phil:

Looks like Twitter asploded overnight regarding the fabled Google phone. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington stopped crying JooJoo tears long enough to cull some of the Tweets, and here’s what he found:

• Google program manager Leslie Hawthorne kicked things off with: “Stuck in mass of traffic leaving work post last all hands of 2009. ZOMG we had fireworks and we all got the new Google phone. It’s beautiful.”
• CNET’s Jason Howell says he saw it, HTC did the hardware, it’s unlocked and a buttload of Google employees got them this week.
• And from Great White Snark: A friend from Google showed me the new Android 2.1 phone from HTC coming out in Jan. A sexy beast. Like an iPhone on beautifying steroids.

To be clear, Google hardware would mean a Google design handed off to a manufacturer to build, much like Apple and Jony Ive do with the iPhone and Foxconn. Rebranding a Passion (or variant device) just ain’t what we consider building one’s own hardware hereabouts.

That said, HTC makes great gear, and Android 2.1 (tasty pastry codename please?) will no doubt be very cool, so we’d like to see the latest Android phone, even if it isn’t (yet) “THE Google Phone“.

Competition will be a great motivator for Apple, maybe help them find our still missing iPhone 3.2 update, never mind the likely iPhone 4.0 Sneak Preview event in March, if they stick to their cycles…

Our buddy Phil Nickinson over at sibling site WMExperts finally got his HTC HD2 on this weekend and has video’d up an amazing hands-on with what he swears is a 3-foot screen! Ahem. Anyway, I had a chance to try it out as well, but you’ll have to wait on my thoughts for a bit still…

Meanwhile, check out Phil’s video and let us know what you think!

First up, the highly anticipated HTC Hero is in Android Central‘s house, and Casey gives us a look at the decidedly non-Google Android phone and SenseUI, something closer akin to HTC’s previous Windows Mobile powered TouchFLO3D. And we think he likes it:

We believe that you’ll be stunned at how easy it is to use and how polished it all works. If you’re looking from the myTouch 3G or T-Mobile G1, you can’t help but be jealous of the Hero. The UI offers a great experience while still maintaining the same lovely Android and even adds a better browser! We have no hesitation in saying that the HTC Hero is the best Android phone available and after using HTC Sense, will be for quite some time.

Next up, I don’t think we’ve ever mentioned “Motorola” and “competition” to the iPhone in the same paragraph before, but with the introduction of the CLIQ, their first device running Google’s Android OS, do we have to stop chuckling at the mere concept?

Maybe. We often say (okay, Chad often says) that Apple designed the iPhone for RAZR users — the first dead-simple, consumer-friendly smartphone. Well Moto built the RAZR, and now they’ve built MOTOBLUR, a new, hyper-social network focused new layer on top of Android designed to hook the heart of the Twitter/FaceBook generation (yes, Icebike, I campout firmly in the former). And they’ve put it on a G1/Dream-style horizontal slider.

Have they succeeded? Engadget says:

Let’s be very clear: though it fares pretty competitively against the aging crop of Google-powered devices on the market today, the CLIQ isn’t the Android phone to end all Android phones. Then again, it’s not supposed to be — at least, we hope it isn’t — because a smallish HVGA display and an overworked, outmatched MSM7201A core aren’t going to win any believers that haven’t already been won over by HTC’s stable. What the CLIQ does do, though, is lay the groundwork for something better — a Motorola that doesn’t cause eyes to roll, a Motorola that makes aspirational phones that people can want to own again.

One thing’s clear, however. The competition is focusing on the social networks, something Apple’s never been historically good at, and something they may still not quite understand. Is it an achilles heel for the iPhone? Not yet, especially not with the App Store. But there’s no MOTOBLUR or widgets or Synergy in the App Store yet, and likely there won’t be given SDK restrictions. So, Apple, howsabout 4.0?

While reaction to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 release ranged from “yawn” to “yeesh”, one device, not even given the stage, certainly seems to have stolen the show — HTC’s HD2.

Theories on why Microsoft didn’t see fit to show off, indeed highlight, the HD2 range from friction with HTC over their foray into Google’s Android OS, to an attempt not to show up other partners whose devices look outdated by comparison. That anyone saw it at all was only due to a few HTC reps carrying it around the show. Microsoft’s latest baffling behavior aside, the device itself clearly shows that if they aren’t going to raise their game, HTC will do it for them:

640×800 capacitive, multitouch screen driven by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, complete with Sense UI built in so deeply Microsoft’s interface is all but completely hidden from the end user.

Our sibling site, WMExperts.com, has been following the device since it was known by the code-name Leo, and report that it should be making its way to the US in the first part of 2010.

It’s nice to see some competition, if not from Microsoft itself then from HTC. But it brings a question to mind — will buyers of non-integrated devices end up going by carrier brand (AT&T, Verizon, etc.), OS brand (Android, Windows Mobile/Windows Phone), or manufacturer (HTC, Motorola, LG, Samsung, etc.)? And will that give the unified devices from Apple, BlackBerry, and Palm an easier shot at mindshare?

Someone told Daring Fireball that Apple not only asked Google to remove the multi-touch from the Android/HTC T-Mobile G1 smartphone, but also to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The first part was reported earlier and makes the kind of sense that only tricky mega-corp coopetion can make (iPhone eyeballs are more valuable to Google than the G1′s multi-touch at this point). The second part… not so much. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s source mentioned Apple’s use of the remote buttons on the headset to control media playback as the reason for Google avoiding the jack entirely on the G1. (Note: while this sounds familiar, a Google search didn’t turn up any links for Apple patenting anything associated with such processes, so if anyone can point us towards that info, please let us know in the comments).

Other smartphones have long used the 3.5mm headphone jack, and since the G1 is hardly a media powerhouse (it doesn’t even include a built-in video app), there’s little reason to believe HTC couldn’t have included a non-remote, standard 3.5mm jack.

(Aside: Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, has managed to confirm that both the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Pearl both make use of some type of headset based media control, so there we go…)

Chris Ziegler over at Engadget Mobile weighs in, calling the entire Apple/Google story from VentureBeat FUD, and the sourcing on the 3.5mm piece sketchy, and while admittedly an unnamed Android source, absent corroboration, doesn’t pass the traditional media test, here’s the other thing:

HTC seems to love the ExtUSB in lieu of 3.5mm headset jack. It’s not just the G1, but an increasing array of their smartphones that are — and will be according to the 2009 HTC roadmap that was leaked — abandoning 3.5mm for the ExtUSB.

So, we’re not sold on this story yet, how about you? Does it seem likely Apple talked Google out of a 3.5mm jack, or that HTC just plain doesn’t like them and never considered it?

Confession: My secret, innermost desire for the iPhone 3G was a 420p display. I knew Apple wouldn’t do it yet — there was nothing in their simultaneously released SDK to support any other resolutions — but still… I wants-ded it!

Imagine my fanboy chagrin, then, when HTC goes and not only makes a device in exactly the same dimensions as the iPhone 3G (obvious much?), but slaps a monstrous 800×480 display on the beast! (Not to mention a 5(!) megapixel camera)

The HTC Touch HD (which we’re pretty sure means “Hi Dieter!” — see the afore-linked WMExperts for why…) represents the next expansion of HTC’s Touch brand — something spread so thin Asus’ Eee marketeers are wincing. It may seem questionable to show the HD off this early (it’s not expected to land until 2009, and doesn’t even seem to support US 3G frequencies yet) since, frankly, who’s not gonna put off Osbourne-ing a Touch, Touch Duo, Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, etc. when this baby’s around the bend, but we’re guessing the announcement was aimed more at Apple’s gut than any potential customers’ wallet.

And in that regard — ouch!

Sure, it doesn’t have the Apple/iPod ecosystem behind it and it’s still using TouchFLo 3D to try to hide the UE (user exasperation) that is Windows Mobile 6.1, and multiple layers of OS are never a Good Thing, but this is the first iClone that’s actually got us worried.

Apple, you’ve got almost four months until Macworld 09, and we’ve got three newly urgent words for you: iPhone HD, b’okay?

This one is for our very own Dieter Bohn… For those of you who do not know, and it pains me to say this, Dieter loves his Windows Mobile.

It seems like the tables have turned here for this edition of “Send in the iClones”. I suppose it is only fair that we as iPhone owners have the tables turned on us sometimes. What we have here is called iPhoneFLO. It is a simple theme you can use if you have Summerboard on your Jailbroken iPhone. To find it go into the installer.app and search for iPhoneFLO. Be sure to have Summerboard installed as well, which can also be installed via the installer.app.

For more information please visit our section of the forums devoted to Jailbreaking. Anyone going to give this a shot and Jailbrake simply for this theme?

[Via MobilityToday & IntoMobile]

One thing the FCC is really good at: unknowingly or “accidentally” leaking information about heavily anticipated, top-secret technology. At the very least, you gotta love them for that. There latest misstep? Leaking the size of the fabled HTC Dream, which you may remember as the world’s first Android device. Yeap, that Android.

Surprisingly, it looks like it’s going to be a wee bit shorter and a wee bit skinnier than the iPhone 3G. However, it is expected to be thicker than the iPhone given its inclusion of a full QWERTY keyboard in some way, shape, or form. Even though we are the iPhone blog, we give credit where credit is due: HTC must’ve done a helluva job making the Dream a bit smaller than the iPhone. I guess the Dream is making no secret about going after the iPhone

Now about that big slow fatty Blackberry Bold…

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Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Nothing. Seriously. It’s like there’s some event on Monday that’s blotted out the smartphone sun…

(Okay, fine, maybe there’s some small something or other we can dig up. Hit the read link…)

Breaking: TiPb Welcomes Messrs. Lazaridis, Ballmer, and Colligan!

More fake breaking news, as we’ve received no tips reporting that the head honchos over at RIM, Microsoft, and what’s left of Palm have done nothing all week but wire up fiber channels and practice hitting “refresh” in anticipation of our live meta blog coverage of the WWDC keynote on Monday.

When reached for non-comment, dead-pan funnyman Lazaridis said, “C’mon, I need to know what Apple’s new phone looks like this year so I can figure out what RIM’s will look like next year!”

Monkey-Boy dance phenom Ballmer didn’t chime in with, “We’ll be selling 3 friktillian smartphones with Windows Mobile Se7en on by 2012, and we’re going to need to know what else to copy beside Multi-touch!”

Colligan, however, when awoken from his 5 year stasis, never remained cool, “We have no interest in duplicating the iPhone. We’re about to release our 19th version of the Treo 600, and we’ve got 37 more where that came from!”.

Alrighty then…

ATTN: Crackberry.com, RE: Coming Back Around…

Confession: We make a little fun of RIM’s well-publicized and hugely embarrassing network outages (see, we did it again right there). But last week, when .Mac went down and we here at TiPb reported it pro-forma as the nothing little insignificant blip on an otherwise perfectly clear iPhone sky that it was, Crackberry.com wasted no time, and spared no level of glee, in NOC’ing it up, and twisting it into some big brouhaha.

Bulletin: A .Mac outage probably effects exactly 3 iPhone users. If that. We don’t like to publicize it, but even Dear Leader doesn’t really use the service (he’s using the new one already, which is why they needed some massive super secret upgrade you may be hearing about at a little developers conference you may have hear about, b’okay?) Anyway, .Mac going out is like the 300th ranked ISP in Bavaria going out — barely anyone noticed. They were all busy with setting up their new Exchange or MobileMe accounts for Monday.

Payback: However, you noticed, and we noticed you noticing, so we called up our “friends” in Waterloo and convinced the former Canadian Tire cashier whose hand’s on the giant red NOC-off lever that, since everyone on the planet will pretty much be iPhone-only this weekend, it would be the perfect time for a “scheduled” outage. Poor kid. We’re talking hook, line, and voice-cracking sinker…

We’re not sure what Crackberry addicts pop when the push is down (our guess — Solitaire on Win95), but enjoy the weekend!

Microsoft Out the Gates and High on Life

Or something! First up we have Microsoft (probably Ballmer), who according to WMExperts.com is sending letters (probably cut out of a soon-to-be-extinct magazine and stick-glued onto unsold Vista boxtops…) to their partners desperately reassuring them that Windows Mobile 6.6.6 (or 6.1, whatever the latest — and by that we mean most currently behind schedule — release is) will somehow still be relevant come Monday after El Jobso drops the iPhone 2.0 bomb.

Er… yeah… Not sure how to break this to you, but Windows Mobile 6.x wasn’t relevant after iPhone 1.0 back in January 2007. And instead of trying to get Windows Mobile Se7en up to iPhone 1.0 standards, you might want to think outside the little beige box and shoot for something innovative your own self?

And no, spreading rumors of a Blu-Ray Xbox 360 in some attempt to “steal Apple’s thunder” is not innovative. A giant, red-ringing, PowerPC, noisy, inelegant gaming machine, no matter how we loves us our Gears of War, suddenly getting the technology that beat the stuffing out of your own HD-DVD format years after Sony released it in the PS3 just doesn’t crossover the same news circles.

But here’s an idea: maybe call that friend of yours Bill. You remember him, the one you no longer need but may still use? (Leastways he could help keep you from blurting out your envy towards the iPhone’s admittedly top-tier browser experience…)

Government Tracking Treo Users

TreoCentral.com is claiming that the US government is tracking cellphone users. Since some of us aren’t in the US, or in Government, we have no way of knowing whether this is true or not, but since we grew up on everything from Orwell to the Matrix, we kinda just assumed it already.

What’s particularly disturbing, however, is that TreoCentral.com reporting this makes us think the US Government is tracking Treo users as well.

Why?

Is it for anthropology, like when the Discovery Channel finds some lost, never before contacted Amazonian tribe and wants to study their behavior? Is it that they think tax dollars are well spent analyzing a people untouched by mobile technology since 1999?

Dunno. But we sure hope Dr. Jones doesn’t get a shunning for his troubles.

And in No Other News

HTC finally got around to still not releasing their HTC Touch Diamond, which early reviews say just crackles on EDGE, given its lack of support for North American HSPA. Not a problem though, as it seems the OS is slow enough that you can barely notice…

Points for consistency, but you had to know slapping an extra layer of OS on top of WinMob and then chipping down the radio was putting the advertising spin before the handset, right?

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the first ever live demo of Google’s new Android platform… and it’s on the iPhone!

[Er... That's the HTC Dream.]

What? Sigh. Okay.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s a proof of concept. Maybe it’s because of the Diamond. Maybe it’s just a hormone thing. But does all the innovation have to lead back to Cupertino these days? Does it?

So, another week, another iClone, and more specifically another HTC iClone. (At least they’re giving RIM a run for their Bold, Thunder, Storm money for the official iClone volume title…)

Still, it’s nice to see Android. As I mentioned in the Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn From the Competition, the cloud looks to be the future, and Google currently owns the cloud. Never mind their CEO is on Apple’s board of directors (he reportedly recuses himself from iPhone discussions to avoid a conflict of interest), the industry needs the drive Google can provide, even if they wrap it up in a horribly derivative package for now.

Check out the video after after the break!

More videos and images:

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No need for double-takes. You didn’t click the wrong link. Just breath, dig deeply, and stick with me for a moment. Yes, you really are still reading the iPhone blog.

For a 1.0 device, the iPhone knocked the ball — if not out of the park — soundly into the fence, and sent a complacent industry fumbling and flurrying to catch it. But no device, not even from Apple, could get everything perfect the first time at bat. Now, I’ve pretty much staked my turf here by playfully poking a little bit of fun at the competition but, truth be known, when they’re not wasting their time on iClones every platform and handset has some great — even killer — features to recommend it. In that spirit, here’s my top 5 list of what Apple should seriously consider stealing… er… learning from the competition if they want to hit a home run with 2.0 and beyond…

5. Blackberry’s Email Management

RIM is the undeniably #1 in smartphone market share, but they come in at #5 on my list for the simple reason that, while what they do well they do phenomenally well, as a platform I think that very maturity has led to little innovation, and hence little (and narrow) potential to mine for iPhone improvements.

That said, they are the email monster for a reason. With one major caveat, nobody does email bigger or better than Blackberry and while Twitter, IM, VoIP, video chat, and other technologies old and new battle it out for communication domination, email remains the mainstay of the mainstream, business and consumer alike, and in that regard Apple has something important to learn from Blackberry.

What Blackberry Does Right

Blackberry does email to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Push notwithstanding, when it comes to managing email, the Blackberry is a beast. It’s simply the best there is at what it does.

What Apple Could Do Better

RIM uses a centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle all Blackberry messaging everywhere, providing true, near-instantaneous “push” to thousands and thousands of Crackberrians each and every moment. But here’s that major caveat: it’s a single point of failure. Outages, from carrier to regional to network-wide have increasingly plagued the service, as have privacy and security concerns.

With the upcoming 2.0 update, the iPhone will support the ActiveSync “push” technology Apple licensed from Microsoft. ActiveSync eschews the “one NOC to manage it all” and instead simulates “push” between local Exchange Server and mobile client — in this case, the iPhone. If someone else’s Exchange Server — even Microsoft’s in Redmond — goes down, it effects your iPhone service not one bit.

That just leaves the iPhone MobileMail app itself. Fairly easy to set up and use, it still remains a challenge to manage multiple accounts and messages. Better mass-mail handling, especially for important functions like delete, is imperative (and is rumored to be coming with 2.0 as well).

Beyond that, however, better organization is needed. A single, unified inbox, like the one on the desktop Mail.app would be a great first step, followed by the ability to hide selected, seldom-used IMAP folders to clear up some clutter.

Speaking of IMAP, since MobileMail can “see” IMAP folders for Calendar, Apple Mail To Do, etc. better integration with the iPhone Calendar and Notes application (and dare we dream — Task app?), seems natural given what’s been done in OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Mail.app.

And since the spammers seem intent on mail-bombing the internet back to the stone age, some client-side anti-spam filters would also be most welcome.

Taken together, these improvements would go a long way to making the iPhone king of the next email generation.

4. Palm’s Click Counting

We want powerful, we want beautiful, and — dangit! — we want drop dead easy to use. Great design is functional design, great user experience is intuitive, almost transparent experience. Apple nails this to a large degree. I’ve said it before, but my two-and-a-half year old godson can pretty much navigate his way around the iPhone, from pictures to camera to notes (his ABCs) to calculator (his 123s) which unbelievable ease and accomplishment. But there remain a few problem areas.

Palm OS, dinosaur that it is, has legendary ease of use. Rumor has it that early Palm developers, like co-founder Jeff Hawkins, literally counted each and every “click” it took for a user to accomplish a task, and did everything possible to optimize and minimize that number. It has failed miserably to keep up with the times, but in a few key ways (no pun intended!) it’s still timeless.

What Palm Does Right

Palm understands moving around a mobile device like nobody else. Almost every task can be accomplished with just a few touches, clicks, or key presses. Brian has already covered the ease of entering appointment/calendar data on in the constantly-saved model of the Palm OS, and I’d add past innovations like photo speed dialing (which seems a natural for the iPhone, and ironically was a Palm innovation for their first Windows Mobile device, and requires a 3rd party add on for Palm’s own OS!). TreoCentral.com no doubt has many more examples. Though perhaps not as practical on an all-touch device, even little things like typing to begin a contact search or call are all time-saving techniques mastered by the Zen of Palm, and a spirit the iPhone could easily learn.

What Apple Could do Better

In addition to being so old its joints creak and crack every time it turns around, the Palm OS lacks the power to deliver a modern user experience, and bizarrely lacks standardization even across its own device platform (besides the aforementioned lack of photo dialing on the Palm side, GSM and CDMA phones have sported different dialing apps, some modernized while others are left to languish in whatever layer of hell 1990 monochrome aliased bitmaps are condemned).

Adding photo dialing to the iPhone would be trivial. All the Quartz and Core Graphics/Animation services are there, just begging for an Apple take.

Likewise improved calendar entry: tapping on an empty slot should bring up a New Event editor the same way tapping on a filled one brings up a viewer. And data should be saved automatically unless specifically cancelled. The mobile world is both more prone to interruptions and less forgiving of them, after all.

The sideways flick currently used to move between photos, Weather app cities, and other information surfaces could be leveraged more widely as well to speed up functionality. Let me flick between album lists while a song is playing, or email folders from one account to the next.

Digging down into, and backing up out of stacked screens is so iPod Classic.

3. Windows Mobile/HTC Speeds, Feeds, and Divergent Needs

As any WMExpert would tell you, Windows Mobile — in Microsoft’s most favoritist model — is not a product but a platform. So, I’m adding in stalwart hardware manufacturer HTC to round out the reference. Before we get too deeply into that, however, it’s worth remembering that the Microsoft model makes for an almost diametrically opposed situation to Apple’s. At the time of this writing, there is only 1 iPhone model, from 1 manufacturer, on 1 US-based carrier. Last count, there were 3.2 gazillion Windows Mobile phones across a plethora of OS variations (standard, smartphone… er… purple?) and innumerable manufacturing SKU’s not only from HTC, but Palm, Motorola, and even Symbian co-founder Sony Ericsson, among others, which run on every carrier and it’s multitude of resellers.

But Apple’s end-to-end control of the device, while giving it an undeniable edge in stability and user experience, comes at the cost of variety and individual configurability.

Back in the dark days of tech support we used to joke that if you were in Mac support, every question had a simple “yes, here’s how…” or “no, sorry” answer, while if you were in Windows support, every question inevitably started with “maybe” and led to hours and hours of digging, tweaking, and testing. And in many ways, the same holds true with the iPhone today: One feature set and a limited range of settings. And in very narrow ways, that leaves room for Apple to learn something from Windows Mobile.

What Windows Mobile Does Right

Again, I’m including HTC in this equation, and from that standpoint, they deserve credit for upping the game with a VGA quality screen and a release schedule that allows them to continuously field the latest and greatest mobile processors.

On the Windows Mobile side proper, the beast is so infinitely tweak-able it might as well be a hobbyist kit. Dig deep enough, and you can find settings for how you’d like your settings, and settings for those settings as well.

What Apple Could Do Better

While my heart remains set on a Nano-esque 202dpi screen (the current iPhone is 160dpi) bringing 720p to the mobile world, I would realistically expect VGA’s 640×480 in the next revision. The iPhone, with the video-out cables, is already capable of pumping 640×480 to your TV, why not to the iPhone screen? And while a yearly, single product release cycle doesn’t give much room for proc bumps, going beefy from the start, and getting the new chips early like Apple does with their laptops and desktops, would keep up the cutting-edge tradition and reputation, and help see devices healthily though their annual life cycles. (This might even be something proprietary chips via the recent PA Semi purchase could help with…)

On the configuration side, while Windows Mobile has ‘em, they’ve also left them pretty much scattered every which where but under under a unified Settings area, which is precisely where the iPhone sorts them. However, though its certainly understandable that Apple is focusing on the casual user, surfacing some lower-level options a la Windows Mobile, organized and implemented with Apple’s fit and finish, would go a long way to appeasing power users who currently turn to jailbreaking in a desperate attempts to get closer to the metal. On the Mac side, there are 3rd party apps that create GUIs for otherwise Terminal-only settings, and while I’m not suggesting (though maybe pipe dreaming a little…) that Apple should provide an official way to get Terminal up on the iPhone, an Advanced button that allowed for more options and deeper tweaking would be a happy medium for many users.

(What, you thought I’d beat the dead horse of cut and paste?)

2. Nokia’s Mobile Video Creation

“I’m streaming live right now, come chat!” is pure Twitter bacon (like spam, but you opted in to it). Many tech pundits, who are also iPhone users, love the Web 2.1 ability to stream video from anywhere and everywhere, whether it’s Robert Scoble shoving a camera in front of economic powerhouses, or the infinitely better looking Cali Lewis demoing Wii fit for the good of the masses, or the first lady of Apple (and self-confessed Jobstalker) iJustine zooming down the highway, live streaming video, especially live streaming mobile video, is the latest IT thing.

Many (most?) of these bleeding edge technojournalists are also Apple fans and devoted iPhone users. So, the fact that they’re all using N95′s to stream their mobile videos shows that Apple could learn something from Nokia.

What Nokia Does Right

Say what you want about Nokia’s Soviet-military design aesthetic and their rather pathetic North American release schedules, they know how to throw a camera at a smart phone. The N95 sports a massive 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens and DVD(ish) caliber video capture. This compares to the rapidly obsoleting 2 megapixel cam on the iPhone, which also fails to enjoy any Apple-provided video capture (which means jailbreaking and loading unsupported third party apps are your only current option).

So, while Apple and the iPhone’s built-in iPod rules the roost when it comes to consuming mobile media, the N95 can’t be touched when it comes to creating that media on the go. This is why all those aforementioned iPhone toting blogerati, when they clog my Twitter feed with their live streaming announcements, are streaming live via the N95.

What Apple Could Do Better

There have been rumors of an upcoming iChat Mobile application, and even video conferencing, and that’s a start. Apple, however, stands alone in 360 degree spherical integration, and while they don’t have as massive a footprint in most of them the way Microsoft might, they at least have a toe in all of them, from hardware, to software, to services, from production, to processing, to deployment, to consumption. You can fire up Final Cut Pro on your iMac, create a movie, upload it to .Mac and sync a copy to your iPhone. Imagine that power harnessed around mobile media creation?

Right now, QIK and Nokia need each other to produce streaming video (while the N95′s battery lasts, that is). Imagine an iPhone with a decent camera and video capture that could stream live via, or send recorded clips to, .Mac gallery. And imagine if Apple took the much-needed step of enabling support for UstreamTV, stickam, Flickr, and YouTube.

Coupled with seamless integration with the Mac, iMovie 08, and higher end apps, and — BOOM — the king of mobile media consumption becomes the king of mobile media creation as well.

Everyone could be a life-caster.

1. Android’s Cloud and Location Based Services

I know. Android is still somewhere between vaporware and the eternal beta tag that hounds so many of Google’s initiatives. How could they be my #1? Here’s the thing: with a few notable exceptions (we’ll get to those in a paragraph or two), they’re batting nearly 1000 on all “cloud services” right now. And the cloud is the future.

What are cloud services? Most of us run applications locally on our computers. We buy software, install it, and use it to save files on our hard drive. Cloud services change that game entirely. They run applications on servers (often huge data centers) that we access via our browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox), or through a dedicated client (iTunes, Sidebar Objects, Dashboard Widgets, etc.). Instead of buying them, we get them for free, sponsored by advertising, or via paid subscription. And instead of saving files locally, we have the option of saving them on the same servers (and data centers) the services themselves run on. We may lose some potential privacy and control, but we gain the advantage of multiple backups scattered over many geographies to preserve our data. If you think this doesn’t sound too different than the old server-client model, or the Sun and Oracle predictions of the network being the computer, you’re right. Just on a far greater scale.

What are location-based services? According to Google, the next gold rush. It’s tying the cloud in to your current location, based on WiFi, and better yet — GPS coordinates.

Apple provides some of these services already, with .Mac mail, iDisk storage, .Mac galleries, Back-to-my-Mac, and Sync, and rumors indicate they may be amping it up with IMAP IDLE-style “push” email and PIM sync, and maybe even a complete revamp with the next release, but they still could learn a lot from Google.

What Google Does Right

Confession: I’m a .Mac subscriber. Yes, it’s buggy and overpriced, but Back-to-my-Mac and the Sync features alone were enough to lure me in. Nevertheless, Google owns this space. They’re predicted to earn more than Microsoft’s Windows + Office monopoly soon, and some say that’s only the beginning. Indeed, the entire raison-d’être for Android is to give away an OS in hopes of getting Google’s services onto more phones and thus, into more hands.

They want you to meet an old friend over one of their Open Social powered networks, use their email to contact the old friend, their search to find a great diner near the both of you, their calendar to schedule a lunch, their Docs suite to get some work done while you’re waiting, their Blogger to write up the event, and their Picasa gallery to store pictures of your reunion. (All with tasteful text and banner ads, tuned per your interests and location, served up along with your results and data)

What’s more, many of their cloud services allow for easy collaboration. You can share your calendar, work on your spreadsheet along with some colleagues logged in back at the office, and publish everything online for the world to see.

And the most important piece — indeed the missing link up until recently — Google Gears allows for offline persistence; you can keep using many of your cloud apps and cloud-stored data even when you don’t have a WiFi or cell connection. If you have to get on a plane to see your old friend, you can keep typing away, and when you land everything will sync back up.

What Apple Could Do Better

Where Google strikes out is integration. Their offerings are a disjointed and sometimes disoriented mishmash of homebrews and buyouts, with nowhere near the cohesive user experience or inter-offering leverage Apple could provide. Until recently, some services didn’t even work under a single login. There are also huge holes in their offerings, like Amazon S3- or Microsoft Skydrive-like storage (yes, you can rig up gDrive, but I’m talking official offerings here).

Apple already has some of these holes filled (iDisk), but are missing many more pieces themselves. There are suggestions Apple doesn’t “get” social networking (or doesn’t want to get it). But an easy to use blogging service built into .Mac and the iPhone would be an excellent start. And given Apple’s existing “Cult of Mac”, a social network tied into that admittedly snobbish demographic would be an easy sell as well. Tie it into the location-based services (opt-in, of course) and suddenly the cloud network takes on physicality as well. Instead of “Steve’s Twittering: Meet up at the Mothership after Keynote”, Steve can see how many of his friends and contacts are already at Keynote, and tying into search, calendar, IM, and other services could make for a very easy workflow to set up the meet.

This brings me back to the integration. The way Contacts flows into the Apple client for Google Maps gives a hint at how it should “just work”. The iPhone Maps app in general shows that Apple can make hybrid client/cloud software better than anyone on the planet. Imagine that leveraged across the device?

Get an email with a spreadsheet, and instead of just a preview, you could launch iWork Online, make your edits, and have them available to all team (or family — Apple’s consumer focus!) members instantly. Still working when you get on that plane? Newer versions of WebKit promise offline modes with database support for just such an eventuality, and WebKit is the foundation of the iPhone’s MobileSafari browser, and much of its data rendering in general).

And once the iPhone scales, and iPhone data starts to get aggregated and leveraged (with firm privacy and security policies!) for the benefit of other iPhone users, watch out. Today’s social networks and sharing proof-of-concepts will looks positively anemic.

Apple (or an Apple/Google alliance even?) could get an immediate edge going into the next great paradigm shift in computer technology.

Conclusion

So there you have them: better Blackberry-style email management, Treo-centric focus on click counting, Windows Mobile-ish configurability, Nokia inspired mobile video production, and Google Android beating cloud services are my top 5 things the iPhone could learn from the competition.

Is Apple already thinking along these lines? We’ll have to wait for WWDC — and likely Macworld 2009 — to know for sure. How about you? If Apple could take 5 things from the competition to improve YOUR iPhone, what would they be?

[Note: This a a Wait-A-Thon post! Comment on this post -- or any post tagged "Wait-a-Thon" -- for your chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card!]

Usually we wait for This Week in Smartphone Schadenfreude to mock review the competition (such as it is), but if they bring the hype, we’ll bring the satire, special-edition style.

Samsung, Nokia (yeah, I’d forgotten about them as well…), and RIM (and RIM) have already sent in their iClones, and now it’s HTCs turn to make mid-2008 look like early 2007 all over again… Ludites and gentlemen, the HTC Touch Diamond.

(At least I think it’s the Diamond, they’ve pre-announced like 100 different Touch trademarks lately, so it could be the Pro or the Cruise or even the Cubic Zirconium for all I can tell…)

Speaking of 2007, as we all know when Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld and pulled the iPhone from his pocket, it’s form factor was exactly like every other Palm, RIM, and WinMob device out there, with a tiny screen, application independent tic-tactile keyboard, always unstylish stylus, and and OS and interface straight out of 2001.

Wait, no it wasn’t. El Jobso unveiled a revolutionary new device with a giant, hi-res screen, multi-touch input, and an interface the likes of which the industry had never seen before. But they (and we) have certainly seen it since — reflected funhouse mirror-like in almost every signature device from every company released post-iPhone.

Read on!

Now HTC does deserve some orientation-sensing, hardware-accelerated props (assuming they cough up non-crippled drivers this time). According to WMExperts.com and HTC CMO John Wang, they’ve replaced Pocket IE with Opera (imagine Dell doing that with Firefox on the Windows desktop…), improved on the default virtual keyboard to the point of earning an official Engadget “messy”, and very wisely done everything they can to hide Windows Mobile, even though the device sports the latest, greatest (all things being relative) version 6.1. (And boy must that have the furniture flying around Ballmer’s tiny office…)

Instead, they’ve layered on custom interfaces to “Multi-Touch Cover Flow”… er… single “TouchFLO 3D” their way through photos, put little green numbered dots to count down emails on their envelop icons, and in a myriad other ways joined the “inspired by Apple in Cupertino” crowd. Still, it’s actually, you know, a decent interface, and the animation is borderline gorgeous (or it would be if the demo unit didn’t sport the responsiveness of a 386 running Vista).

Want to do anything more than the slicken-ing veneer allows, however, want to tweak a setting to access the fabled power of the platform, and its straight back to Windows Mobile 6.1.

Surprise, surprise, if you pile whip cream atop a turd sunday, all that shiny sweetness is meaningless the first time you dig in and really take a bite.

The eponymous touch screen is the old school, resistance type (oh, stylus, where art thou?) but the paltry (and already Apple abandoned) 4GB internal storage capacity is probably sufficient, what with Microsoft creating and abandoning user-unfriendly content services like MSN faster than you can say PlaysNoMore. And it’s a good thing since there isn’t much to watch on that beautiful, if cramped, 2.8″ VGA screen, given the positively tiny 900mAh battery guaranteed to last through a full day of absolutely no use anyway. (For the truly masochistic, of course, a micro-SD expansion will allow an extra moveable part to break and the comforting knowledge that all pressure data is safely stored on something the size of a pinky nail — no chance of losing that! UPDATE: turns I miss-spec’d myself — HTC to consumers: no SD expansion for you! 4GB is all you get!)

On the plus side, however, at least HTC didn’t copy the iPhone’s hardware design. Nope, this baby draws straight from the Zune! Want to zoom a photo, just swirl(?!) your finger around the squirle!

I get the feeling that when Steve Jobs said it would take the competition 5 years to catch up to the iPhone, he was being uncharacteristically generous. While spec-for-spec the HTC Touch Diamond offers a few huge leap ahead in pure smartphone power, it’s horribly out-dated OS, lack of interface innovation, and design straight out of Microsoft’s failed X-Mas 2007 music player book is still too little, too late.

Like Nokia, RIM, Palm, and pretty much every other device maker on the planet, HTC really needs to get in the game, and that doesn’t mean just trying to throw as many specs as possible at a device and hoping some cohesiveness sticks (it never, ever does), or out-innovating each other in iCloning the iPhone. It means having a unique, cohesive visual from the get go, and it means out-innovating Apple. Sadly, the only one proven capable of either these days is Apple. (Soon to be witnessed yet again when they drop the all-but-announced iPhone 3G later this year.)

[Digg link]

Will the Diamond pull folks away from the iPhone?