MacRumors

Ahead of an upcoming import ban on older Apple devices, Verizon attorney Randal Milch has published an open letter via The Wall Street Journal, calling for presidential intervention in the case to veto the ban.

High-tech products can implicate thousands of patents. If the ITC finds that a product infringes even a single one, it can stop the product at the border. But that's basically it. The commission can't levy much in the way of a lesser penalty. In the end the consumer suffers when the use of such an enforcement tool is unwarranted.

The import ban was originally scheduled back in June, after the U.S. International Trade Commission reached a decision on an ongoing Apple vs. Samsung patent case. The ITC ruled that Apple infringed on Samsung Patent No. 7,706,384, entitled "Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system."

A cease and desist order was issued on several Apple products, including AT&T models of the iPhone 3GS and 4, the iPad 3G, and the iPad 2 3G. The ban did not go into effect immediately, however, as such rulings are given a 60 day window for the White House to intervene.

Though Verizon is not directly affected by case as it pertains solely to AT&T products, Milch believes that such a ban would further encourage patent abuse.

What we have warned is that patent litigation at the ITC—where the only remedy is to keep products from the American public—is too high-stakes a game for patent disputes. The fact that the ITC's intellectual-property-dispute docket has nearly quadrupled over 15 years only raises the stakes further. Smartphone patent litigation accounts for a substantial share of that increase.

While a presidential veto on an ITC decision has not happened since 1987, Milch suggests that intervention is necessary when the patent holder is not using the technology (as is often the case with patent trolls), when the patent holder has agreed to license the patent on reasonable terms, or when the infringement is unimportant to the overall product. Apple's infringement on Samsung's patent falls into the third category.

"There are more than 250,000 patents relevant to today’s smartphones," Milch writes. "It makes no sense that exclusion could occur for infringement of the most minor patent."

Without intervention, the cease and desist order on Apple products will go into effect on August 5, 2013. Apple has filed for an appeal and has also requested a stay on the ban.

After being found guilty in federal court of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices, legal experts are estimating that Apple could owe as much as $500 million in damages.

GigaOm has shared a chart provided to the federal judge in the case by the Texas attorney general. It shows how much in damages the five publishers have been found liable and how much they have paid in settlements. The remainder -- after damages have been trebled for willful violations -- works out to roughly $500 million.

The chart shows that the publishers have paid out over $166 million so far. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Hagens Berman — the class action firm in the case — told my colleague Jeff Roberts that Apple would likely face a liability payment of harm to consumers times three, minus the $166 million already paid out by publishers. On Wednesday, Law360 reported (paywall) the same thing, calculating that if Apple loses its appeal it would face about $490 million in damages. I annotated the chart above with those figures.

Apple has indicated that it will appeal the guilty ruling and it's likely that it will be many months or even years before the case is resolved.

While Apple is still working to bring its developer site back up a week after taken offline due to a security breach, the company appears to be experiencing another problem with its systems today, as a number of MacRumors readers have reported they are unable to activate their new iPhones. Other reports are showing up on Twitter as the problems continue.

According to one tipster who called Apple about the problem, the company's activation servers are currently down. Another AT&T employee has told MacRumors that AT&T has also confirmed the outage, and posts in Apple's discussion forum offer similar information.

Reports of problems began surfacing nearly three hours ago, and there is no word yet on when users can expect the issue to be fully resolved.

Last week, Ashton Kutcher took to Quora to explain some of the reasons why he decided to take on the role of Steve Jobs in the upcoming film JOBS, noting his admiration for Jobs, the challenge of the role, and his interest in the convergence of technology and entertainment.

With the film set for wide release on August 16, Kutcher is now beginning to hit the publicity circuit to talk about the film. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night, where he discussed how he missed a chance to meet Steve Jobs six months before Jobs' death and how regret over that decision played a part in his decision to portray Jobs.

Kutcher also sat down with The Verge for a wide-ranging interview including some discussion of his portrayal of Jobs. In the interview, Kutcher describes how he felt almost compelled to take on the role of Jobs out of love for the Apple co-founder. Kutcher felt that if anyone was going to "screw it up", it should be someone should be someone who cared for Jobs.

To prepare for the role, Kutcher assembled a 15-hour SoundCloud compilation of Jobs' speaking voice, including both public presentations and more candid recordings that captured his habits outside of public life. "There were two versions of him, and I got this from a lot of friends of his that I talked to," Kutcher said. "There was the guy who went on stage and presented things, and then there was the guy who was in the boardroom, who was working on a product, who was having an intimate conversation. And I tried to find little snippets of stuff where he wasn't aware that he was being recorded or speeches that he didn't think anyone was going to hear, so I could get a little more of who he honestly was."

The relevant portion of the interview begins roughly 11:30 into the video.

A newly published patent application from Apple describes a "power management for electronic devices" system, which detects the usage patterns of a mobile phone and estimates the required energy needed to run the phone between charges. The abstract of the patent application, No. US 2013/0191662 (via AppleInsider), describes the system as:

A method for modifying one or more characteristics of a mobile electronic device in order to save or reduce power consumption of the device.

Closer inspection of the document reveals that the system automatically turns certain hardware features of the mobile phone (such as Wi-Fi, location services or Bluetooth) off in order to try and increase the device's battery life.

The patent application, which was first filed back in January 2012, lists Michael Ingrassia, a senior software engineer at Apple who has worked the iPod nano and iPod classic (including the Radio, iPod Out, and Voice Memos features on the iPod nano), and Jeffrey T. Lee as its inventors.

In making its case for the need addressed by the described invention, the document describes a situation all too familiar to many smartphone users:

A user may charge his or her device prior to leaving for work, and while at work may use a global positioning system (GPS) for turn-by-turn directions to attend a business meeting, watch one or more videos on the device, and make multiple phone calls, all without charging the device for a number of hours. In this case, the power source may be drained before the user has the chance to recharge the device and thus cease operating.

The system described by Apple remembers charging locations where a user would typically charge their device (such as their home or place of work) as well as typical device usage (the type of power source, typical charge time and typical travel time to and from locations) by using "an on-board GPS radio", then automatically builds a power management profile based on the user's usage patterns.
As always with Apple patents, the technology described here may not make it into a final product, but given the limitations on battery capacity imposed by the slim mobile devices in use today, it would certainly be welcomed by many people looking to extend the battery lives of their devices.

European regulators have accepted a promise by the British media group Penguin and German media conglomerate Bertelsmann to scrap deals on electronic books, also known as "e-books", with Apple which were found to be in breach of European competition policy.

Penguin was not the only company in the firing line. Back in December 2012, the Commission criticized the practices of four large publishers, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Holtzbrinck and Harper Collins, of working with Apple via an "agency model" whereby the publishers set the retail price and the distributor takes a fee (30% in Apple's case).

Under the "wholesale model" in place before Apple entered the market, publishers sell their goods to distributors for fixed prices and allow the distributors decide the final retail prices. The agency model came under fire for causing a rise in retail prices of e-books compared to the wholesale model championed by Amazon and Google. Under Apple's "most favored nation" contract clauses, it was allowed to match lower pricing by other retailers, and with the support of the major publishers effectively forced the entire industry to switch to the agency model, raising antitrust issues in a number of regions.

Joaquín Almunia, the European Commissioner for Competition, said in a press release from this morning:

After our decision of December 2012, the commitments are now legally binding on Apple and all five publishers including Penguin, restoring a competitive environment in the market for e-books.

The development comes after a district judge in the United States, Denise Cote, said that Apple played a "central role" in helping to fix the price of e-books. Court documents show that Apple, along with five other publishers, "conspired to raise, fix, and stabilize the retail price for newly released and bestselling trade e-books in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1 ("Sherman Act") and various state laws". Apple has steadfastly claimed that it has done nothing wrong and will appeal the decision.

The European Commission is well-known for imposing large fines on companies who fail to follow practices designed to protect consumers against anti-competitive behavior. In 2009, Intel was handed a record-breaking €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine for the abuse of its dominance in the computer chip market and in 2004, Microsoft was fined €497 million (around $795 million) for offering Windows Media Player standard with its operating systems as well as providing no information about competing network software to interact with Windows desktops and servers.

After two electric shock incidents involving the iPhone in China, Apple has added a special page [Google translation, via The Next Web] to its Chinese website informing consumers about the identification and use of genuine USB power adapters for the iPad and iPhone.

The page includes a message about Apple’s continued dedication to consumer safety and testing. It also includes diagrams for identifying genuine power adapters for products that use the new Lightning connector and those that use the legacy 30-pin connector.

When you need to charge the iPhone or iPad, we recommend that you use the standard USB power adapter and USB cable. These adapters and cables are also available separately from Apple and Apple Authorized Resellers.

Last week, a Chinese man was left in a coma after receiving an electric shock while charging his iPhone 4, an incident which followed the death of a Chinese woman under similar circumstances. Both incidents apparently involved the use of unauthorized third-party adapters.

Algoriddim has launched a sequel to their popular djay iOS app. Djay was originally a Mac application, but has since found wide popularity on the iPhone and iPad. The iOS version has won a 2011 Apple Design Award and has seen millions of downloads.

The new version offers a revamped user interface, drum machine, sampler, and improved scratching/syncing tools and more.

Most notable are features related to offering users direct visual feedback of music. Songs are now actually mapped to "virtual grooves" which reflect the peaks and valleys just like on traditional vinyl. The music waveform is now colored, mapping specific colors to similar sounds, allowing you to visually identify song sections and instruments.

Retaining the simplicity of the traditional DJ turntable look-and-feel, djay 2 adds a stunning new waveform layer, which allows users to touch and interact with their music at an unprecedented level of detail and clarity. HD Waveforms provide users with precise visual cues that highlight similar sounds with similar colors, leveraging the full resolution of the Retina display on iPad and iPhone.

Djay 2 is available in the App Store now with discounted launch pricing of $4.99 for iPad and $0.99 for iPhone. Direct Links: iPad, $4.99, iPhone, $0.99

As Apple's Developer Center outage continues into its seventh day of downtime, Apple has once again updated the site with a newly updated message for developers that outlines how the company plans to restore functionality and provides a status page that reveals which systems are online.

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We'll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we've created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

At the current point in time, iTunes Connect is the only service that is listed as online, but Apple says that it plans to work on Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles immediately, following that with the developer forums, bug reporting tools, and software libraries. Software downloads, including the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will follow.

Apple's Developer Center first went offline last Thursday, and on Sunday, Apple revealed that it had been taken down as a precaution after a security breach. It is unclear who was responsible for the hacking, but a security researcher has suggested that he might be to blame for the outage.

Apple says that it has been "working around the clock" on a complete overhaul of its developer systems since the Developer Center was taken down. Apple has noted that developer memberships and apps set to expire during the outage will be given an extension to account for the significant downtime.

Korean site ETNews.com is reporting [Google translation] that Apple will be discontinuing production of the iPhone 5 in the fall, instead putting all of its efforts towards the iPhone 5S and the rumored entry-level plastic iPhone.

Apple has been presumed to be discontinuing the iPhone 4 and 4S in order to make way for an all-Lightning iPhone lineup, allowing Apple to standardize around its latest connection standard and phase out the older 30-pin connector standard with the possible exception of the iPod classic, which has not been updated in a number of years. The fate of the current iPhone 5 has, however, not been the subject of much discussion as it has remained unclear whether the new lineup of iPhone 5S and plastic iPhone would leave room for Apple to continue offering an iPhone 5 model.

Today's report claims that the in-cell technology used on the iPhone 5’s touchscreen is "not suitable for low-volume production", contributing to Apple's decision to stop production on the phone and focus all of its efforts toward producing parts for newer products. The iPhone 5 and 5S are, however, expected to share nearly identical display technology although leaked photos have a shown a change to the orientation of the flex cable connectors on the display assemblies.

The iPhone 5S is reportedly scheduled to begin production later this month, with both that device and the lower cost iPhone rumored for launch in the September-October timeframe.

(Thanks, Byungjin!)

At a press conference today in San Francisco, Google announced its second generation Nexus 7, which comes with a number of enhancements. The tablet, which is thinner and lighter than the previous version, has an improved screen with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 and a pixel density of 323 PPI.

It is equipped with a Qualcomm 1.5GHz quad-core S4 Pro, 2GB of RAM, a 9 hour battery life, and it comes with NFC and Bluetooth 4.0. The iPad mini, released in late 2012, sports less impressive internals in comparison as it has yet to be updated, including a dual-core A5 processor and 512MB of RAM, along with a screen that is 1024 x 768.

Google has not focused much effort on the camera of the Nexus 7, which is in line with the iPad mini’s 1.2-megapixel front camera and 5-megapixel back camera. The Nexus 7 is also slightly heavier than the mini, with a smaller screen and a smaller profile.

In addition to releasing an updated Nexus 7, Google is also aiming at Apple services on several other fronts, taking on both Game Center and AirPlay.

The company has launched its Google Play Games app, which is designed to be the Android version of Apple’s Game Center. It works hand in hand with Google Play games services, a feature that lets developers build cloud saving, multiplayer gameplay, and achievements into apps.

Chromecast, another feature Google introduced today, is an HDMI accessory that functions similarly to AirPlay, allowing users to mirror content from a tablet, smartphone, or computer. Chromecast works with video, music, and apps like Netflix, and can be used with a number of devices, including iPhones and iPads. Chromecast, which will retail for $35, will be available later today through Best Buy, Amazon, and the Google Play Store.

While Google’s Nexus 7 will be available on July 30 with a $230 price tag, there appears to be no iPad mini upgrade on the horizon. Apple has plans to release a redesigned fifth generation iPad with a thinner design and smaller bezels, but it remains unclear when the company will offer a new iPad mini. A recent report from reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that the company might not release an updated mini until March or April of 2014.

Digitimes reports that the adoption of new touch-sensor systems in both the iPhone 5 and iPad has caused a notable shift in the supply chain of the touch panel market, according to research carried out by the firm DisplaySearch.

Displays with in-cell touch are expected to rise from 7.3% of mobile phone shipments in 2012 to 13.7% in 2013, while shipments of GG DITO (double-sided ITO glass) structure are expected to decline from 10.3% to 0.6%. For tablets, shipments of GF2 sensor structure are expected to rise from 4.7% in 2012 to 28.4% in 2013, while shipments of GG DITO structure decline from 37.2% to 8.1%.

Calvin Hseih, research director at DisplaySearch, notes that Apple has been primarily responsible for this shift, despite the massive number of touchscreen devices already on the market. Apple's shift from a GG type touch-sensor system (glass on glass) to in-cell touch technology and GF2 (whereby the second layer of glass is replaced by an optical film) has rapidly influenced the entire supply chain

Apple switched from GG to in-cell touch technology with the iPhone 5 release back in September 2012 and the iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad also feature GF2 technology. Another report by Digitimes reiterates previous rumors that the upcoming fifth-generation iPad, which is slated to be released sometime in Q4 2013, will feature GF2 touch technology.

That technology will allow the new iPad to be thinner and lighter than previous models, with the technology being supplied by TPK and GIS. The fifth-generation iPad has been rumored and shown in leaked parts to be significantly smaller and thinner than the current iPad, taking design cues from the iPad mini.