MacRumors

Reuters reports that the dispute over the iPad trademark in China has taken an interesting turn, with Proview Technology filing suit against Apple in the United States over alleged deception related to the deal between the two companies.

Apple set up a dummy corporation known as IP Application Development Ltd (IPAD) to conduct negotiations with Proview over the trademark back in 2009, and Proview's suit alleges that Apple's efforts to keep its identity secret amounted to fraud.

In its filing, Proview alleged lawyers for IPAD repeatedly said it would not be competing with the Chinese firm, and refused to say why they needed the trademark.

Those representations were made "with the intent to defraud and induce the plaintiffs to enter into the agreement," Proview said in the filing dated February 17, requesting an unspecified amount of damages.

The use of dummy corporations is not particularly unusual in business negotiations, with companies sometimes seeking to keep their identities secret as they work to acquire intellectual property and other assets in support of products under development. By keeping their identities secret, high-profile companies hope to avoid having their plans become public while also looking to strike more favorable deals with companies who think they are dealing with a small business rather than a deep-pocketed industry leader.

MacRumors discovered in the weeks leading up to the introduction of the original iPad in January 2010 that Apple had used a similar dummy corporation with a nearly identical name of IP Application Development LLC to register its own iPad trademarks.

Apple claims that its IPAD dummy corporation purchased the rights to the iPad trademark from Proview in ten countries back in December 2009. Proview has claimed that the transaction did not include the Chinese rights, and the two companies are currently facing off in a number of Chinese courts over the matter. A Hong Kong court ruled last year that Proview and several of its subsidiaries and associated companies had conspired to extort millions of dollars of Apple's by refusing to turn over the Chinese rights to the trademark, but Chinese courts have in several cases sided with Proview.

iMore claims that Apple may be transitioning away from the standard 30-pin dock connector to something more compact in the very near future.

An updated “micro dock” could make room for bigger batteries, 4G radios, and other components far more important to the iPhone and iPad in a PC free world.

As the site points out, Apple has worked hard to miniaturize other components in their iOS devices. Apple was one of the first to adopt the micro-SIM and has even proposed an even smaller SIM card design so they could make even thinner designs.

As iMore points out, the current dock connector isn't huge, but as devices continue to get smaller and thinner, every little bit counts.

Moving away from such a ubiquitous connector, however, would be walking away from an enormous ecosystem of existing 3rd party products. Still, Apple's constant desire to make smaller/thinner designs will naturally put pressure on the size of all their components. Apple's recent move to PC-free computing with iCloud syncing may have also diminished the importance of the dock connector.

We reached out to iMore's Editor-in-Chief Rene Ritchie who said that the report came from a "solid source". iMore also made headlines recently by predicting the date for the iPad 3 launch, which is believed to be accurate.

Apple is acquiring three-year old startup Chomp and plans to use the company's technology and expertise to improve the App Store's search and app discovery technology, according to a report from TechCrunch.

We first covered Chomp in November 2009 to announce their seed funding. Since then, they’ve grown their scope to include not only iPhone apps, but Android apps as well. In fact, Chomp currently has a deal with Verizon to power all of their Android-based app searches. That relationship, obviously, is going to get a bit awkward with this acquisition.

My understanding is that such deals will remain intact for now but are likely to end once the Chomp team and product transitions over to Apple. The same is likely true for Chomp’s stand-alone products.

The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that the deal isn't merely about talent -- Apple wants Chomp's technology as well. Chomp has raised more than $2.5 million in funding and apparently all investors are very pleased with the outcome. Chomp's 20 or so employees are reportedly all headed for Apple.

Apple generally prefers to make small to medium size acquisitions of talent and technology, rather than spending huge sums of its $100 billion cash hoard. Earlier this year, Apple paid some $390 million to acquire Israeli flash memory firm Anobit.

Update: Apple has confirmed the purchase to AllThingsD.

Update 2: Apple "paid about $50 million" for Chomp, according to Bloomberg.

Apple's annual shareholder meeting has just concluded at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, with the company declining to make any major announcements related to its operations. One of the biggest questions on the stock side has been speculation about a dividend, buyback, or stock split, and while Apple has indicated that it is continually evaluating the best uses for its cash stockpile, the company has not decided to adopt any of those strategies so far.

CNBC posted a live blog of the meeting, outlining the formal agenda, brief statements from Tim Cook, and a brief Q&A session with shareholders. One change the company did announce is its adoption of a measure that will require members of Apple's board of directors to obtain majority votes from shareholders in order to be elected. The company had previously operated under a plurality vote standard in which directors need to obtain only a majority of the votes cast, omitting those who failed to vote their shares. Under the new policy, directors who do not receive a majority of outstanding voting shares will voluntarily step down. All current directors were easily re-elected.

Majority voting has increasingly become the standard among major companies, and major shareholders have been attempting to push Apple in that direction for several years. A non-binding proposal from shareholders on the topic was approved last year, but Apple declined to adopt it. The proposal was set to be revisited at this year's meeting, and while Apple opposed it in its proxy materials sent to shareholders, the company agreed to implement it even before today's vote results were released.

Tim Cook faced several other questions from shareholders today, touching on topics such as Apple's commitment to education and the company's lack of interest in owning music labels or television studios. Other topics included Apple's advertising on controversial television shows, its relationship with Facebook (Cook called Facebook a "friend"), and the possibility of an Apple television set (no comment from Cook).

Last week, we reported that we had been able to obtain a 9.7-inch display claimed to be for the iPad 3, confirming through microscopic analysis that the display offers twice the linear resolution and four times the total number of pixels as the iPad 2.

We've since shared the display with our friends at iFixit to see if they could power the screen and otherwise take a closer look at it. Unfortunately, with the different connector on the new display, iFixit was unable to directly hook the display up to the guts of an iPad 2. Meanwhile, efforts to map the pins of the two displays in an attempt to jury-rig the iPad 3 display were believed to be too substantial to undertake with the limited time and no guarantees of success. iFixit was, however, able to confirm our findings of an ultra-high resolution display that quadruples the number of pixels over the previous-generation iPads.

In this new video overview of the iPad 3 display, iFixit confirms the higher (2048x1536) resolution, the modified connector, and tweaked retaining clips as compared to the iPad 2 display.

Apple is expected to introduce the iPad 3 with a media event on March 7. Beyond the display, photos of a number of claimed parts for the device, including the logic board and front glass/digitizer, have leaked in recent weeks, offering some reasonable evidence of what can be expected in the updated models.

T-Mobile USA today announced earnings results for the fourth quarter of 2011, revealing a net loss of over 800,000 contract subscribers during the quarter. The carrier, which is now the only one of the four major U.S. carriers to not carry the iPhone, specifically blamed the launch of the iPhone 4S for the defections, mentioning the iPhone by name seven times in its release.

Sequentially, the decline in branded net contract customers was driven primarily by higher branded contract deactivations as a result of the launch of the iPhone 4S by three nationwide competitors in mid-October.

Following the collapse of a deal that would have seen T-Mobile USA acquired by AT&T, T-Mobile USA is seeking to reposition itself with a "challenger strategy" and move aggressively to roll out 4G LTE services beginning next year.

Other U.S. carriers have already been rolling out their LTE networks for some time, but T-Mobile has been behind that curve as it has relied on HSPA+ technology that previously gave it an advantage over some of the other carriers in data speeds. But with AT&T having upgraded its own network to HSPA+ even as it is already building out LTE, T-Mobile is now finding itself scrambling to recover from the holding pattern is was in while the AT&T acquisition deal was pending.

Reuters reports that a Shanghai court has declined to issue an injunction that would have barred sales of Apple's iPad in the city, a ruling that is part of the dispute between Apple and Proview Technology over the trademark on the iPad name.

Early reports had painted the decision as a significant victory for Apple, but while the company is no doubt pleased that the judge in the case did not find sufficient cause to halt iPad sales at this time, it appears to mainly be a procedural ruling to put off further proceedings until a decision is reached in a related case in Guangdong province. Apple lost an initial case there and is currently appealing that decision.

The Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court denied a request by Proview Technology (Shenzhen) for the injunction and agreed to Apple's request that the trademark infringement case be suspended pending a ruling in a separate case in a higher court.

The decision, announced on Thursday on the court's website, gives Apple some leeway in a larger battle over the iPad trademark in China, which is important to Apple not only as a consumer market, but also because the country is a major production base for the iPad and other of its products.

Proview has won several small victories against Apple in cities around China, but a ruling against Apple in Shanghai would have been by far the most significant given the city's size and Apple's presence there with three of its own retail stores.

In an upcoming profile of AMD, Forbes reports that the company's Llano family of Fusion combination CPU-GPU systems was under consideration by Apple to be used as the brains behind the MacBook Air for its 2011 revision. AMD lost out to Intel, however, as the necessary parts were late in being delivered to Apple and had unacceptably high failure rates.

AMD struggled with its new fabless model while trying to crank out “fusion” processors that combined a CPU and a GPU in a single part. On paper the idea was promising. A notebook processor dubbed “Llano” got a close look from Apple for an update to the ultralight MacBook Air, scheduled for launch in mid-2011.

But AMD couldn’t get early working samples of Llano to Apple on time, one former employee says. Several former AMD employees disagree on just how close AMD came. “We had it,” one says. But too many of the Llano parts were faulty. AMD lost the deal.

The company reportedly also pitched Apple on using its Brazos family of Fusion systems in the Apple TV, but Apple proved to be uninterested in the proposal.

Forbes' Brian Caulfield has more on AMD's efforts to lure Apple in a separate article in which he talks further about yield issues on the Fusion chips planned for the MacBook Air.

The claim echoes a November report from SemiAccurate alleging that AMD's Fusion platform was Apple's "Plan A" for the 2011 MacBook Air and that such machines were "on the verge of production" before Apple ultimately decided to stick with Intel.

Apple had been struggling with chip options in its small portables for several years as licensing issues prevented graphics companies such as NVIDIA from developing integrated graphics solutions for Intel's latest processors. With Apple being forced to choose between slower Core 2 Duo processors paired with fast NVIDIA graphics and faster Intel Core i-series processors hampered by slow integrated graphics from Intel, Apple opted to continue using the aging Core 2 Duo processors for much longer than it would have otherwise liked.

Improvements in Intel's integrated graphics did allow Apple to transition to significantly improved Core i5 and i7 processor in the current generation of MacBook Air models, but it seems that Apple was also weighing AMD's offerings as it sought to work its way out of the constraints of Intel's graphics issues.

Last month, OnLive introduced its free OnLive Desktop service that allows users to run virtual instances of Microsoft Office apps streamed from OnLive's remote PCs to the users' iPads. The company has now added Adobe Acrobat Reader support to the service and introduced a paid "Desktop Plus" subscription service to provide enhanced functionality including priority access and a Flash- and PDF-enabled browser experience. OnLive Desktop Plus is priced at $4.99 per month.

The free OnLive Desktop App, currently available on iPad—and coming soon to Android, PC, Mac, TVs and monitors—delivers no-compromise, media-rich, instant-response Windows applications including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint software, and as of today, Adobe Reader for PDFs, along with 2GB of cloud storage. OnLive Desktop Plus, available for $4.99/month at www.desktop.onlive.com, provides all OnLive Desktop Standard features plus OnLive’s gigabit-speed accelerated browsing experience with full Flash player capability. With OnLive Desktop Plus, the iPad not only becomes 100% Flash compatible, it becomes the world’s fastest mobile Flash player.

As with the original OnLive Desktop service, there is some lag in responding to touch input and visual artifacts when moving quickly through documents or web pages. The lag made it somewhat difficult to work with interactive Flash-based content such as games in our testing, but the service does allow for decent viewing of Flash video content on the web.

While that slight lag is a function of the time needed for data to transfer between OnLive's servers and the user's iPad, OnLive's PCs themselves are connected to the Internet with gigabit connections, making for very fast loading of content and data transfers, which is then optimized for the iPad's display and passed along to the user.

OnLive is planning yet another tier of service, a $9.99/month "Pro" level that will offer additional PC applications for use from the iPad and an upgrade from to 50 GB of storage, up from 2 GB on the regular and Plus levels.

The California Attorney General's office today announced that Apple, Google, and other companies running mobile app marketplaces have agreed to implement new standards for notifying users of privacy policies associated with apps offered in their stores. The provisions will require that developers of apps that collect personal information include privacy policies with their app sthat can be viewed directly from the store before downloading the apps themselves.

Attorney General Harris forged the agreement with six companies whose platforms comprise the majority of the mobile apps market: Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research In Motion. These platforms have agreed to privacy principles designed to bring the industry in line with a California law requiring mobile apps that collect personal information to have a privacy policy. The majority of mobile apps sold today do not contain a privacy policy.

Links to privacy policies will be in consistent locations within the App Store and other marketplaces, offering users the ability to view the policies at a glance. Developers who do not comply with these requirements can be charged under California law, and Apple and the other companies signing on to the agreement have pledged to educate developers about privacy policy requirements and help them to meet the standards.

Finally, the agreement requires that the companies provide simple methods for users to report apps that do not comply with privacy requirements, as well as systems for dealing with those reports.

Following publicity about location-tracking and privacy on mobile devices last year, U.S. Senator Al Franken sent letters to Apple and Google specifically asking if they would be willing to require clear privacy policies for apps distributed through their stores.

Apple's Bud Tribble had noted during a Senate hearing on mobile privacy that privacy policies from developers would not go far enough in protecting users' information, arguing that Apple's own efforts to provide visual indicators of information sharing such as an icon becoming visible when the user's location is being transmitted are more effective at policing privacy issues.

AppleInsider reports on an interview with a representative of Hong Kong-based nonprofit Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) claiming that Foxconn used advance knowledge of recent audits by the Fair Labor Association to hide underage workers from auditors. Specifically, the report addresses the issue of 16- and 17-year olds, who are permitted to work under Apple's supplier code of conduct if allowed under local laws, but with special restrictions on types and duration of their work.

[SACOM project officer Debby Sze Wan] Chan said she had heard from two Foxconn workers in Zhenghou last week that the manufacturer was "prepared for the inspection" by the Fair Labor Association that had been commissioned by Apple and began last week.

"All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments," Chan reported the workers as having said.

Other workers reported to the agency that Foxconn had relaxed certain policies such as by adding additional break periods ahead of the audits.

Fair Labor Association president Auret van Heerden noted to Nightline's Bill Weir in a segment that aired yesterday that his group always expects to receive "a show" when it arrives for its audits, but that its interview techniques and other strategies help to dig beneath the surface to find more accurate representations of working conditions.

Chan's organization also focuses on issues of student labor, alleging that local Chinese governments have in some cases forced school to sent their students to Foxconn for internships even when the work is completely outside of their field of study.

Apple's high-profile presence and Foxconn's role as its largest manufacturing partner have cast the two firms into the spotlight over the issue of worker rights and factory conditions. The issues are of course not unique to the two companies, although Apple's public statements and attempts transparency have also contributed to the focused attention.

Yesterday, we noted that the music component of iTunes in the Cloud was rolling out to Japanese users, allowing them to freely download any music content previously purchased from the iTunes Store. But as now summarized by 9to5Mac, various reports in the Japanese media reveal that the additions have been much more extensive and have brought Apple's Japanese iTunes Store offerings nearly on par with most of the company's other major markets.

Highlighting some of the changes, Apple has posted a What's New page [Google translation] for iTunes on its Japanese site. The new additions include:

- 3G downloads: Music downloads from iOS devices had previously been restricted to Wi-Fi only, but users can now access content over 3G networks.

- iTunes Plus: The Japanese iTunes Store now supports the DRM-free 256 kbps iTunes Plus format, up from the previous 128 kbps versions carrying usage restrictions. Labels will need to upgrade their content to the new standard, so it may take some time for all music to become available in iTunes Plus format.

- Ringtones: Music ringtones are now available for purchase in the Japanese iTunes Store.

- Mastered for iTunes: Rolling out on a worldwide basis, Apple is now featuring songs and albums that have been specifically mastered for the iTunes Store to provide the best sound quality for the format.

- Complete My Album: Users who previously purchased individual tracks from an album can now purchase the entire album for a discounted price based on a credit for their individual-track purchases.

As for iTunes Match, Apple's subscription service currently available in 37 countries that allows users to either match or upload their entire music libraries regardless of source for access from any iCloud-enabled device, the company is reportedly planning to bring the program to Japan during the second half of 2012.

While Proview has had some success in its battle against Apple's use of the "iPad" trademark in China with minor court decisions against local retailers, the two companies are now going directly head-to-head in a higher-profile case underway in Shanghai. There has been no decision in the case yet, but lawyers for both sides spent four hours today laying out their evidence for the presiding judge. Reuters notes that Apple has gone on the offensive by citing the impact on the Chinese economy if iPad sales were to be halted, given the iPad's massive popularity and Proview's current lack of any product offering under that name.

"Proview has no product, no markets, no customers and no suppliers. It has nothing," Hu Jinnan, a partner at Guangdong Shendadi law firm, which is representing Apple in the case, told the court.

"Apple has huge sales in China. Its fans line up to buy Apple products. The ban, if executed, would not only hurt Apple sales but it would also hurt China's national interest."

Apple's tactics of highlighting the economic impact of the iPad and calling into question the validity of Proview's trademark given a lack of physical product using the name are side arguments to its primary claims, which hold that Proview agreed to transfer the rights to an Apple-held company in late 2009 and has failed to uphold its part of the deal.

A Hong Kong court sided with Apple last year, ruling that Proview and its subsidiaries had colluded to extort significant sums of money from Apple in refusing to hand over the Chinese rights to the trademark. But Apple needs to convince courts in mainland China to adopt the same view as it seeks to thwart Proview's attempts at halting iPad sales and its requests for as much as $2 billion in compensation. Proview has argued that the Hong Kong ruling is inadmissible in Chinese courts, although Apple could presumably submit the same primary evidence to the Chinese court that it did in the Hong Kong case, seeking to convince the Chinese judge to independently come to the same conclusion.