The two main market intelligence companies both report that for the first time ever, Apple beat Samsung in global smartphone sales.
The last time Samsung didn’t top the rankings was some 13 years ago, when the top-selling cellphone brand was … Nokia!
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Nokia has announced a new patent cross-license agreement with Apple that replaces the prior deal reached in 2017. The arrangement was set to expire later this year.
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Nokia ended speculation today that its Digital Health division could end up at Google or even Samsung. Instead, the wearable company will be sold to the co-founder of Withings and return to being an independent brand.
Nokia’s ownership of Withings has been incredibly messy. After buying Withings in mid-2016, Nokia sued Apple over unrelated patents which resulted in Withings digital health products being pulled from the Apple Store.
While that dispute has since been resolved, Nokia now says it is reviewing its digital health business altogether. The result could be positive or negative for Withings customers depending on where ownership lands.
As a Withings customer myself, my hope is that Apple buys the digital health product business from Nokia — if only to do the bare minimum to maintain hardware that works with Apple HealthKit.
Nokia has disclosed that Apple made a $2 billion cash payment last quarter as part of the deal to settle patent disputes between the companies. Specific details of the settlement were previously not reported. Nokia has also revealed more information about how Apple and Nokia will work together going forward.
The back-and-forth patent lawsuits between Apple and Nokia could be about to get more interesting. Nokia is seeking access to documents from Samsung’s patent battles with Apple to assist its own case.
Apple sued Nokia last year, claiming that the company had deliberately excluded some patents from an agreement between the two companies, subsequently transferring five of them to a patent troll which unsuccessfully tried to extort $100M from the Cupertino company. Apple seemingly filed the lawsuit in an attempt to head off any further such attempts …
Earlier today, we told you about Apple’s all-new HomeKit accessories webpage where the company lists out a variety of products that are compatible with its HomeKit platform.
While over 100 products across 15 categories can be found on that webpage, one notable exclusion is the Withings Home Plus…
Apple has pulled the Withings line of health care products from its online stores following the recent patent dispute with Nokia. Nokia purchased the Withings line of smart devices earlier this year for around $192 million and has since integrated the company into its smart line of products…
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We reported yesterday that Nokia filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company had violated no fewer than 32 of its patents in every iPhone from the 3GS onward. Just for good measure, the lawsuit also includes every iPad, the Apple Watch and Apple TV.
The WSJ now reports that Nokia was responding to an Apple lawsuit accusing the company of deliberately excluding the 32 patents from an agreement reached between the two companies in 2011, and transferring the patents to third-party companies in order to extort excessive royalties …
Apple versus Samsung isn’t the only legal battle over patent violations to follow now. CNBC reports that Nokia has filed several complaints in a lawsuit against Apple over patent infringement in the United States and Germany…
Ten months after Microsoft wrote-off its Nokia acquisition, the company has now announced that it is effectively out of the consumer phone business. It is cutting 1,850 jobs, and setting aside almost a billion dollars to cover the costs of exiting the business.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced plans to streamline the company’s smartphone hardware business, which will impact up to 1,850 jobs. As a result, the company will record an impairment and restructuring charge of approximately $950 million […]
“We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft.
The company recently saw its market share fall below 1%. While Microsoft is – for now – insistent that it has a future in the corporate smartphone business, the reality seems doubtful …
Nokia announced today plans to purchase Withings, maker of many popular healthcare related accessories and companion apps for iPhones and other mobile devices.
The company said the 170 million Euro purchase would see Withings become part of its Nokia Technologies business and help jump-start its new efforts at Digital Health products.
Strategy Analytics has issued its latest estimates of global mobile phone shipments, and reports that Apple’s market share climbed from 8.2% in Q2 2014 to 10.9% in the same quarter this year. Apple revealed in its latest quarterly earnings that it saw iPhone sales climb 35% year-on-year to 47M units.
The research firm said that Apple’s dramatic growth in iPhone shipments contrasted strongly with an overall industry growth rate of just 2% …
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Windows Phone has not been the greatest success story in the world, and Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia to produce its own handsets looks to have been an even bigger flop. The company today announced that it is writing off $7.6B against the Nokia business – more than it paid for the company in the first place.
Microsoft has also revealed that it will be laying-off 7,800 staff – more than 6% of its workforce – over the next few months, mostly from the Phones business …
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According to a report from Bloomberg, Nokia is targeting Apple as a potential buyer for its maps business. Nokia has recently been trying to sell its HERE Maps division due to it losing revenue. The report claims that Nokia is seeking around $3.2 billion for its maps business. Nokia first bought the mapping assets in 2008 for $8.1 billion.
Apple has been cleared of infringing five wireless patents originally held by Nokia in its iPhones and iPads. The patents were later acquired by a subsidiary of Conversant Intellectual Property Management Inc, which sued Apple for $100M by calculating a per-device license fee. Apple argued that even if it had infringed the patents, which it denied, a fair license fee would be less than $1M.
Reuters reports that a federal jury in Texas took five hours to deliberate yesterday before finding in favor of Apple.
Had Conversant won, it’s possible that the majority of the revenue would have been paid to Microsoft and Nokia. In a complicated chain, Conversant obtained the patents when it acquired a company called Core Wireless, which had in turn bought them from Nokia–which had licensed them to Microsoft.
In its purchase of Core Wireless, Conversant agreed to return two-thirds of any revenue from licensing and litigating the patents back to Microsoft and Nokia, according to the documents. A Microsoft representative on Monday night could not confirm whether that agreement was still in force.
Update: Microsoft has since informed me that “Microsoft no longer has a financial stake in Core Wireless.”
Apple holds the unenviable record of having been sued by more patent trolls than any other company. It has a mixed record of success in these cases, Apple saying last year that it usually won on the merits of the cases it defended, but chose to settle some “for business purposes.”
Apple last month lost a case brought by Smartflash, and was ordered to pay over half a billion dollars in damages. Apple is appealing the award, while Smartflash is extending the proceedings to devices made since the lawsuit was originally filed.
In a separate ongoing patent dispute with Ericsson, the ITC has been asked to block the import of iPhones into the country.
Apple reported the largest profit ever recorded by a public company in the holiday quarter, mostly driven by sales of 74 million iPhones with an average selling price of $687. According to Cannacord, this meant Apple captured 93% of handset smartphone profits. Perhaps more staggering is that it claims Apple dominated on similar levels across the entire of 2014 — with 79% of mobile device profits.
The analyst expects continued growth for the iPhone for the next few users, with an estimated 650 million iPhone users by the end of 2018.
Data from Yahoo-owned analytics company Flurry shows that iPhones and iPads comprised more than half of all mobile device activations between 19th and 25th December, at 51.3% – almost three times as many as second-placed Samsung.
Apple accounted for 51% of the new device activations worldwide Flurry recognized in the week leading up to and including Christmas Day (December 19th – 25th). Samsung held the #2 position with 18% of new device activations, and Microsoft (Nokia) rounded out the top three with 5.8% share for mostly Lumia devices. After the top three manufacturers, the device market becomes increasingly fragmented with only Sony and LG commanding more than one percent share of new activations on Christmas Day.
The company notes that while Chinese companies Xiaomi, Huawei and HTC didn’t reach 1%, this reflects the fact that Christmas is not celebrated in their home market …
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Xiaomi has built its business on copying Apple, so it wasn’t a great surprise when it launched its iPad mini clone, the Mi Pad. It’s slightly more surprising to see post-Microsoft Nokia going down the same route, today launching its N1 tablet which has cloned everything from the curved edges to the speaker grilles at the bottom of the device to the button placement at the top. Even the friggen website looks like it was lifted from the apple.com domain.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJmthxJV5Q]
The Android-powered N1 is Nokia’s first new product since selling its devices and services division to Microsoft last year …
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Earlier this week it was revealed that if you bend your iPhone 6 Plus, it will bend. This shocking news took the world by storm, but left some people wondering if other phones would also flex under pressure. To answer the question, YouTuber Unbox Therapy attempted to repeat his earlier experiment with iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, HTC One M8, newest Moto X, and Nokia Lumia.
After applying roughly the same force to each of these handsets, he discovered that the iPhone 6 Plus was in fact more flexible than the rest. The Moto X ended up coming out top of the pack, with next to no flexibility at all. The 4.7-inch iPhone 6 was also found to be much less “bendy” than the larger model, though it did get a very small curve with enough force.
You can check out the video of all five phones being tested below:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/DIdf99noLJk]
Nokia, like the rest of the smartphone industry, is no stranger to mocking its biggest competitor in ads. Today we get two new spots posted to the company’s YouTube account that highlight the Windows Phone Cortana assistant feature while mocking Apple’s Siri feature in the process.
The first ad called “Lost” highlights Cortana’s ability to automatically remind users when to leave for appointments based of calendar and traffic data. The second spot, titled “Remind Me”, shows Cortana sending reminder notifications associated with texts and calls they are receiving.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/vfozrCjKHus]
Nokia isn’t the only company iPhone bashing today, BlackBerry just wrapped up its Passport launch event where it took time to compare the device directly to the iPhone 6 on stage.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w4Gqt-ljb4]
With just about everyone in the tech industry getting in on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness for ALS (including Apple’s own Tim Cook and Dr. Dre), Samsung decided it would also be an appropriate time to mock the iPhone and others in the process.
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Samsung, together with its lawyers, will have to fork out a little more cash following its loss in its second patent battle with Apple. A court has fined lawyers Quinn Emanuel and Samsung a total of $2M for misusing confidential details of a patent deal struck between Apple and Nokia.
The documents were supplied by Apple to Samsung’s lawyers purely so that it could see that Apple was telling the truth about its patent deals with other companies. The documents were marked “for attorney’s eyes only” and were not to be revealed to Samsung executives …
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Apple has agreed to back a new initiative along with a host of Android manufacturers and all of the major U.S. cellular carriers that would require all smartphones manufactured after July 2015 to come with specific anti-theft features. The program is the latest attempt to prevent theft of smartphones, which some have blamed for increasing crime rates.
To this end, Apple introduced a first-of-its-kind system in iOS 7 that blocks freshly-restored iPhones from being used until the original owner logs in with the Apple ID associated with the device. Today’s agreement between the carriers and handset manufacturers essentially states that all parties will ship this exact type of system on new phones.
Specifically, the required anti-theft measures are broken into four kinds:
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