Apple

Photo: USA Today

According to a court filing discovered by Reuters, Apple and Google’s Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle their ongoing smartphone patent litigation battle against each other. In a statement, the two companies said that this agreement does not include the ability cross license each other’s patents, but rather the promise to “work together in some areas of patent reform.”

The two tech giants have been battling it out over various patents for several years now, both directly and indirectly. It’s important to note, however, that this agreement is solely between Apple, Google, and its Motorola Mobility unit. This does not apply to any lawsuits between Android device manufacturers, such as Samsung and HTC, and Apple. Although theoretically, it would apply to patents owned by Google that device manufacturers are licensing.

A verdict was reached in the latest Apple v Samsung battle just a few weeks ago, with Apple being ruled as the victor, albeit small. The court ruled that Samsung owed Apple $119 million, which is far less than the $2 billion it was seeking.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google just bought the company behind a smartphone app called Word Lens that visually translates text in real life scenarios right on your device using the camera and some behind-the-scenes intelligence.

With Word Lens, we’ve seen the beginnings of what’s possible when we harness the power of mobile devices to “see the world in your language.”

By joining Google, we can incorporate Quest Visual’s technology into Google Translate’s broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future.

As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we’ve made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time while we transition to Google.

We’re looking forward to continuing our work at Google – stay tuned!

The kicker? Word Lens was recently featured rather prominently in Apple’s latest iPhone ad “Powerful” and even listed on Apple’s microsite promoting the film as an app to explore.
Expand
Expanding
Close

An image of an aluminium backplate for what looks like the rumoured, larger, iPad Pro has appeared on Weibo. Although details are unclear, not to mention incredibly sketchy, this looks like an aluminium mockup dummy unit, not an actual iPad part. The image was first spotted by NowhereElse.fr.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Luke Wood, Jimmy Iovine, & Dr. Dre

Just as Apple is expected to close on a deal with Beats Electronics as soon as next week, a new report from The Wrap shares that David Hyman, the founder of music service MOG which Beats purchased, is suing the headphones and streaming music company for at least $20 million plus interest.

The suit claims that, under an incentive plan adopted during Hyman’s tenure, he would be entitled to compensation including 2.5 percent of the company’s “currently outstanding equity interests,” with 1 percent due on the first anniversary of Hyman’s date of employment, and subsequent installments due in subsequent months. The suit also claims that he was promised a grant of 25 percent of the company’s outstanding equity interests following adoption of the incentive plan if the company achieved a fair market value of $500 million or more.

Hyman served as founder and CEO of the MOG music service for seven years until Beats Electronics purchased it for $14 million in May 2012. Hyman stayed on to head the music service that is now Beats Music where he served as CEO for just seven months.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: The glitch may be related with the latest versions of Find My Mac and iTunes, according to testing by The Mac Observer.

Since upgrading to OS X 10.9.3, some users are reporting that their /Users folder is now hidden. This means the folder is no longer visible when looking at the root of the hard drive in the Finder, which is inconvenient for Macs with multiple users installed.

With OS X Lion, Apple took the liberty to hide the Library folder from OS X users. However, it does not seem like hiding the /Users directory is an Apple design decision. Many users are still seeing this folder after updating and the behaviour is consistent. The most likely conclusion is that is simply a bug that slipped through to final release, despite Apple’s new beta testing program. If you are affected by this bug, you can find out how to make your /Users folder visible again after the break …

Expand
Expanding
Close

It is always fun when we get celebrity Apple tips, but those usually revolve around Samsung endorsers using an iPhone. Today we received something a little more interesting.

An Apple tipster sent in an image of Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant with his wife Vanessa today on Apple’s Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California. The pair met with Jony Ive’s team according to the tipster and the scuttlebutt is that the meeting centered around upcoming products. Apple’s campus is clearly recognizable in the background of the photo and the couple can be seen waiting for food. We can’t verify the topic of conversation with Ive but the picture is embedded with a geotag that confirms the photo was taken with an iPhone on Apple’s campus. Kobe’s watch matches a previous publicly available image you can see in the inset…

Expand
Expanding
Close

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today published its annual “Who Has Your Back?” report that rates and compares how major corporations deal with government data requests. The EFF’s ranking of technology company data request transparency is notable because the organization is the “leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.” The report ranks companies based on six categories: requires a warrant for content, tells users about data requests, publishes transparency reports, publishes law enforcement guidelines, fights for users’ privacy in courts, fights for users’ privacy for rights in Congress. This year, Apple received a star for each of the six categories. 

This compares to many other technology companies, including Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, that received stars across the board:

Expand
Expanding
Close

<a href="http://9to5mac.com/2014/05/14/detailed-iphone-6-mockup-compared-to-ipad-air-ipad-mini-iphone-5c-iphone-5s-iphone-4s-and-ipod-touch-video/#more-323188">iPhone 6 physical mockups on the right</a>

United States-based carrier AT&T today officially announced its rollout of voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) calls. The VoLTE rollout comes in tandem with AT&T HD Voice launch, which provides better sounding phone calls. Starting on May 23rd, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin will be the initially supported markets for these features, but AT&T says to expect a more complete rollout as time goes on:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple is preparing to release a new iPhone with a larger screen later this year, and while multiple reports have indicated that the screen will be larger, the exact dimensions of the screen and its resolution have so far been guesswork.

Some industry watchers have speculated that Apple could stretch the iPhone software’s interface and retain the iPhone 5s’s screen resolution of 1136 x 640. This approach would allow all iOS software and App Store apps to function normally on the iPhone 6 without work from developers. The downside of this approach would be that the iPhone 6’s display would fall below Steve Jobs’ somewhat arbitrary 300 pixels per inch definition of ‘Retina’ for a phone.

Just like with the transition to the iPhone 4’s Retina display in 2010 and the transition to the iPhone 5’s taller screen in 2012, Apple is preparing major resolution changes for the iPhone 6 that will require software changes by both Apple and developers, according to people briefed on the specifications of the new device…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Lately, there has been a storm of rumored iPhone 6 images, renders, schematics, and videos. We’ve seen just about everything that the rumor mill has to offer at this point. All of the mockups that have been floating around may not match up with Apple’s official iPhone 6 design, but they are definitely convincing to an extent.

We recently put together a video comparing an iPhone 6 mockup to the iPhone 5s and fifth generation iPod touch, but what about Apple’s other iOS devices? In the video below, we compare this alleged iPhone 6 design to the iPad Air, iPad mini, iPhone 4/4s, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, and iPod touch. Hopefully this massive comparison will put an end to any other questions regarding the rumored iPhone 6 design, but based on the mockup units we’ve obtained the iPhone 6 is going to be a very large device and possibly feature a sharper 1704 x 960 resolution display.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Adam Pash, former lead editor of Lifehacker, reports that Apple has acknowledged a problem we’ve heard reported before: text messages continue to be converted to iMessages and forwarded to an Apple ID even when that ID is no longer in use. This means that any text messages sent from an iPhone are reported as delivered while actually disappearing into the ether.

[The AppleCare rep] explained:

1. This is a problem a lot of people are facing.
2. The engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it.
3. There are no reliable solutions right now — for some people the standard fixes work immediately; many others are in my boat …

Expand
Expanding
Close

iOS 8 is likely to supercharge the functionality of Apple’s iPad with a new split-screen multitasking feature, according to sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development. These people say that the feature will allow iPad users to run and interact with two iPad applications at once. Up until now, each iPad application either developed by Apple or available on the App Store is only usable individually in a full-screen view.

Expand
Expanding
Close