An administrative law judge ruled on Friday that Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox doesn’t infringe on wireless patents owned by Motorola Mobility, another in a series of legal decisions that could quiet patent litigation surrounding popular consumer electronic devices. The International Trade Commission judge determined the technology Microsoft uses for wireless communication with the Xbox doesn’t infringed on a Motorola Mobility patent for wireless connectivity. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreRichard Kerris, who has been helping recruit developers for Nokia, has left the Finnish phone maker to set up his own consulting firm. After spending the bulk of his career pitching developers on the benefits of one particular platform, Kerris says he wants to help developers navigate all the competing choices. Kerris, who previously worked at Apple and HP/Palm , was at Nokia for a year and a half helping the company woo developers to Windows Phone. In an interview, Kerris said he is putting together a small team including a technologist and a well-known marketer to start the firm. “Our goal is to make it a small boutique, but a prestigious company,” Kerris told AllThingsD . The new consulting firm will work to help both established companies and startups to create a coherent mobile strategy. Kerris said many entertainers, artists and brands have developed a mobile app, gotten some downloads but then seen their mobile efforts fizzle.
Read MoreIn case you haven’t been hammering the “refresh” button on AllThingsD.com this week, here’s a sampling of what you may have missed — our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 11: 1.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough? 2.) How Apple Gets All the Good Apps 3.) Telling Employees He Hasn’t “Walked the Talk,” Cisco’s John Chambers Leans In on Women in the Workplace Issue 4.) LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M [and here's what they could do with Pulse] 5.) How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll 6.) Crowdfunding for a Cause: Nonprofits Can Now Hold Fundraisers on Crowdtilt 7.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud 8.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job 9.) Nokia: A Microsoft Surface Phone Could Screw Us 10.) Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company [Update: and he's now joined Disney's online parks division ] For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Read MoreNintendo’s Wii U isn’t proving to be much of a successor to the 100-million-selling Wii. New metrics from NPD suggest that sales of the console continue to disappoint. The market researcher said Friday that Wii U shipments rose over 40 percent month over month in February — encouraging news were it not for the poor shipment number from which they rose. Wii U shipments are believed to be as low as 57,000 units during January. In other words, Nintendo’s Wii U shipments for the month of February were somewhere in the mid-60,000s . For a console that debuted just a few months ago, that’s just plain lousy. Consider this: Microsoft shipped 302,000 Xbox consoles during the same period.
Read MoreWe’re coming up on the third anniversary of Apple’s release of the iPad, and looking back, one of the bigger surprises about it has been its strength in the enterprise. As CEO Tim Cook points out nearly every time he speaks in public, most companies in the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad for use by their employees. And numerous enterprise software companies, among them SAP and Oracle. And numerous cloud software companies — Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite, to name only three — all support it. But is that a permanent state of affairs? There is at least one analyst who has decided that it isn’t. Patrick Moorhead — a former executive with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices who now runs his own research shop called Moor Insights and Strategy — has published a new white paper arguing that if ever there was a moment when the iPad’s dominance in the enterprise might face a challenge, it’s now. Moorhead bases his argument — one that is admittedly hard to swallow, given the current state of play — on a few comparisons of the iPad to the Dell Latitude 10, Hewlett-Packard’s ElitePad 900, and the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, all of which run Windows 8. (Hold on, Apple fanboys, you’re going to hate this.) First, the three Windows tablets have user-replaceable batteries, and can support extended-life batteries, giving them a longer useful battery life versus the iPad’s 10 hours. Second, they’re all more readily expandable than the iPad, boasting more ports and connectors and memory-card slots. Finally — and this is probably the most important factor — they all natively support the many management tools and security services that come with Windows machines in the enterprise, things like credential managers, VPN clients, BitLocker, Active Directory and scads of other things that IT managers are already used to dealing with in their Windows-centric offices. “Once iPads are secured and deployed, they need to be managed,” Moorhead writes. “For PCs, most enterprises have already adopted Microsoft’s SCCM … Windows InTune or another tool they’ve been using for years. Anything additional for use with iPads adds investigation and research time, test, training and deployment resources.” Do CIOs and IT managers like it when new things support their existing infrastructure? Sure they do. But their opinions are less relevant these days. Don’t forget the entire BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend that has rocked the enterprise in the last three years, and seems almost entirely created for the iPad. Recent research has found that at least 81 percent of consumers use their own devices at work .
Read MoreAndy Rubin is a brilliant visionary and a fierce executer, and he may have more acts up his sleeve. But, at a time when mobile is increasingly big business at Google, the father of Android is no longer at its helm. Google CEO Larry Page has substituted a grounded and effective operator, Sundar Pichai, for the independent Rubin. It was certainly a sudden move. Rubin had been confirmed to speak at our D11 conference in May; you don’t do that when you’re easing your way out. In the time between giving wide-ranging comments on Google’s plans two weeks ago and dropping out of a speaking slot at SXSW this past weekend, something changed. But that doesn’t mean Rubin wasn’t ready to move on; as Android grew, he had been frustrated with the large-scale operational work, and wanted to return to return to passion projects in robotics and home automation, said sources close to Rubin. In their explanations of the move, both Rubin and Page referred Rubin’s desire to “start a new chapter at Google,” with Rubin saying he is “an entrepreneur at heart.” Though there’s much speculation that he might join Google’s “moonshot” group Google X, our sources said that was not necessarily the case. Android — which began life as an independent company Rubin co-founded in 2003 — is now a massive and growing force in mobile. Sure, some might grumble about the many forks and flavors, but the software powers more than 750 million devices from scores of different hardware makers. Android accounted for 70 percent of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC . That’s compared to Google’s other operating system — Chrome OS, which along with Google Apps and the Chrome browser is one of Pichai’s main projects. Chrome OS and Chromebooks have yet to catch on with mass consumers, with limited success in the education vertical so far. Putting Pichai in charge of the far more successful Android seems a way for Page to ease redundancy and friction, a move that many consider long overdue.
Read MoreIs Samsung’s interest in Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 on the level, or is it a ploy intended to slow the platform’s market penetration? Boutique research house Detwiler Fenton believes it may be the latter, a concerted effort by Samsung to hamstring Windows Phone 8 as it ramps up development of its own Tizen mobile OS. If that all sounds a bit too evil-genius for the smartphone industry, consider this. Samsung’s Windows Phone road map is not elaborate by any means. The Ativ Odyssey, the company’s first Windows Phone handset, is a bland offering by any metric, and one that’s not doing particularly well in the free-with-contract market for which it was intended. Detwiler Fenton analyst Jeff Johnston figures it’s claimed barely any sales share at Verizon. And, interestingly, Samsung has made no effort whatsoever to boost sales. Which is all a bit odd. One could argue that if Samsung were truly committed to Windows Phone 8, it would be out in the market pushing the Ativ Odyssey, and working hard to flesh out a full portfolio of devices based on the platform. But according to Detwiler Fenton, it’s not. And for a good reason, and an obvious one too. Samsung doesn’t particularly want to see Windows Phone 8 succeed. It would much rather have Tizen, the Linux-based mobile platform it’s developing with Intel, become the third big mobile OS after iOS and Android. “Our checks indicate that Samsung may be intentionally gobbling up Microsoft’s smartphone resources as a strategic move to impede the adoption of Windows Phone 8,” Johnston theorizes. “While Samsung insists on receiving extensive engineering support (which they are getting) from Microsoft, there is no evidence that Samsung has any interest in seeing the Windows Phone platform succeed.” End result: Microsoft funnels Windows Phone 8 resources that could be put to better use at other OEMs to a “strategic partner” that’s basically tying its shoelaces together. Muahahahaha … Does that seem a bit of a stretch
Read MoreJonas Daehnert No one knows for sure yet if Microsoft is developing its own Windows 8 smartphone, but some of the company’s handset manufacturers clearly fear that it might. One in particular: Nokia. Nokia bet the farm on Windows Phone back in 2011, committing to a broad partnership under which Microsoft’s mobile OS would be its primary smartphone strategy. Two years later, it continues to struggle toward what has so far been an elusive recovery. So it’s understandable that the Finnish handset maker might worry that Microsoft’s foray into the tablet world with Surface might herald a similar “exploratory” jaunt into the smartphone market. And, according to Nokia’s latest 6-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that is a very real fear. Among the multitude of Microsoft-related uncertainties listed in the “Risk Factors” portion of Nokia’s 20-F is this one, helpfully flagged by Business Insider : “Microsoft may make strategic decisions or changes that may be detrimental to us. For example, in addition to the Surface tablet, Microsoft may broaden its strategy to sell other mobile devices under its own brand, including smartphones
Read MoreThere appear to be some growing pains for Microsoft with its new Outlook.com email service . Users of the service , which left beta last month, have been getting error messages since earlier Tuesday. “Sorry, there seems to be a problem with Outlook right now,” reads the error message being seen by some AllThingsD readers, as well a number of folks on Twitter. Microsoft’s message goes on to say “We’re having a problem accessing email. You might not be able to see all your email messages. We’re working to restore service right now.” Joe Cassara, of Miami, said he has been seeing the errors since 10 pm ET on his consumer Outlook.com account, though he has had no problems with a separate Office 365 hosted account. Microsoft said on the site that it is working on the problem, and promised an update within a couple of hours. A Microsoft representative was not immediately available for comment. Microsoft has signed up 60 million people for the service, which is replacing its venerable Hotmail as the company’s Web-based email product. Update: Microsoft told AllThingsD that it is working to restore access to both Hotmail and Outlook.com users. “Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting customers’ access to Hotmail and Outlook.com, and we are working to restore full access to the service as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement. “For the latest information, we encourage people to visit the Hotmail and Outlook.com status page .”
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