HTC One X Phone Held by Customs Due to ITC Ruling 101
zacharye writes, quoting BGR: "The launch of Sprint's flagship EVO 4G LTE has been delayed indefinitely and supply of AT&T's flagship HTC One X will be constrained as a result of ongoing patent disputes between HTC and Apple. HTC confirmed in a statement emailed to BGR on Tuesday evening that shipments of its new EVO 4G LTE and One X smartphones have been held up by United States Customs as part of an International Trade Commission investigation. Before the phones can clear Customs, the ITC will need to determine that HTC's new handsets are in compliance with an earlier ruling..."
Re:Google needs to stop this (Score:4, Informative)
What's Motorola got to do with this? This whole issue is because Apple is trying to screw HTC into the ground over patents.
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I explained it in the post.. This is actually Google using Apple as a proxy company to sue and destroy other Android manufacturers.
That's quite the imagination you have there. It's almost as creative as all your sock puppet user names.
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I explained it in the post.. This is actually Google using Apple as a proxy company to sue and destroy other Android manufacturers.
That's quite the imagination you have there. It's almost as creative as all your sock puppet user names.
Especially considering the apple vs HTC lawsuit predates the Google acquisition of Motorola mobility by months/years...
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Ugg, I know you mean well and all but I never would have had to have seen that drivel if you hadn't responded :(
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So Google's using their biggest rival in the market to kill a company that distributes phones with a Google-sourced OS.
That's like removing the wings from a plane to make it fly better.
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So Google wins because Apple crushes Android.
[DOES NOT COMPUTE]
*brain explodes*
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*wishes for edit button*
Just want to clarify, I'm not on whatever AngryOldGuy is on. The only drug I need is life. That, and videogames.
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I want the same drugs you are taking, dude. Just not that much :-)
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>>>Why anyone still uses Android, I don't know - maybe it would be good time to switch to proper Linux-based mobile OS like MeeGo.
Do they sell them on my VirginMobile provider?
>>>Or they could go with Windows Phone 7 :-o
I'd rather use open-source Android.
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Windows Phone 7's not bad actually, though I understand why most /.ers are staying away from it ;)
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I'd stay away from it because it has "Microsoft" and "Windows" in the name. I simply don't like the Windows Way. I don't want an OS or program to be friendly, I want it to be obediant. I want it to do what I want it to do and I want it to do it like I want, not how some developer wants. I don't want shiny if it means less workable.
Too bad they don't put the people who did Excel on their Windows team, Excel is actually the best spreadsheet out there.
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Fuck off, bonch.
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What the hell are you babbling about? You old coot...
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I'll give you credit for coming up with one of the more amusing conspiracy theories I've heard recently.
Re:Boycott Apple (Score:5, Funny)
Please do not think that a massive intake of cash by the lawyers in this case doesnt lead to quite a bit of cocaine purchasing power. Thats right kids, a dollar spent on apple products buys at least 10 cents of cocaine.
can't do it (Score:4, Funny)
I would boycott Apple, but they are preventing us from buying Android phones.
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Having been picked on at the start, Apple has become one of the biggest bullies on the block. It's as if the Ugly Duckling rather than go swanning (heh) around saying "Look how pretty I am" decided "Right, now I'm 4x the size of those bastards who picked on me. Time for some payback" and went on a revenge spree.
This is one of those very rare times were I want to see some hacker group take Apple down. Certainly some "Anonymous" guy was looking forward to his new OneX.
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And trust me, if I was trolling you would know about it.
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Apple has always been a bully. From "Look and Feel" lawsuits, to creating then killing clone machines, and now patent trolling...
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They can't do this so easy though as I'm sure that Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and Google combined have more patents than Apple. Wait until they all respond in kind. Then no one wins but the lawyers. It's MADD. Is Apple nuts?
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I'm sure that Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and Google combined have more patents than Apple.
Actually... [tinypic.com]
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I like you data, and I know this off subject but since FaceBook is valued so highly, you would think they would have a few more patents. They would have to earn $2 or $3 trillion in the next few years to even match the ROI of Google let alone Microsoft or Apple. "Big Bad" Microsoft comes to mind. If you would have invested in just a few shares in 1986 your increase would have been somewhere around 36,000% give or take 2,000% depending upon where you get you figures from. Apple may be overvalued because they
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Apple already destroyed the competition by having a superior product. Symbian, Microsoft and Blackberry phones began a steep decline after the iPhone was introduced, and before any lawsuits. In all markets where there is no legal restriction to selling competing tablets, the iPad still rules.
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They did win on quality and consumer demand. They were 25% of the US smartphone market within two and a half years of release (one new vendor on one carrier vs. multiple established vendors on all carriers), and wouldn't file their first offensive iPhone lawsuit for another couple months.
I do see a difference. Microsoft threatened HTC and others with a lawsuit if they didn't pay because Microsoft was on the botto
Zombie Steve attacks Android (Score:1)
Did I get the title right?
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"It's clear that Apple is an evil company, bent on destroying its competition through incessant lawsuits."
Do you know of any publicly held companies that aren't even and bent on destroying their competition using all means available including but limited to incessant lawsuits?
Re:Boycott Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know of any publicly held companies that aren't even and bent on destroying their competition using all means available including but limited to incessant lawsuits?
You can't be serious.
The vast majority of publicly held companies go about their business without trying to kill off the competition.
Doing so is a costly distraction, which seldom ever succeeds. Its far more often found that big companies form
trade associations and collude than go after each other with daggers. Having competition is very useful.
Not having competition simply invites regulation. That's why MacDonalds gets along with Burger King,
AT&T and Verizon share tower space, Union Pacific and Burlington Pacific and Santa Fe share tracks, Bayer
cross licenses with Pfizer.
Your assumption that all publicly traded companies are in a death struggle suggests a hopelessly paranoid
view of corporations that seems to be in vogue today.
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I am perfectly serious.
Companies make deals with companies all the time, so what. Take Apple (sic) and Samsung for instance. Samsung is a primary vendor of product to Apple and yet they have lawsuits going back and forth constantly.
Companies of all sizes uses lawsuits to delay or stop their competitors all the time. Larger companies with deeper pockets will often sue individuals or smaller companies with smaller pockets with annoying and perhaps not winnable lawsuits to scare them into line.
Corporations
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Wait, wait wait...moving goalpost sighted.
Giving all money away? Where did that come from? How is that possibly germane?
Corporations have far more than one goal in mind, and making money is at bes number two or three on the list.
If ALL that mattered was making money, Pfizer would stop wasting money making Viagra and start building smartphones or
opening Casinos in Vegas.
BNSF does not try to run UP or CN out of business.
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Giving away all profits would show some selflessness, would indicate something other than a concern for the bottom line. It's something that even rich humans do on occasion but it is not something that is even imaginable for a corporation.
Consider what happens to company executives who don't make maximum profit for their company. They're fired.
Making money is always the primary concern if not the only real concern. Pfizer's core business is drugs of course they're not going to branch out into cell phones
Yes, because it totally looks like an iphone (Score:3, Funny)
I could even mistake the HTC logo at the top, and the bottom row of hardware buttons for an early ipad. Totally.
Re:Yes, because it totally looks like an iphone (Score:5, Funny)
ROUND
CORNERS
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I know you're trolling, but actually, Apple's lawsuit against HTC is over certain software patents related to URL handling and so on, not what the phone looks like. It's even thinner ice than a design patent suit.
Either way, it's amusing to see the "zomg Apple is evil!" comments on this story contrasted with the "haha good on Samsung, totally legit!" when the reverse was the case in Germany and Apple had to pull products.
In my opinion it's all just getting ridiculous, with some of these suits hinging on the
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I suppose that depends what you consider the opening salvo to be? Nokia vs Apple? Samsung vs Apple? HTC vs Apple? Microsoft vs Google? Motorola vs Apple?
So did HTC (Score:2)
sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?
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sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?
Inasmuch as the act of "selling a phone better than the iPhone outside of Apple's release schedule" seems to be enough to get your phone's sales stopped by Apple these days, I suppose the answer is technically "yes".
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Why not? If Apple's claims are quashed, Sprint sells the phones as normal. If not, HTC gets them back and refunds Sprint.
Actually, HTC has already removed the offending features [bgr.com].
Re:So did HTC (Score:5, Informative)
sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?
Actually MILLIONS already entered the country and were sold by AT&T and independent retailers. Only when this phone started taking
serious sales away from Apple did they start complaining.
HTC has long ago removed the offending patent item [bgr.com]. (And Apple ultimately lost on all other claims in this particular suit.) A single item in the '694 patent [google.com] was upheld, namely having a url sent in a text message be treated as a real url and launching the browser when tapped. (My ancient Razr feature phone did that - sans the tapping part).
FUUUUUCK (Score:1)
Step 2 discovered... (Score:1)
Step 1: Create mediocre, over-priced smart phone to leverage absurdly loyal fan-base, using components from popular MP3 player.
Step 2: Claim to have invented every aspect of smart phone technology, and sue into oblivion anyone who dares to threaten your market share by creating superior products.
Step 3: Profit.
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You do realize that most buyers were not Apple fans, right? In fact, the term "halo effect" was coined in this context to describe people who became Apple fans because of buying iPhones, making them more likely to buy Apple computers.
There was pretty much no hardware or software in common with the iPod of the time when the iPhone was released.
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Ah, only on slashdot can someone with a dissenting opinion, laid out in similar style to the post its replying to be classified as a paid astroturf.
I assume you're not going to accuse the GGP post of being an anti-Apple shill?
Didn't think so.
Either way, the assertion that the iPhone only sold to "absurdly loyal fans" is disproved by simple numbers - it has sold in far greater numbers than the total number of Apple Mac computers that exist, and continues to do so. Far more than could be attributed to the "ab
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Fact: Most original iPhone buyers were not current Apple fans, or even product owners. Apple had $1.2 billion in yearly sales in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe before the iPhone. The iPhone's release drove that up to $22 billion the next year.
Halo effect was coined: You need to understand the definition of context, as in the how the term "halo effect" was used in this context.
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Um......no.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_ [osnews.com]
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Do I have the timeline wrong here?
Apple begins working on iPhone in 2005
Google buys Android in 2005
Apple announces iPhone in January 2007
May 2007, Blackberry-like Android prototypes are available for internal use (Horowitz says he's been using his for six months). This phone looks like the phone in the first SDK phone emulators.
Apple releases iPhone June 2007
Sometime before November 2007, an obviously unfinished full-screen Android device with very limited touch capabilities is ready for a demonstration. No
Patent In Question? (Score:4, Informative)
Can't find any info yet on the patent in question, but Apple had won a patent ruling back in December. HTC was suppose to resolve it to avoid an import ban. Here are the details.
If this is still the issue, thank god that the courts are there to protect inventors of such important magnitude. It's horrible to think that someone who could come up with the idea of parsing a phone number would not be adequately compensated. I can't imagine how much R&D Apple has spent in the process. An import ban is the only appropriate resolution.
BTW, in this legal case, Apple had sued for 10 separate patents. Out of the 10, this is the only one that the courts upheld. I can't imagine what the other 9 were like.
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The patent was filed in 1996. The C2 wiki [c2.com] has been doing this since 1995. Camel case words are automatically converted to hyperlinks. (And coincidentally, the next Slashdot story is an interview with its inventor, Ward Cunningham.) Shortly afterwards, I copied the idea in my company's issue tracking system. Identifiers like "Q1234" were automatically converted to hyperlinks to the page describing the issue.
I know Apple's patent isn't exactly the same thing, but once you've had the idea of recognising
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Yep. Other sources suggested that this is the relevant patent.
OMG (Score:2)
I just realised my VoIP system is infringing on this patent too, you know parsing the data it is getting and then redirecting calls appropriately based on the structure of the number it receives.
Actually Apple should call AT&T. I believe they've been doing something similar since the second world war. That's a lot of royalties to collect. Bonus points for getting AT&T banned in America.
Worry about the old phones (Score:2)
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Pretty sure you don't understand their business model.
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If you're pissing off your customers, your business model is pretty damned weak.
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Old customers, not new customers.
HTC doesn't make any money if you have the latest & greatest version of Android.
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The problem with the ICS upgrades for these phones is that there are no ICS-compatible binary drivers available for the radios on them, and no hardware vendors (to my knowledge) release the source code for their radio drivers. So until an official ICS build is released by the manufacturer that the drivers can be extracted from, it'll be impossible to get ICS running on them. So it's not just a matter of "Do your ICS upgrade yourself".
I haven't personally done any kernel development, so I may be oversimpli
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So you demand continous free software upgrades from every hardware vendor you buy stuff from?
HTC provides rooting methods for all their phones since the last 2 years. Do your ICS upgrade yourself and stop making off-topic posts
Well, there's the rub. Android is meant to be a decent competitor to iOS (and it is) but the sort of crap foisted on the user base by handset makers who simply abandon the old models without providing an upgrade path to the newer versions of Android only takes away from that.
It's likely the main reason that such a tiny percentage of Android handsets are running ICS (compared to a large proportion of iOS devices being at the most current main release [iOS 5] of that operating system, even if they're not all
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Well, there's the rub. Android is meant to be a decent competitor to iOS (and it is) but the sort of crap foisted on the user base by handset makers who simply abandon the old models without providing an upgrade path to the newer versions of Android only takes away from that.
Android fragmentation? Blame Microsoft. Seriously. As evidenced in the B&N ordeal, MS's Linux Extortion agreement stipulations require the phone manufacturers re-up the ante and pay more for each version of Android the MFGs push out on a device. THIS is why older hardware is lagging behind. Not that they don't want to push out newer OS updates, but that they have to pay the MS Tax each time they do so. I mean, the hardware's not THAT different on new models, the differences are minimal in the sof
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It sucks that HTC and/or T-Mobile aren't providing us with an official ICS ROM, but when you buy a phone you are buying that
It's always nice to see companies compete (Score:1)
Woo-hoo! The patent scam company wins again! (Score:2)
Apple zealots everywhere are cheering. Amazing how much other companies allow Apple to get away with.
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Well, I guess it's the Apple Zealots turn, after all the Android Zealots were cheering after Apple's handsets were held back from sale in Germany. It's not really a case of "other companies allowing" Apple to get away with things - that would be the legal system.
Personally I think it's all just getting stupid - most of these patent suits are bullshit, on both sides.
As a side note (Score:3)
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The sprint pre-order required payment up front... sadly. I was about to do this until I saw I had to pay, then wait on the phone. Thankfully, my logical side asked me to wait.
Worst pre-order *ever*. -Comic book guy
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Are you sure of that? Granted, I've never done a pre-order with them... but every encounter I have had with Sprint's customer service has been excellent. Maybe you could try having them switch you over to the Galaxy Nexus? I just got two - one for me and one for the wife - and we love them.