Apple offers Phone 5S owners big penises

The marketing team at Apple appears to have taken a page from spam which promises men large endowments if they buy their products.

The latest advert for the Apple iPhone Phone 5S has a soundtrack from a popular beat combo called the Pixies crooning a number called Gigantic.

Obviously, the people at Apple thought "gigantic" is exactly the sort of message it wanted to get across --- after all it does have a bigger screen, sort of.

However they should have looked at what the lyrics were really about before paying for the licence to use it on their adverts.

The song is all about a woman's observation of an attractive black man making love to another woman, culminating in the chorus: 'Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic... A big, big love.'"

In otherwords, it is about how a bloke with a large wang is a good thing. When you know this the advert takes on a completely new meaning. It is about associating your phone with getting a big dick, rather than just a big dick actually owning one, which is closer to the reality.

But what Apple has failed to realise is that when it comes to comparing size, its latest effort is not really that big in comparison to its rivals. So while it is bragging about the size of its screen it does so knowing that there are people out there which much bigger offerings which can make customers' eyes water.

Then we would have thought that a large number of its customers are women who would not really want to be waving a penis extension about. All up, this is probably another own goal from Apple.

by Nick Farrell via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Apple loses out to Android, Windows

A report from market research company IDC said that more than three quarters of Western government employees are abandoning Apple and Blackberry.



The European government sector was heavily dependent on Blackberry use in the past, but only 27 percent use the device to connect with their enterprises.



The winners are smartphones based using either the Android or the Microsoft Windows operating system, said IDC.



IDC also said that over 60 percent of government outfits are developing mobile applications, including financial apps.



Massimiliano Claps, a research director at IDC EMEA, said that government CIOs need to support investments in back office apps, workflow automation and analytics.

by A staff writer via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Apple wants silly money from Samsung

Jobs' Mob's reality distortion field has been a major reason why it could not reach an agreement with Samsung.

Apple is in court now demanding the court aid it getting money for five patents connected to smartphones out of Samsung. Samsung has apparently attempted to negotiate, but Apple said no.

The reason is that Jobs' Mob has a completely inflated view of what these five patents are worth. The court was told that it wants $2.2 billion in damages. Samsung thinks that $6 million is a fair enough price for the patents.

Apple claims it needs all that cash to compensate for the fact Samsung's alleged theft of its ideas happened during a time where the smartphone market experienced extremely rapid expansion.

Christopher Vellturo, who is an economist and Apple's damages expert, told a US District Court that patent infringement would encompass over 37 million smartphones and tablets that were sold by Samsung in the US from August 2011 to the end of last year, where the total revenue generated by those devices remains undisclosed because it is deemed as "confidential".

Vellturo, who is being paid $700 per hour by Apple for his work on the case, said that the $2.2 billion damages claim is justified due to the length of the infringement. For that amount of money I would say anything Apple wanted, hell I would even claim to be an Apple fan boy. Sure enough Vellturo said that the smartphone market was "in a profound state of change and growth because so many people are coming in and buying phones" so the infringement was greater.

The patents are the "slide-to-unlock" function that takes the phone from the lock screen to home screen; universal search, which pulls in results from the phone and the Internet; the ability to sync data in the background; automatic word correction as a user types; and contextual links that attach a menu to items such as phone numbers, email addresses and postal addresses.

Samsung's brief Bill Price spent almost two hours trying to find holes in Hauser's arguments. He said that the study looked solely at features and discounted whether or not it was Samsung or the user's allegiance to Android.

This is the second patent infringement case between the two phone makers. In an earlier case, which has been appealed, two juries have ordered Samsung to pay Apple a total of $929 million for infringement of different patents in different phones.

Patent expert Florian Mueller calls Apple's claims crazy and says that the judge should have told the jury that the cash Apple was demanding was completely insane.

He said that the case will now focus on some out-of-this-world numbers "numbers that are totally detached from the rates at which Apple and others in the industry license patents, and in the case of the '647 patent, 20 times higher than Apple's own damages claim against Google's Motorola Mobility".

by Nick Farrell via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Blackberry beats chipmaker in court

Troubled Canadian mobile phone maker Blackberry has managed to convince a jury that it did not nick three ideas belonging to Dutch semiconductor company NXP.

NXP sued BlackBerry in April 2012 claiming that versions of the BlackBerry phone and PlayBook tablet infringed patents related to the design, data transmission and other features of those devices.

Originally the case centred on six patents, but NXP later dropped its claims related to three of them. It wanted an arm and a leg for the infringement including triple damages.

The case was heard in Florida and jurors needed less than a day of deliberations before ruling in BlackBerry's favour.

NXP said it is disappointed with the verdict and is "investigating all options for appeal".

NXP was spun off from Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV in 2006. It is certainly not a patent troll as it makes products based on "products with no big chip in the middle".

These are semiconductors used in a wide range of "smart" automotive, identification, wireless infrastructure, lighting, industrial, mobile, consumer and computing applications.

by Nick Farrell via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Vodafone buys Ono

British phone company Vodafone has written a $10.03 billion cheque to buy the Spanish cable outfit Ono.

We are not sure, but believe that this could be part of a cunning plan to get the Beatles back together, after all Ono and an ability to raise the dead was all that stood in the way of getting the world’s most famous boy band into the recording studio.

Analysts that are more serious tell us that this is just the latest move by the British group to acquire fixed-line assets to rebuild its European operations.

Vodafone said that the move would also save it a lot of dosh because it can achieve cost and capital expenditure savings of approximately 240 million euro, before integration costs after four years.

This is Vodafone's third buy of a European fixed-broadband asset in two years as the company seeks to improve its networks and shore up its European businesses after they were hit by fierce competition, the recession and regulatory cuts.

Vodafone said that it will invest in its networks, and acquire assets where necessary, after selling its US arm for $130 billion last year.

The price of Ono is high. In fact, it is 10.4 times the group's operating free cash flow, but then that is more or less how much a cable company is going for in the European cable and telecoms sector, so analysts are not concerned.

by A staff writer via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Mozilla to trash smartphone market

At Mobile World Congress 2014, Mozilla, maker of Google-financed browsers, announced that its mobile OS version known now as FireFox OS will be the foundation for several new low-cost phones that are designed for consumption in markets with low smartphone penetration, writes our correspondent, Tom Henderson.



Once known as Boot-to-Gecko, FireFox OS is especially easy to "skin" for mobiles network operators as HTML5 apps will live atop the Gecko layer, allowing simple customizations and app mixtures to be conjured. Complete skins of the OS as a customization for revenue streams, user applications, and perhaps actual phone calls, are perceived to popular, and FireFox supplies these with out usury and fealty paid to Google, or even Microsoft.



Spreadtrum, a Chinese chipset developer, has built a chipset featuring a System-on-a-Chip reference design for FireFox OS using ARM designs capable of TD-LTE/TD-SCDMA/EDGE/GPRS and lowly GSM protocols. This reference design ostensibly permits phone makers to target retail prices as low as $25 for smartphone designs.



Such thinking flies in the face of business plans from numerous smartphone makers and mobile OS developers salivating revenues in the remaining smartphone markets, identified as rice farmers in Asia, Eastern Bloc ex-slaves to socialism, and of course, the downtrodden whose national carriers serviced their markets with ancient flip phones, having no data infrastructure for backhaul of important videos, or a way to charge for them.



This seeming commoditisation of smartphones by Mozilla is unlikely to be the only OS and requisite chipset entrant to target the "low-end" of smartphones and mobiles as Microsoft, Blackberry, and others re-tool to garner the tougher, high-tree fruits of the marketplace.

by A staff writer via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

US mobile data doubles

US people cannot get enough of their mobile phones and consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.

In a report Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, said that worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year.

This figure means that in the US your average bod downloaded the equivalent of 1,200 photos compared with 690 photos he downloaded a month last year.

Sharma thinks that the uptick in data use could be attributed, at least partly, to the widespread coverage of LTE, which is 10 times faster than its predecessor, 3G.

Another reason was the popularity of phones with bigger screens, like the newer Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone, which download bigger images.

There is also the rise of people using tablets to connect to the worldwide wibble on the move.

by Edward Berridge via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines

Argos capitulates in tablet wars

Despite a blitz of publicity at its launch, high store shop Argos has now decked its MyTablet range.



The news, covered in our sister publication ChannelEye earlier this week and first reported by hudluser.com, shows that if you’re going to make an entry into this market, you’d better get it right.



Although we contacted the Argos press office earlier this week to seek confirmation of the news, it has not deigned to give us the time of day – or the time of week.



However, a reader has forwarded us a response from Argos “customer service” which clearly spells out the facts.



“Dear Mr xxx,



“Subject: Catalogue number Bush MyTablet 7 Inch Tablet - Pink (139/4090) and the Bush MyTablet 7 inch Tablet - Silver (139/5769).



“Thank you for your email regarding your product query.



“As previously advise (sic) no further stock of thee items will be received, some stock may still be available in stores across the country however, you would need to find stock at a store you are happy to travel too.



“If you need any further assistance simply reply to this email or call us on 0845 640 2020 and we will be happy to help.



“Regards,



“Helen Green Argos Direct E-Commerce Customer Service Team.”



So that’s that.

by A staff writer via TechEye - Latest Mobile headlines