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Apple sues rival HTC as phone competition rises
Yahoo! News (AP), “Apple sues rival HTC as phone competition rises”
by Rachel Metz
As Apple Inc.’s iPhone faces stiffer competition in the lucrative market for smart phones, the company is going after one of its main rivals with patent lawsuits claiming theft of touch screen technology and other features.
The complaints, which Apple filed Tuesday, cover a slew of models made by Taiwanese phone maker HTC Corp., including the Nexus One, G1 and myTouch 3G — all using the free, rival Android mobile operating software from Google Inc. Non-Android phones include HTC’s Touch series.
But consumers shouldn’t worry about buying or using any of those phones. Patent cases can take months or years to resolve — sometimes longer than the life of these phones — and agreements over licensing and royalty payments often emerge.
Yahoo! News (AP) article continues here.
Steve Jobs to assist with book on his life
The New York Times, “Jobs Is Said to Assist With Book on His Life”
by Brad Stone
A handful of presumptive biographers have, over the years, tried to tell the remarkable story of Steven P. Jobs: the youthful visionary who, after being ousted from Apple, the company he helped to found, triumphantly returned to lead a new era of high-tech innovation.
But those efforts lacked one important ingredient: cooperation from Mr. Jobs himself.
Now Apple’s chief executive is set to collaborate on an authorized biography, to be written by Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, according to two people briefed on the project.
The book, which is in the early planning stages, would cover the entire life of Mr. Jobs, from his youth in the area now known as Silicon Valley through his years at Apple, these people said.
The New York Times article continues here.
Steve Jobs vents on Google and Adobe
Wired, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs”
by John C. Abell
After a big public announcement of the sort Apple had this week for the iPad CEO Steve Jobs often takes time in the day or two afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.
This time, the big topics included Google and Adobe — no surprises there. Google recently unveiled its own Android-powered handset, the Nexus One, whose release Jan. 5 prompted Jobs to perhaps over-react by announcing on the same day that the iTunes store had served up three billion apps and that “… we see no signs of the competition catching up any time soon.” Apple’s billionth iPhone app download was greeted with great fanfare, but the two billionth not so much, so it felt a tad like Jobs was feeling some heat.
And the absence of Adobe Flash support on the iPhone for three years and counting, and now on the iPad, is either celebrated by users as a poke in the eye of one of the web’s most dextrous tools, or the most over-rated and overused crutch for decent design.
Wired article continues here.