Google launches Chrome for Android

Google has announced the availability of a beta version of its Chrome web browser for the Android platform. The browser is available on handsets and tablets running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, and is downloadable via Android Market in select countries and languages.

However, this version of Chrome will not support Flash, as Adobe is no longer developing the browser plugin for mobile devices following the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

The Chrome for Android browser is available on handsets and tablets running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, and is downloadable via Android Market in select countries and languages. The browser is based on the Chromium open source project, and supports HTML5.

“Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices,” said Sundar Pichai, SVP for Chrome and apps at Google.

However, Mark Doherty, strategic solutions manager at Adobe Systems Doherty recently told Telecoms.com that while HTML5 is certainly one path forward, it will take years to produce widely consistent web standards necessary to support everything required by the creative and publishing industries in HTML.

“Content owners just weren’t that interested in optimizing Flash content for mobile browsers, but they are keen to build applications and so Adobe is supporting that model,” said Doherty.

The Chrome for Android browser has been redesigned from the ground up for mobile devices, and Google’s Pichai said that the development team reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. Users can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if holding a deck of cards in the palm of their hands.

“One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier,” added Pichai.

Google TV has a new interface and new hardware partners

Google has announced that it has brought new hardware manufacturers on board as partners for its IPTV service Google TV.

LG is the biggest name to join the Google TV ecosystem this year and will unveil a new line of Google TV sets running on its own L9 chipset at CES in Las Vegas next week.

“Through Google TV, LG has merged Google’s established Android operating system with LG’s proven 3D and Smart TV technologies, offering consumers a new and enthralling TV experience,” said Havis Kwon, president and CEO of LG.

Chip makers Marvell, from the US, and MediaTek, from Taiwan, have also announced their partnerships with Google and their hardware will power Google TV devices over the coming year. They join Samsung, Sony and Vizio, which will bring Google-TV powered devices to market in 2012.

“Google TV is about bringing new entertainment and innovation from the web to TV and our team along with our partners are pleased to bring more Google TV powered products to more people, across more devices in more countries in 2012,” said Mickey Kim from Google TV’s partnership management team.

Last October, Google launched an update to its Google TV service, which includes a simpler interface and a more “TV-like YouTube experience”, as well as Android Market.

The company claims that since launching the update, it has seen activation rates more than double and it now has more than 150 apps which developers have specifically built for TV.

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The iPhone 4S is the hungriest data device

The typical Apple iPhone 4S user is equivalent to two iPhone 4 users and three iPhone 3G users in terms of data demand, according to a report released Friday.

Network optimisation firm Arieso, reported the findings in a research paper following a similar study carried out by the firm in 2010. The company’s CTO, Michael Flanagan, who briefed telecoms.com on the report expressed some surprise at the headline finding – that the iPhone 4S is the hungriest handset on the market – especially given the rise of Android over the past 12 months.

The study was carried out on the data demands of over 1.1 million distinct subscribers over a single, 24 period in a Tier-1 market with a mixture of urban and suburban morphologies, focusing on popular devices which were represented by at least 1000 subscribers. The iPhone 3G was chosen as a “normalised benchmark,” although the study found that different users and different devices exhibit very different demands on the network.

Android is picking up the pace however, according to the findings, the Google Nexus One by HTC has twice the data calls per subscriber compared to the iPhone 3G. By way of comparison, the iPhone 4S shows 54 per cent more data calls per subscriber than the iPhone 3G. Greater ease of use arguments may apply to both devices here but Flanagan also warns not to discount the operating system and related, potentially excessive, signalling demands of the smartphone on the number of data calls. Something that remains a topic of on-going study by network operators.

The HTC Desire S revealed a dramatic 223per cent increase in uplink data volumes per subscriber compared to the iPhone 3G. Increases in uplink data volumes are largely expected to be due to corresponding increases in user generated content, and the Desire S may be significant in its implementation of higher speed HSPA+ connectivity on both the uplink and downlink.

Data downlink volumes are still rising of course. The iPhone 4S showed an increase of 176 per cent in downlink data volumes over the iPhone 3G, quantifying the importance of the metric for purposes of network planning and optimisation. Flanagan notes that the device appears to unleash data consumption behaviours that have no precedent.

Indeed, following on from the 2010 study, Arieso’s latest analysis reveals that so called ‘extreme’ users are becoming even more extreme, with just one per cent of subscribers now consuming half of all downloaded data. The vast majority of these are dongle users treating their connection as they would fixed line broadband but 33 per cent are smartphone users and the remaining three per cent are tablet users. Usage in these cases tends to be stationary rather than mobile, so Flanagan suggests that these users might be prime targets for femtocells, or in some cases, just getting rid of.

On a related note, Flanagan suggested an application of such data mining, which operators can and should be doing on a regular basis, in helping them recommend devices to customers. “Say a certain customer comes in to upgrade his device to a smartphone and tells you where he spends most of his time. The operator looks on a map and sees the usage profiles for that particular area. The result might mean some devices are more appropriate ones for this person to move towards than others. It’s an informed piece of advice and can be used to manage expectations at the point of sale.”

Telecoms.com is publishing feature length content on customer experience management in the telecoms space in February. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Application stores, now swollen with content, have become daunting, especially for first-time users

Since mid-2008, when Apple first opened the doors of its genre-defining App Store, the concept has swept the mobile industry and become the primary means for consumers to discover content. While there are some who believe the devices space has become a two horse race in terms of platforms, with Apple and Google’s Android as the only runners, the software side of the mobile experience is in a state of flux, and 2012 may still be too early to place confident bets.

There’s no doubt the respective ‘big name’ app stores, those run by Apple and Google, are successful. There are more than 500,000 available apps in the Apple App Store and over 370,000 in the Android Market, while Windows Phone Marketplace, Nokia Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World follow behind at some considerable distance.

There is also a customer base. According to Gartner, smartphone sales jumped yet again during the second quarter of 2011, totalling 25 per cent of all handset sales. Then of course there’s the nascent but not insignificant tablet space. Overall there’s a strong ecosystem in existence, with plenty of opportunity for developers, who create the applications that are the lifeblood of these ecosystems, to flock to the biggest store fronts.

And this is the problem. Application stores, now swollen with content, have become somewhat daunting, especially for the many first-time users migrating to the smartphone space from the feature phone market. For developers, the big risk is getting lost in the crowd, buried beneath dozens of other apps that might be cheaper or similar in nature, offer more novelty value, or whose developers simply got luckier. Moreover, the bigger a store gets, the harder it is to police, and the more likely that a sub-standard or even downright malicious app will make it through the vetting process, damaging the experience on that platform for everyone.

According to Lee Epting, director of content services for Vodafone group, consumers are prioritising quality over quantity: “They’re saying, ‘give me choice but don’t give me too much choice’. It’s a daunting prospect to have to scroll through thousands of apps to find one quality item and then buy it in the hope that it’s ok,” she says.

Vodafone isn’t the first carrier to try and position itself as a filter between the thousands of available applications and the bamboozled consumer.  But it recently went a stage further, with the launch of a branded experience in the Android Market that introduced carrier billing and also opened a separate, curated app store, designed to showcase a selection of apps from multiple platforms and stores, all of which have been tested against Vodafone’s network.

“What we’ve found when we check these apps, is that there’s lots of stuff getting into the Apple App Store that we don’t think Apple would be happy with. We don’t know why, maybe they dropped the bar,” Epting says. “But when we quality check these apps they fail our standards, mainly for using APIs not required for the app. So we’re more stringent than other app stores.”

In its branded App Select store, a standalone experience pushed out via widget and web to new and existing users, Vodafone will focus on showcasing the top 100 apps from any shop. There will be no archive, with content being refreshed every three months—and, if an app is not moving, it will be cut. Furthermore, all content is localised by market.

If Vodafone is correct in its assessment there is a new generation of smartphone agoraphobics who, unsettled by the wide, open plains of the internet and its application stores, are clamouring to be let back into the walled garden. It could be argued that the growing adoption of HTML5 as a rich web technology will exacerbate this problem as many see an HTML5 site as a cheaper alternative to a full blown mobile application.

“The app store model is certainly a bubble, but this time it’s clear that the shift isn’t temporary,” says Mark Doherty, strategic solutions manager at Adobe Systems. “For agencies and publishers we’ve now come out of the era of using marketing budgets to simply join the crowd on iOS. Brands are now starting to measure their successes and optimise their spend. We also know that mobile budgets are not growing, so brands are looking for ways to reach more devices with the same cost and that’s where HTML and cross-platform technologies come in.”

In November, Adobe called time on Flash Player for mobile devices, ending development on the browser plugin following the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. Doherty says that HTML5 is certainly one path forward, although it will take years to produce widely consistent web standards necessary to support everything required by the creative and publishing industries in HTML. Meanwhile standalone applications can still be built using Flash tooling and targeting with Adobe AIR across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices. “It turned out that content owners just weren’t that interested in optimizing Flash content for mobile browsers, but they are keen to build applications and so Adobe is supporting that model,” Doherty says.

While Flash is being refocused towards premium video and gaming experiences and other use cases that would be impractical or impossible with HTML, Doherty points out that, with larger screens such as those appearing on tablets, users hunt for—and find—different content.

On the flip side, more of those large screens are coming on line, partly due to the success of the iPad but more because Android inherently lowers the barrier of entry for newcomers to the tablet and mobile devices scene. Take Australian manufacturer Kogan Technologies, which recently hit the consumer market with an Android tablet that costs £120. Founder and CEO Ruslan Kogan concedes that the device is not an iPad competitor, it’s targeted at people who want a similar experience for a fraction of the price.

“Android is a game changer when it comes to the hardware industry. For TVs, which is our core manufacturing operation, we spend a lot of time and money with engineers designing the software and menus and associated features. But when it comes to mobile devices, the beautiful thing about Android is that it lets you just concentrate on the hardware, while the software just does what it needs to do,” Kogan says. “Android has done a great job of making sure the OS can be ported to different devices, while Apple on the other hand restricts what you can do because it’s a very closed system.“

Another key point Ruslan raises is that Android, coupled with the potential of online retail, enables the manufacturer to talk directly to the consumer. And with the most successful application stores run by a mixture of web entities and device OEMs, the operator looks somewhat shut out of the ecosystem, according to Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google developer credited with the creation of Gmail as well as the company’s “Don’t be evil” motto.

“The carriers are such a roadblock to innovation a lot of times and Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are all in this really aggressive war with each other and they’ve all got a lot of money. If something like buying a carrier gave one of them a leg up in terms of offering services it may well make a lot of sense. But right now things are held back a lot of times by carriers trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the industry. Look at how long the iPhone was stuck on AT&T’s network while Android got a huge opening by being available on Verizon,” he says.

In Buchheit’s crystal ball, the mobile platform space will be a two horse race between Apple and Android. “Android has so much momentum and its free—it has a negative cost so how do you compete with that? And Apple is just a better experience. So what room does that leave for any other players?”

Vodafone’s Lee Epting concedes that HTML5 gives brands the ability to bypass all other channels in the delivery of their solutions but argues that the web is, “just another touch-point. Users come in via the browser and are presented an app to download to the desktop.”

Epting believes that users exploring the device default to an app-centric world and, while widgets as a concept are becoming increasingly dynamic, you get more richness from native apps. “I have yet to see one new paradigm put another paradigm to death. Just look at Java,” she says. “It’s still a primary breadwinner for a lot of app developers today and is a mainstream in the emerging markets. Java will still be around for some time because people with feature phones will want content too.

“Developers are living in a mixed soup, so we are saying a curated app shop is what will matter to the next wave of smartphone users,” she says. “We’re going after an existing channel—Android Market—and saying let’s have a curated store within that, but also let’s hit the browser and have a widget framework with real time updates.”

But another player that has seen reasonable success as an app development platform, as well as managing to cosy up to the operators and the device vendors is Facebook, a social network that has been smart in its packaging of APIs, and very successful in integrating social gaming and driving brand awareness through applications.

Take Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which in October, launched a self-care app for Facebook, allowing operators’ customers to personally manage their fixed and mobile telecom services from their phones. The app enables end users to check their balance, buy special offers and subscribe to services from their respective service providers. The app aims to offer an improved service from operators by allowing them to engage with customers where they spend most of their time online. It also hits a sweet spot with operators by setting up a self-care platform, freeing up the carrier’s in house resources.

Henri Moissinac, head of mobile business at Facebook, says he doesn’t see Facebook as a “rival” development platform because a lot of the things done for mobile developers recently are on top of Android or iOS. “So we’re making these platforms more and more relevant for developers. We’re making them social, focusing on social apps. So rival isn’t right but we’re starting on Android and iPhone and trying to spread out into other platforms,” he says.

In one sense the firm walks a fine line because it relies on the carriers and handset manufacturers to push the social network to the users. But Moissinac does reveal that the company is trying to push the envelope with regards to specific experiences that pitch Facebook more as a handset UI. “You can sync your address book with Facebook and for some devices and users maybe that will be the only address book that they use,” he says, conceding that the proposition might not be attractive for “the entire world”.

For Facebook, in a mobile environment at least, its greatest traction comes through the apps, on various platforms, as every time a user migrates from the mobile site to the app Moissinac says the company sees “engagement going through the roof” due to a better and faster experience. Yet he also sees potential for a more intelligent browser.

In fact, the consensus is that native apps, widgets and rich web sites will co-exist for some time to come. The big question is whether these existing channels, left to a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ model, will be able to maintain, or in some cases regain, quality. The users hold all the trump cards and will take the simplest option. But this doesn’t mean the most permissive player will take the lead, rather the most shrewd cultivator of those pieces of content.

Ruslan Kogan

The line up of names listed in the handset vendor rankings looks very different now to how it did a few years ago and may yet change more, with Linux-based operating systems lowering the cost of entry to new players. Ruslan Kogan, founder and CEO of Australian electronic manufacturer Kogan Technolgies and Australia’s richest person under 30, gives his thoughts on the market as the company prepares to enter the fray with a £119 Android tablet.

According to Kogan, which specialises in TVs and video cameras, Android is a game changer when it comes to the hardware industry. And it goes beyond the more obvious implications for tablets and mobile devices. Kogan says that for TVs, which form the Australian company’s core manufacturing operation, Kogan spends a lot of time and money on engineers who need to design the software and menus and associated features for the models.

“When it comes to other devices, the beautiful thing about Android is that it says ‘look, you guys just concentrate on the hardware and we’ll make sure that the software does what it needs to do.’ It really opens up the marketplace as the costs of devices are significantly reduced because we don’t have to spend so much time and money on software engineering,” he says. “We just load it and it works with the required features and functions. This lowers the cost of mobile phones and tablets and even cars or other electronic devices. We have already introduced a smart TV set top box based on Android for sub £100, which includes a browser, keyboard, apps, streaming movies and the entire app store ecosystem.”

Kogan claims that the developers behind Android have done a great job of making sure the OS can be ported to different platforms, while “Apple on the other hand restricts what you can do because it’s a very closed system. So we see more innovation in Android with hundreds of new devices coming out every year.”

Kogan admits that his company still needs skills in house and has engineers constantly working on updating certain drivers and getting software working properly on Kogan’s devices, but claims it’s nowhere near the amount of effort required to build an operating system from the ground up. “To do so would double the cost of the devices,” he says. “To be fair, it’s not exactly plug and play but it significantly reduces the resources required to enter a new market. So of course the handset space is attractive to us as well and we’re working on something right now. So you can expect an announcement from us in the coming months,” he says.

Kogan picks his battles. He knows a £100 Android tablet isn’t going to compete against the Apple iPad in the iPad’s own market, but he argues the low cost models are there to fill a specific gap.

“We’re filling the space for people that can’t justify buying an iPad but want the iPad experience. It doesn’t compete, but it’s there at a quarter of the price,” he says. “It’s really a price game for us.”

And Kogan predicts that the industry will see lots of manufacturers bringing out Android-based phones in all shapes and sizes to target specific markets. “Apple has the best product out there and is a market leader in tablet space. But it’s a big market, it’s not just a premium market. There’s a big budget market too.”

Kogan believes that online retail has enabled the manufacturers to talk to the end consumers. Before, companies needed distribution channels with a wide geographic spread, but the Australian firm now believes a company can operate from one hub. Kogan expects that in the not too distant future more manufactures will be going direct with many companies in Asia that recently white labeled products saying, “we don’t need all these other brands we can go direct to the consumer and don’t need to share our brand with anyone else.” Kogan suggests this is to some degree what has happened with HTC, ZTE and Huawei, with the result that the manufacturers can make their products cheaper.

“Hardware manufacturing is our specialty so we monitor what people are searching for, what’s hot in search engines like Google and we use that information to direct our manufacturing lines out in Asia,” Kogan says. “Nokia is going to be struggling because Android has taken away their main competitive advantage. Nokia used to spend heaps on R&D to get the software running as well as it could but they fell behind when iOS and Android came out and all of a sudden all these companies out of China were able to rapidly produce a phone that had the right hardware and the right software, rather than just the hardware. They’ve solved a very difficult part of making a phone for you,” he says.

BT wades into patent war with its own lawsuit against Google

UK incumbent BT has taken legal action against Google for alleged patent infringement. The two firms have commenced legal proceedings in the US District Court of Delaware.

BT said that it is taking action due to Google’s “ongoing and pervasive” infringement of its patents, relating to technologies which underpin location-based services, navigation and guidance information and personalised access to services and content. 

It is seeking royalties and triple damages, as it claims that the patent infringement has been “willful and deliberate”. It also wants Google to pay for all of its legal costs.

“BT’s constant investment in innovation has seen it develop a large portfolio of patents which are valuable corporate assets,” the firm told Telecoms.com in an emailed statement.

The company said that it has a total worldwide portfolio of around 5,600 patents and applications and claims to have spent more than £5bn ($7.74bn) on research and development over the past five years. During the 2010-2011 financial year, BT filed for patent protection on 62 inventions.

“This is about protecting BT’s investment in its intellectual property rights and innovation. It is a well-considered claim and we believe there is a strong case of infringement,” the firm continued.

“We have invested heavily over the last twenty years, notably on mobility and related network services technologies, which BT recognised early on would revolutionise the way people communicate.”

Although the lawsuit is being held in the US, it is widely suspected that BT will take the complaint into other countries as well.

Google denies infringing upon BT’s patents and vowed to fight its corner in the courtroom.

“We believe these claims are without merit, and we will defend vigorously against them,” a Google spokesperson told Telecoms.com.

The news comes as yet another blow for Google and its Android ecosystem partners. The firm has been embroiled in legal disputes over patent infringements with Apple and Microsoft, and its takeover of Motorola Mobility – which is purportedly acquiring to use the firm’s patents as ammunition in such disputes – has hit a stumbling block as the European Commission (EC) has suspended its review of the merger last week.

Apple recently failed to secure a ban on a Samsung Android tablet – the Galaxy Tab 10.1 - in Australia, after an Australian High Court rejected an appeal to keep the device off shelves. It was also denied a preliminary injunction to block the sale of Samsung’s touchscreen smartphones and tablets in the US. Meanwhile, Motorola Mobility recently won a ruling in a German court against Apple that could see Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices banned in the country, although Samsung lost out in its attempts to ban sales of Apple’s iPhone 4S device in France.

Much of that technology has gone into curation tools for the application stores Vodafone supports, a concept the Informer finds slightly amusing as he imagines consumers trying to climb back into the walled gardens they were so keen to escape a few years ago. It’s a jungle out there in the app wilderness and increasingly likely you’ll get eaten alive without some form of guidance.

What we’ve found is that there’s lots of stuff getting into the Apple App Store that we don’t think Apple would be happy with,” Epting said. “We don’t know why; maybe they’ve dropped the bar. But when we quality check these apps they fail our standards, mainly for using APIs not required for the application. So we’re more stringent than other application stores,” she said.

But with so many apps now flooding the market, it’s easy to see how quality is falling. Google this week announced the ten billionth download from its Android Market application store, having racked up no less than four billion downloads in the past six months.

Android Market hit the six billion downloads mark in July of this year, up from one billion in July 2010. By contrast the Apple App Store hit 15 billion downloads in July, suggesting that Android Market is catching up on iOS in terms of numbers.

The latest version of Android, numbered 4.0 but known as Ice Cream Sandwich, also hit the market recently, making its debut on the Samsung Nexus Galaxy, and will soon arrive as an update on in-market high end Android phones. Usually when a major update takes place, there is impatient clamouring from the user community eager to get their hands on the latest version, but to calm the excited masses, Android handset vendors Motorola and Sony Ericsson have released information about the process for deploying operating system updates to in-market handsets.

The OS, which brings together features from the smartphone and tablet worlds, is in great demand as an update, having already made it to rooted devices via the custom ROM and phone hacking community. But it may take a couple of months to hit existing devices like the Samsung Nexus S and Motorola Xoom via the official channels.

The bottleneck, according to Motorola and Sony Ericsson, is the carriers, which have to certify each and every change before an update can be rolled out to users on their networks.

Motorola said it is currently assessing the source code, and over the next month will be determining which devices will get the upgrade. From there the vendor merges and adapts the new release for different device hardware architectures and carrier customisations as well as integrating all of the Motorola-specific software enhancements into the source code. Next, vendors stabilise and ‘bake’ the result to drive out bugs before submitting the upgrade to the carriers for certification. This is the part that takes the longest as the carrier’s lab has to qualify and test the upgrade, so there may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months, Motorola said.

In related news, US carrier Verizon Wireless said this week it will not be supporting Google’s m-commerce app Google Wallet when it launches the Galaxy Nexus in the US market this week.

Verizon was keen to stress that it is not “blocking” the application – contrary to what reports in the US have stated – but rather, is saying that it is just not making it available until it can offer “the best security and user experience”.

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesperson for Verizon, said “Google Wallet does not simply access the operating system and basic hardware of our phones like thousands of other applications. Instead, in order to work as architected by Google, Google Wallet needs to be integrated into a new, secure and proprietary hardware element.”

But one reason for Verizon’s stance could be its own m-commerce interests. Verizon and rivals AT&T and T-Mobile USA are part of a consortium called ISIS, which is planning to launch its own payment system in the US soon.

On the subject of commercial interests, Verizon Wireless has also announced that it will be acquiring Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum from a number of other US carriers in a bid to boost its LTE offering. Verizon intends to buy 122 AWS spectrum licences  from SpectrumCo, a joint venture between cable companies Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. The firm will pay $3.6bn for the spectrum.

Verizon claims that by buying this AWS spectrum, it can bring even better 4G LTE products and services to its customers—and according to Sara Kaufman, an analyst at Ovum, the deal puts the carrier in a much stronger position to compete on LTE.

“Acquiring spectrum that it can use for LTE is a key objective for Verizon, and this deal gives it a lot of spectrum that it can use for its 4G services,” she said.

Meanwhile, rival Sprint Nextel will make use of 800MHz spectrum for its LTE network during 2012, in addition to the 1900MHz frequency on which it plans to launch the network, it was revealed this week by Sprint CFO Joseph Euteneuer. The use of the lower frequency will be made possible by moving of its iDEN customers onto its CDMA push-to-talk service.

Sticking in the US, and Apple has been denied a preliminary injunction to block the sale of Samsung’s touchscreen smartphones and tablets in North America, after a judge in California ruled that the Korean manufacturer’s products would not severely impact Apple’s sales.

The ruling means that Samsung will be able to sell its devices in the US during the traditionally lucrative Christmas season.

US District Judge Lucy Koh in said in a court in San Jose, California: “It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed.”

Samsung responded to the ruling, with a spokesperson saying that the ruling “confirms our long-held view that Apple’s arguments lack merit. In particular, the court has recognised that Samsung has raised substantial questions about the validity of certain Apple design patents.”

Koh’s ruling only relates to an interim injunction that Apple had been seeking, and there is still a chance that Samsung could see an eventual ban imposed on its devices, when a full trial commences in July 2012. However, Samsung remains optimistic that it will come out victorious in the main trial as well.

Apple has been seeking a ban on Samsung products – most aggressively on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet – in various countries across the world. It won its bid to ban sales of the device in Germany, where a Düsseldorf court upheld Apple’s preliminary injunction, which claims that Samsung had infringed its intellectual property and copied the iPad’s design.

But while Apple’s having trouble stopping Samsung selling tablets, Blackberry vendor Research In Motion is having enough trouble shifting its own hardware. The Canadian firm has warned shareholders that it has a large inventory of PlayBook tablets sitting in its channels at the moment, amounting to a provision for this quarter of around $360m.

RIM said it sold approximately 150,000 PlayBook tablets into the channel in the third quarter and believes sell-through to end customers was higher than this amount. Yet the company isn’t shifting its stock as fast as it would like. Clearly there won’t be many Playbooks under Christmas trees this year.

The company also suffered a legal setback after a ruling that prevents it from using the BBX moniker for its forthcoming flagship operating system. BBX, unveiled in October, is a hybrid of the BlackBerry platform and the QNX operating system that the firm uses in its tablet offering, but software firm Basis is claiming it infringes a trademark on its own OS, also dubbed BBx.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that it will miss its target of launching its Windows Phone 7 handsets in China, stating that the devices will be available in the country in the first half of 2012, rather than by the end of 2011, as originally planned.

China is a key market for Microsoft, as penetration of its Windows smartphones in the country is expected to grow more than 20-fold over the next five years, from just 800,000 devices on the market today, to 18.92 million units by the end of 2016, according to forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media.

The company had has been in discussions with Chinese handset makers including Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei Technologies about developing Windows Phone 7 devices for Chinese consumers, and it is not currently clear which handset manufacturer will launch the first handsets on the OS in China.

Microsoft bedfellow Nokia, might be looking to offload its bling, if rumours are correct. The company has long harboured a little unit called Vertu, which makes ridiculously expensive phones, encrusted with gold and diamonds, for luxury markets in places like Dubai. The handsets themselves are technologically mid-tier, but the use of precious metals and stones can push prices into hundreds of thousands.

For a company that excelled in the low end mass markets, Vertu was never a good fit, but it did apparently deliver profits. Now, it could be a useful way of rustling up some cash as private equity firms are reported to be sniffing round the asset. Offloading also fits with CEO Stephen Elop’s vision of trimming the fat.

There’ll be a lot of fat to trim come January, the Informer fears. That time of year is almost upon us and the mince pies have already made an appearance in the Informer’s diet. Lovely.

Take care

The Informer

Ice Cream Sandwich is the latest Android OS

Web giant Google this week announced the ten billionth download from its Android Market application store, having racked up no less than four billion downloads in the past six months.

Android Market hit the six billion downloads mark in July of this year, up from one billion in July 2010. The growth curve has accelerated dramatically over the past twelve months, from three billion in March 2011 to 4.5 billion downloads by May, now approaching a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.

By contrast the Apple App Store hit 15 billion downloads in July, suggesting that Android Market is catching up on iOS in terms of numbers.

In related news, Android handset vendors Motorola and Sony Ericsson have released information about the process for deploying operating system updates to in-market handsets. The move was intended to quell impatient smartphone users in the wake of the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

The OS, which brings together features from the smartphone and tablet worlds, made its debut on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in November and was released to the industry around the same time. The software is in great demand as an update, having already made it to rooted devices via the custom ROM and phone hacking community. But it may take a couple of months to hit existing devices like the Samsung Nexus S and Motorola Xoom via the official channels.

The bottleneck, according to Motorola and Sony Ericsson, is the carriers, which have to certify each and every change before an update can be rolled out to users on their networks.

Motorola said it is currently assessing the source code, and over the next month will be determining which devices will get the upgrade. From there the vendor merges and adapts the new release for different device hardware architectures and carrier customisations as well as integrating all of the Motorola-specific software enhancements into the source code. Next, vendors stabilise and ‘bake’ the result to drive out bugs before submitting the upgrade to the carriers for certification. This is the part that takes the longest as the carrier’s lab has to qualify and test the upgrade, so there may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months, Motorola said.

Finally, after some customer testing, a final release is delivered publicly to the user base.

Verizon's Samsung Galaxy Nexus will not support Google Wallet

US carrier Verizon Wireless will not be supporting Google’s m-commerce app Google Wallet when it launches the first Android 4.0 device on its network.

Verizon is rumoured to be launching the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the US market later this week, but Google has confirmed that the carrier has asked it not to include the app in the handset.

Verizon was keen to stress that it is not “blocking” the application – contrary to what reports in the US have stated – as the operator “does not block applications”. Rather, it said that it is just not making it available until it can offer “the best security and user experience”.

“Google Wallet is different from other widely-available m-commerce services,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesperson for Verizon.

“Google Wallet does not simply access the operating system and basic hardware of our phones like thousands of other applications. Instead, in order to work as architected by Google, Google Wallet needs to be integrated into a new, secure and proprietary hardware element.”

One reason for Verizon’s stance could be its own m-commerce interests. Verizon and rivals AT&T and T-Mobile USA are part of a consortium called ISIS, which is planning to launch its own payment system in the US soon.

Earlier this year, Google launched its Nexus S handset which also incorporated Google Wallet, however the app was supported on Sprint’s devices but not on T-Mobile/AT&T’s. The service on Sprint’s Nexus S appeared to work without any problems.

Meanwhile, Verizon claims that it is continuing ongoing discussions with Google on the issue.

Lee Epting, group director of content services at Vodafone

Some applications available through Apple’s App Store are failing to meet Vodafone’s internal quality standards, accessing APIs that are non-essential for the applications’ functions, according to the international carrier’s group director of content services, Lee Epting.

“What we’ve found is that there’s lots of stuff getting into the Apple App Store that we don’t think Apple would be happy with,” Epting told Telecoms.com. “We don’t know why; maybe they’ve dropped the bar. But when we quality check these apps they fail our standards, mainly for using APIs not required for the application. So we’re more stringent than other application stores,” she said.

Vodafone recently launched a branded store within the Android market and a curated, multi-platform store of its own in response to what it has identified as a confusingly wide array of applications in the market place.

If Vodafone is correct in its assessment there is a new generation of smartphone users who are clamouring to be let back into the walled garden. It could be argued that the growing adoption of HTML5 as a rich web technology will exacerbate this problem as many see an HTML5 site as a cheaper alternative to a full blown mobile application.

Epting conceded that HTML5 gives brands the ability to bypass all other channels in the delivery of their solutions but argued that the web is, “just another touch-point. Users come in via the browser and are presented an app to download to the desktop.”

She told Telecoms.com that users exploring the device default to an app-centric world and, while widgets as a concept are becoming increasingly dynamic, there is more richness available  from native apps. “I have yet to see one new paradigm put another paradigm to death. Just look at Java,” she said. “It’s still a primary breadwinner for a lot of app developers today and is a mainstream in the emerging markets. Java will still be around for some time because people with feature phones will want content too.”