A group of Congressmen have sent letters to the US International Trade Commission asking the organization to decide against a ban of the Xbox 360 console. ITC administrative law judge David Shaw recommended a ban after Microsoft's console was found to infringe on patents held by Motorola Mobility. The Congressmen accused Motorola of abusing fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) patents to seek an exclusion order. They join a growing chorus against the ban on the console, including recent additions Activision and IBM.
"It would be severely detrimental to the U.S. economy to allow an essential patent holder to obtain an injuction against an industry participant instead of licensing their patents on FRAND terms," patent lawyer Mark G. Davis of Weil, Gotshal & Manges wrote to US ITC secretary Lisa Burton.
Eight members of the US House of Representatives wrote a letter to ITC chief Deanna Okun opposing the ban: Rep. Dave Reichert, Rep. Norm Dicks, Rep. Jim McDermott, Rep, Doc Hastings, Rep. Adam Smith, Rep. Rick Larsen, Rep. Cathey McMorris Rodgers, and Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler.
"An exclusion order against the Xbox 360 consoles could threaten high-paying America jobs and continued economic growth in Washington and throughout the nation," they said in their joint letter.
Other tech companies including HP and Nokia have backed Microsoft in this matter. The US Federal Trade Commission also came out against the ban last week, according to Bloomberg. At the time, Motorola said it was willing to license the patent, but Microsoft and Apple were not willing to come to terms.
"To date, however, neither party has been willing to enter into a cross-license on reasonable terms and thus we all find ourselves in seemingly endless litigation," said Motorola in a statement.
[Via Engadget]
Samsung TecTiles Let Users Automate their Lives with NFC - PC Advisor
Forget about mobile payments, Samsung wants you to use your smartphone's Near Field Communication (NFC) chip to complete tasks at home, the office and in your car. Samsung announced that it will sell programmable stickers, called TecTiles, that you can use to automate daily or repetitive smartphone operations with just one tap.
You can stick Samsung's TecTiles in your car to toggle your Bluetooth radio on or off, or place a TecTile at home to automatically set your phone to silent. Samsung also envisions restaurants placing TecTiles on their menus to enable one-tap Foursquare check-ins or to connect to a public Wi-Fi network.
Each TecTile sticker is about the size of a postage stamp and comes with an embedded NFC chip. You can buy a pack of five TecTiles for $15 through AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon stores, or online directly from Samsung. Samsung says TecTiles will work with almost any NFC-enabled phone, but users will need Samsung's TecTile application from Google Play to program the stickers.
You will also need the app to perform certain functions such as changing your phone's settings or launching a specific app. The TecTile app requires an NFC-enabled phone and Android 2.3.3 or higher. NFC is a technology that allows you to share small bits of data between devices using special chips that can connect to each other when in close proximity.
NFC has yet to take off in any significant way in the United States. Early uses of the technology have centered around mobile payment services such as Google Wallet, which launched in September. There are other applications as well such as Research in Motion's recently launched BlackBerry Music Gateway. This small $50 gadget lets you stream music wirelessly from you phone to a home or car stereo using NFC and Bluetooth. Some PCs such as the Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook have NFC reading capabilities to share data such as Web addresses between NFC-enabled devices.
NFC may not be a popular feature yet, but that may soon change as the number of devices equipped with NFC chips is expected to rise dramatically in the coming years. The marketing firm ABI Research predicts that the number of NFC-enabled smartphones will grow dramatically from 80 million devices in 2012 to more than 550 million by 2016, according to IDG News.
But even if NFC becomes a popular feature, you have to wonder how long TecTiles will last. Who wants a bunch of stickers hanging off their dashboard, office desk, and night table? A better option than stickers might be to have programmable NFC tags embedded where you can't see them (like inside your car's dashboard).
Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter andGoogle+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.
T-Mobile's abrupt change in plans puts off cell phone antennas in Eastmoreland and Alameda - Oregonian
Cell phone behemoth T-Mobile recently talked to Eastmoreland and Alameda neighborhood leaders about scheduling community meetings to discuss plans for cell antennas in Southeast and Northeast Portland.
Then, last week, T-Mobile abruptly sent emails to the associations, saying the company was for now putting off those plans.
In the email, Josh Sommers, a Portland-based T-Mobile official, wrote that the company’s nationwide $1 billion modernization project would force T-Mobile to “revisit critical sites,” including the ones in Eastmoreland and Alameda.
“To this end,” the email said, “we will let you know when those plans are resumed.”
Rod De La Rosa, a T-Mobile spokesman, this week said the company doesn’t have a timetable for returning to the two neighborhood proposals.
T-Mobile’s decision marked a pause in a contentious disagreement between the company and the neighborhoods.
The Eastmoreland, Alameda and Concordia neighborhood associations have been fighting T-Mobile about antennas proposed for two intersections: Northeast 31st Avenue and Prescott Street, and Southeast 37th Avenue and Ogden Street.
The Northeast location sits on the Concordia-Alameda boundary, and all three neighborhoods have joined forces to oppose T-Mobile’s plans.
“The group of us are momentarily relieved by the fact that it’s not going forward,” said Robin Johnson, Concordia Neighborhood Association chairwoman.
De La Rosa last year said more than 100 customers had told the company they want better coverage in Eastmoreland.
But some residents are concerned about health risks, tumbling property values and the erosion of neighborhood character.
The site at 37th and Ogden would have been about 50 feet from the home of a young family that considered moving if the antenna was installed.
“This was almost certainly going to destroy the finances of a young family,” said Robert McCullough, president of the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association.
T-Mobile met with neighbors at community meetings to talk about both projects. The gatherings turned hostile.
In a November meeting at Southeast Portland’s Duniway Elementary School, residents shouted at T-Mobile officials and a health physicist the company hired to discuss health risks.
The week before, Northeast Portland residents were unhappy about a meeting during which a T-Mobile attorney told a TV reporter that he couldn’t attend.
The city is considering a proposal to clarify the rules for those meetings — perhaps requiring a moderator — in an effort to make them more civil.
Because T-Mobile has been vague about plans for resuming its efforts in Northeast and Southeast, Johnson isn’t ready to declare victory.
“I don’t know if I look upon it as a win,” she said. “I just know that the immediate problem has gone away.”
Can Samsung make NFC tech happen? Not with TecTiles - ZDNet
Let’s face it: in today’s world of electronic mobility, we do things within our phones, not with them.
We can forget them on the bus, drop them, flush them and even hurl them at housekeeping. (Hell, we can even blend them.) But that’s the extent of our relationship with the things.
Almost everything we do with the smartphone is contained in that little screen. As objects, we abuse them. We don’t really use them.
Samsung wants to use its corporate largesse to change that. The company says it has the most near-field communications-enabled devices in American consumers’ hands — all those Galaxy S III, S II, Nexus and S Blaze devices do the trick — and it seeks to use that user base to propel NFC technology into regular use.
How? Through the use of TecTiles, cleverly named programmable stickers that, when tapped with your phone, automate a task — such as sharing a business card, checking into Foursquare or connecting with someone on LinkedIn.
Samsung says the stickers are best used to automate everyday functions, such as silencing your phone when you enter a meeting, or resetting an alarm for the next morning. That’s the consumer pitch.
For businesses, Samsung says the stickers can be used “as a way to market to and engage with consumers by enabling reward programs and to download discount offers or content.”
The $14.99 packs of five stickers are available from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile; a corresponding app can be downloaded from the Google Play store.
As with anything like this, it’s all about adoption: the TecTile is D.O.A. unless both consumers and businesses take to it. First they need to hear about it, then they need to see how it solves a problem.
The company told my CNET colleague Jessica Dolcourt that TecTiles are really a warmup act for mobile payments:
Part of the problem, according to Samsung, is that ordinary people are unused to physically using their phone to do things. Consumers know how to swipe cards and punch numbers, not to press a phone onto a terminal and authorize payment through an app.
A fair point, but I feel this effort is woefully misguided. The pitch is weak and the barrier for use high. (Are you really going to purchase a sticker to set your morning alarm?) If the company wants to accelerate the adoption of NFC technology — really, truly gain traction — it’s going to have to work with major partners to kill off plastic cards entirely.
(Ironically, the title for its announcement is “Samsung Mobile Puts All the Pieces in Place to Bring NFC to the Masses.” Hardly.)
Until I can leave them all at home, tapping my way through the city, there’s no hope for NFC. It’s not the technology; it’s the fact that a tap doesn’t improve upon the swipe enough for vendors and consumers to switch. I want to get rid of all the plastic in my wallet, too — but too few vendors have the incentive to change. And in the case of TecTiles, which require both effort and money for a trivial payoff, I suspect few consumers will have the incentive to even try them.
T-Mobile Offering Free iPhone Support to Customers - iPhone FAQ
T-Mobile has a strange relationship with Apple. They're the only major U.S. carrier who doesn't officially carry the iPhone, but they're very proud that over one million T-Mobile subscribers are iPhone users. T-Mobile has even went as far as to offer free iPhone micro SIM cards, and are working on building a "iPhone compatible" network. Now they're offering free iPhone support to their subscribers.
T-Mobile recently launched an iPhone support webpage to teach users how to optimize their iPhones. An iDownloadblog reader received an email announcing the new service:
"FREE T-Mobile Msg: Help speed up your iPhone. Free up memory to keep it running at its best. Learn how: m.t-mobilescoop.com/memory/iphone”
Perhaps T-Mobile is just preparing its customers for the arrival of the next-generation iPhone this fall, or they're just trying to find a way to survive after the failed AT&T merger. Either way, T-Mobile has made it clear that they're ready to support the iPhone, and are working towards bringing 3G and HSPA+ speeds to their customers who prefer to use iDevices.
It will be interesting to see if T-Mobile officially becomes an iPhone carrier this year, or if they will avoid taking a huge gamble on Apple like Sprint did with the iPhone 4S last year.
T-Mobile may be sunsetting 2G, but its M2M biz keeps growing - Gigaom.com
T-Mobile USA is shutting down 75 percent of its GSM capacity in order to clear its airwaves for new HSPA+ and LTE networks. You would think that such a large-scale retirement of its 2G capacity would wreck havoc on its high profit margin machine-to-machine (M2M) communications business, which leans heavily on its GSM/EDGE networks. But the opposite appears to be case.
T-Mobile’s M2M services provider Raco Wireless announced today at the Connected World Conference that it has landed one of the biggest fish in the M2M industry, point-of-sale (POS) transaction manager Apriva Wireless, which processed $7 billion in sales last year through wireless payments terminals.
Apriva isn’t shifting all of its business to T-Mobile. But, in a carefully worded press release, Raco, T-Mobile and Apriva said that they would be replacing the terminal SIM cards of Apriva’s current carrier in areas where that carrier is shutting down its 2G network. They didn’t name that mystery provider but it’s easy to read between the lines.
AT&T is one of Apriva’s current M2M network partners, and AT&T plans to shut down its GSM network on the 1900 MHz PCS band in New York City (it’s keeping GSM up on the cellular band) devoting that spectrum to its HSPA network. That means Apriva will need to find a replacement network for its PCS-only payment terminals in the country’s biggest commercial center. T-Mobile and Raco may have won the contract by default – there aren’t any GSM alternatives besides T-Mobile in the NYC — but a win is a win.
Raco President John Horn said there would be many more wins in same vein. As carriers – again he wouldn’t name Ma Bell by name – start refarming more of their 2G spectrum for mobile broadband, they’ll be abandoning their M2M customers, who are counting on 2G networks being around for years to come, Horn said.
So why is T-Mobile any different? Of the four Tier I operators, T-Mobile has been the most aggressive when it comes to cannibalizing its 2G spectrum for mobile broadband. While its true T-Mobile is refarming its airwaves, Horn said, T-Mobile is only shutting down GSM to a point. It’s committed to keeping that remaining quarter of its 2G capacity running for the “foreseeable future,” which is more than enough to support a robust a M2M business.
“That 25 percent of its PCS spectrum will support hundreds of millions of [M2M] subscribers,” Horn said. “Not millions, not tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of connections.”
While the big ticket items like tablets and cars get all of the attention, Horn said, 90 percent of M2M devices consumer only the most miniscule amounts of data – smart meters, vehicle tracking modules, field sensors, etc. For the most part, those connected car and tablet computing platforms are moving to 3G and LTE networks, which have the capacity to support their applications, while all of that low-capacity traffic is staying on 2G.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Maitree Laipitaksin
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Motorola’s Droid RAZR Maxx Now Top Seller at Verizon - Gotta Be Mobile
It appears that Apple’s iPhone is beginning to lose momentum at Verizon Wireless where Motorola’s Droid RAZR Maxx smartphone is now the top selling smartphone as of the June quarter, edging out Apple’s iPhone models. Though the Android-powered Droid RAZR Maxx has gained the top seat at Verizon Wireless, the iPhone is still the top selling devices at other U.S. carriers where it is available.
Likely, Verizon’s heavy marketing muscle behind 4G LTE and the Droid RAZR campaigns have helped the RAZR Maxx. The device is an evolution of the Droid RAZR, sharing many of the same design and aesthetics as the slimmer RAZR but the Maxx has a much more capacious battery that will last longer coupled with 4G LTE.
According to Barron’s, analyst Anil Doradla continues to recommend people buy Apple’s stock as Doradla believes that the next iPhone to launch this fall will have 4G LTE network capabilities and will level out the playing field.
Since Apple’s iPhone launch in North America, we believe this was the first quarter where the iPhone was not the best‐selling smartphone at a North American mobile operator (where it was available). While Apple continued to maintain its top position at AT&T and Sprint, Motorola’s Droid RAZR MAXX was the best‐ selling smartphone at Verizon. Our checks also indicate that at this stage consumers are not pausing in front of the iPhone launch as it is not influencing their purchasing decisions (but we expect it to start impacting over the next couple of months). Despite the “increased competitive landscape from 4G devices (and the iPhone 4S is not 4G),” Doradia is “not worried” as the next iPhone model, a true 4G phone, “will be an important catalyst for the company,” he believes.
That device has also been rumored to have a slightly larger display to compete in an era where Android smartphones are getting bigger and bigger screens.
According to that analyst, Samsung holds the third spot at Verizon Wireless with the Android 4.0-powered Galaxy Nexus trailing the Droid RAZR Maxx and the iPhone.
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Samsung TecTiles: NFC-Enabled Stickers Allow For Smartphone Automation With The Tap Of Your Device - Huffington Post
The highly-anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III will arrive in America in just about a week; but first, Samsung has another product offering for U.S. consumers: Stickers.
Stickers? Yes, stickers.
Say hello to Samsung TecTiles, which are NFC-enabled, postage stamp-sized stickers that can be programmed to trigger a single function on a smartphone when the phone is held in proximity of the sticker's surface. The actions that the stickers can be programmed to trigger include:
- Launching an application
- Joining a Wi-Fi network
- Making a phone call
- Sending a text message
- Sharing a contact or business card
- Showing an address on a map
- Opening a web page
- Posting a pre-written status to one's Facebook
- Posting a tweet, or following a contact on Twitter
- Adding a contact on LinkedIn
...and others, which you can see here.
I tried out TecTiles at a meeting with Samsung earlier this month, and the little NFC stamps are easy to use and to program. From the user's end, you simply hold your NFC-capable smartphone (like, say, the Galaxy S III) over the TecTile for a second or so, and a dialog box pops up on your display asking if you'd like for your phone to complete the requested action. I checked in on FourSquare, added a phone number to my address book, and silenced my phone simply by holding the GS3 close to a TecTile.
(Samsung reps, by the way, were pitching that final function -- silencing one's phone -- for movie theaters and libraries: Imagine a line of folks queueing into a film screening, holding their smartphones up against the door to silence their phones as they streamed into the theater).
The TecTile was similarly easy to program: Just hold your smartphone over the sticker until a box with all of your programming options pops up; you then choose from a list which function you want it to perform. After you've chosen, you can "lock" the TecTile so no one else can program over it. It's all very intuitive.
Though TecTiles work well, two pesky questions linger: Who will purchase these things, and how will people learn how to use them? In response to the first question, a Samsung representative told me that retail store owners -- especially small business owners -- could benefit by pasting the stickers around their store, to help shoppers get more information on products, retrieve coupons or discounts, check in on Facebook or follow the store on Twitter to build customer relations.
Though primarily targeted at businesses, these TecTiles apparently have their domestic uses, too: Another Samsung rep said that he had placed a TecTile on the nightstand next to his bed, so that he could easily turn his phone on silent in the moment before he fell asleep.
As for how customers will learn to use TecTiles -- Well, the biggest thing that TecTiles have going for them is probably that they are not QR codes, the universally-reviled robot-vomit scannable squares that have polluted our cities and magazines for months and have yet to catch on. (It is also much easier to hold your device over a sticker than it is to scan a barcode).
Past that, Samsung will have to educate consumers to look for its stickers, which are so small that they can be easy to miss. An advertising campaign will certainly be necessary for TecTiles to gain any traction.
Samsung TecTiles are available for purchase right now in store or online from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint (all of which, by the way, will soon carry the Galaxy S III). Five stickers cost $14.99.
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