bigsnake49

They applied for a patent before it was announced. Their face recognition application uses different technology than what Google uses, which itself is patented but not for mobile devices.

Apple has not copied voice recognition. They licensed the technology from Nuance that has been doing voice recognition for a long time and has a hella of a lot of patents in the area.

Wait, Apple has face unlock? Where?

Don't be silly AJ. I have already filed on that!

Actually Apple has done quite a bit of work on battery controllers. Their batteries are a bit more sophisticated than other people's. They just have not bothered with battery chemistry before. They might, though.

Robert, they can invent a new user interface mechanism like Microsoft did with the Kinect or people have done with gloves. It's not the gestures that you're patenting, it's what results those gestures produce within the context of the particular interface paradigm. Pinch to zoom is not an intuitive gesture out in real life. What does it do in real life? It might get you some bewildered looks, but that's about it. After you see it in action on an iPhone, then it becomes a natural, not before. I was one of the first people to get an iPhone. People would look at me kind of strange on the plane when they saw me pinch or flip. Finally somebody had the temerity to ask me what I was doing. I showed them them. Ahhhh, they said that is very smart.... Let me give you an example. Let's say you have a 3D interface and you are constructing a query from database tables that are hanging around you in 3d space. Let's say that the way to pick the columns from the table that you want in your query is to circle your pointer finger in the air circling the columns you want, either individual columns or a group of columns and then flicking them or swiping them towards the query. Within the context of the 3d interface as it pertains to databases, tables and queries, that is a patentable implementation. Let's take the slide to unlock gesture. There is a hell of a lot of other ways to unlock your phone. Hold the phone button until you're blue in the face, face recognition, fingerprint recognition, voice recognition, etc. Yet Samsung chose to copy Apple because they're lazy.

Sure they can. It it the application of that gesture on that device and the results that it produces that can be patented. The pinch and zoom certainly can.

I have no problem with that, as long as they don't use the same gestures and interactions with the pad. Like using 3D gestures ala Kinect. If all you're doing is using the same basic icons, using the same touch gestures, and on top of that use exactly the same materials, dimensions and overall design, ala Samsung, I have major problems with that. Palm's webOS was a much better design. On top of that, Palm had beaucoup patents on smartphones and PDA's. If Google had acquired Palm, Apple would have had a lot less problems with them because at least they brought a lot to the table.

From 10,000 feet up, it would look like a really, really, really small microwave.

While they could have tried, there was prior art to interacting with tablet and a stylus (albeit a smaller size). Apple's Message Pad and Palm's PDA's were there first before Microsoft's tablets. The reason why Microsoft's tablets failed is because they tried to shoehorn a desktop operating system onto a tablet format. I believe that their Windows 8 Desktop will fail for the exact same reasons. Trying to shoehorn a tablet or phone operating system onto the desktop. I like the way Apple is doing it, borrowing functionality from the mobile segment but never replacing the desktop paradigm.

Yeah, that always mystified me. Some of them, particularly consumers that did not really need PTT but used it as a poor man's mobile-to-mobile before the unlimited M2M plans, went to carriers that at least advertised better coverage than Sprint. A lot of the business IDEN customers went away because of the collapse of the construction industry. Other IDEN business clients changed their business flows so that they did not use PTT or any kind of person to person contact using web forms or SMS based dispatch. There are a few hardcore for which PTT is a hardcore requirement. Hopefully, Sprint can provide them a substitute. If not, there are still LMR outfits around.

I don't think it will be gone. It will be relegated to just another Navigation app. Not THE built-in Maps app.

Doesn't Sprint have 65,000 sites right now and want to reduce them to 38,000? This is off the top of my head and I'm too lazy to google:).

Don't you think they created this market of touch screen smartphone market out of thin air and they have improved their offerings every release. They need to safeguard their IP. If you look at the ultrabooks they are blind copies of the MacBook Air down to the same radius of the rounded corner, aluminum body and chicklet keyboard. They want the unsuspecting customer that see the ultrabooks for the first time to think that it is a Macbook Air! I am not against ultrathin laptops from other manufacturers. But please don't copy everything!

I think the Maps spat is because Google tried to keep the turn by turn directions for Android only. That probably pissed off Apple and prompted them to develop their own Maps. They acquired 3 different companies that were in the mapping business. I'm pretty sure Google will have turn by turn navigation in their Google Maps in iOS real soon. What I will be really interested in is whether the new iOS Maps will have an offline mode. I was going through an area about a year or so ago that had no AT&T service for about 30 miles. Google Maps was useless because it did not cache enough tiles beforehand. I think both mapping programs will get better because of competition.

I guess they're serious about this!

Well, Google got into the mobile handset business, so Apple is getting into the local search business in a roundabout way. It did not help that Eric Schmidt was a member of the board at Apple while they were working on their first iPhone, so he was intimately familiar with their plans. A spy in their midst, so to speak. From 10,000 feet up, Android looks a hell of a lot like iOS except with uglier icons. WebOS and Windows Phone look entirely different. It also did not help that Samsung blatantly copied some of Apple designs. So, Apple will put a big dent in Google's ad revenue from their iDevices.

No need to do beamforming for microwave backhaul since those are point to point links. The beamwidth is very narrow. However beamforming should be used to increase coverage and capacity. People much smarter than me have been advocating the use of beamforming and smart antennas for the last 10 years. I defer to their knowledge and experience. I don't know why it has not taken off. Carriers are more interested in buying more spectrum to keep it away from their competitors than fully utilizing what spectrum they have.

I just bought a pair of those for $189 each for my server.

I just don't want to hang around all that negativity. I prefer technical discussions, creative solutions to problems and reasoned discourse. "Sprint sucks" does not qualify. If and when S4GRU starts being a whiner's forum, then I will move on as well.

That was you wasn't it? I knew I had seen it before, I just did not remember where.

That would solve the problem for a TDD configuration. What I'm prposing is an FDD configuration with Clearwire's spectrum being the down link and a lower frequency being the uplink. LTE TDD configurations have inherent disadvatages vis a vis FDD configuration as far as decreased coverage. Unless those problems have been solved lately!.

If they have managed to not interfere with WiFi so far, I think thay might be able to avoid it in the future.

Just thinking out loud. Turn up the power on the downlink so that the coverage is identical to PCS and use PCS spectrum for the uplink. Now of course the FCC would have to agree to that, but I think the idea has merit. Any technical problems besides the increased power bill? Even that can be ameliorated by the use of smart antennas. Actually this idea would work really well with the uplink portion of Lightsquared's spectrum.

Just a bunch of cheap MFers whining about Sprint service. No thanks!