Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

Apple is suing phone manufacturer HTC for infringing on about 20 patents. Apple says that the Taiwanese company is using protected patents related to hardware, user interface and underlying architecture.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, said Tuesday in a statement. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Our guess is that Apple is right. Of course, we have no legal background nor extensive information on this.

According to an Adobe blog post, some seven million iPhone users have tried to download Flash for the iPhone.

“A little while ago I blogged about our new iPhone page at the Flash Player download center, the same site where hundreds of millions of users download and upgrade Flash every year,” says Mark Doherty, Flash Platform dude at Adobe Systems. “We were amazed by the numbers of hits received from iPhone OS devices, from users seeking the Flash Player to play back rich content from their favorite sites. Users that, before we created the special page, had no idea that Apple do not want them viewing the Internet as they see it today.”

It’s clear that iPhone users want Flash on their phone. As it is now, a small blue square shows up in the middle of the area where Flash would be on websites. It’s annoying.

But Apple CEO doesn’t want to embrace Flash because he thinks Adobe is lazy, Flash is all sorts of buggy and that the future of the internet will be HTML5 anyway.

Still, c’mon. Just get us Flash for now. We don’t care about the future.

According to a couple reports out of Korea, the next generation iPhone is scheduled to be released in April. The new iPhone is expected to have a dual-core processor (in a phone? Wow), video chat, improved graphics, OLED display and *gasp!* a removable battery.

The reports refer to the new iPhone as the “4G iPhone” or “iPhone 4G,” although it’s believed that the G refers to “generation” and not 4G as in the network.

Stay tuned.

While I don’t think anyone will dispute that the iPhone user interface is much better than Windows Mobile, it was until recently lagging behind Windows Mobile in terms of overall users. Well that is no longer. According to a recent comScore survey, the iPhone now has some nine million users as compared to seven million for Windows Mobile.

So take that, Microsoft.

The iPhone also leads the world in mobile web presence, accounting for about half of all mobile web traffic.

Wow! Go, iPhone!

AT&T is getting fed up with people using up too much of their bandwidth on the iPhone. The company says that only 3% of iPhone users take up 40% of the bandwidth and it is a problem for areas with heavy iPhone usage such as Manhattan and San Francisco.

AT&T’s head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, said that a different pricing system could be coming to discourage people from hogging bandwidth with things like streaming audio or video. This would be “to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites,” he said.

We can’t see this endearing AT&T to Apple and could very well hinder a chance at getting a new exclusivity contract.

With AT&T’s exclusivity running out on the iPhone, it seemed to most that Verizon would be the next to get it. Not so, says industry analyst Dough Reid.

Reid told The Street “Apple wants to move away from exclusivity; T-Mobile would achieve this for Apple in the U.S.”

While T-Mobile is a much smaller company, they do have the same GSM network as AT&T. This means that Apple wouldn’t have to manufacture a whole new device in order to work. This could be the deal breaker for Verizon.

But, we don’t know that this would happen. AT&T has some 71 million customers and T-Mobile has about half of that. The solution could be to offer the iPhone to both companies and then let users select which one they’d like to use.

Stay tuned on this one.

Just two short years after the release of the iPhone, Nokia is suing Apple claiming that the iPhone uses 10 of their patents. They say that 40 other companies are using their technology and paying for it, and that Apple should have to as well.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Nokia could get some 1-2% of Apple’s iPhone profits, which could amount to about $400 million. And that doesn’t include future revenue from the phone.

Without any help from Apple, Adobe has developed iPhone tools that allows Flash developers to come up with native Flash applications for the iPhone.

Adobe announced on Monday that their next version of Flash Professional will feature an option for developers to export their Flash code in a format that will allow it to run as a native application on the iPhone. Neat!

“We believe these apps are good for Apple and good for the iPhone,” Adrian Ludwig, a product marketing manager with Adobe’s Flash Platform group, told reporters on Monday. “We have no reason to believe that Apple won’t love this.”

Adobe would love to offer the Flash Player for iPhone, but says they would need more help from Apple to do so. Why wouldn’t Apple want Flash for the iPhone??

More from PCWorld.com:

It’s not the Flash Player for the iPhone that many are hoping for, and the applications won’t be able to browse the Web in the way that programs running in Flash Player can. But it does mean that Flash developers won’t have to rewrite their applications from scratch for the iPhone, which should expand the pool of applications for Apple’s device.

The Dallas Business Journal reports that Apple could double the sales of its iPhone if it dumped the exclusivity contract with AT&T. This projection comes from Kathryn Huberty, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

“We expect Apple to broaden iPhone carrier distribution over the next two years and believe this opportunity is under-appreciated by the investment community,” said Huberty.

The DBJ goes on to say that according to Huberty,

…Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) still has exclusive deals in six markets that made up 70 percent of iPhone sales in the second quarter. Making the devices available to other carriers in those markets would bump market share to 10 percent from its current level of 4 percent…

We all know what this report is really saying… wake up Apple! Make a deal with Verizon so you can sell more phones.

Usually, when we like an iPhone app, we tell our friends on Facebook or whatever. But now, Yappler Sync lets you connect with your friends to share and find new iPhone apps. According to the company’s website, you can:

* Create a list of all your iPhone apps
* Send your list to a friend with a new iPhone
* Show your friends which apps you like best
* Share your list on Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc.
* Embed your list in your MySpace, blog & more
* Automatically keep your list updated