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.

Ok everyone, listen up. If you haven’t played Assassin’s Creed II for PS3 or XBox 360 or whatever, it’s probably a good idea for you to do so. Forget having a life or whatever, just go get it.

So we were just perusing some iPhone news and saw that Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer launched today for iPhone. And it’s free for the first 48 hours! After that, it jumps to $2.99. That’s not insanely expensive, but hell, it’s more than free. So go download it and check out the iPhone version of this sweet game.

Then urinate away the next four hours of your life playing it.

It seems like there is a reason that iBoobs got kicked out of the Apple app store. It would seem that Apple has some new rules that are really clamping down on anything remotely adult oriented. The app store is family friendly and that’s the way it’s going to stay apparently.

So, here are the new rules that the developer of iBoobs got directly from Apple:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)
3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)
4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)
5. No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned
6. Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (I doubt many people could get aroused with the pic above but those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!)
7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

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.

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.

Apple recently announced that the company’s net income rose 47% in its most recent quarter as more and more people drop their fears of Mac computers and the iPhone continues to prove that there is no equal on the market.

As Apple rolled out another faster iPhone over the summer and dropped the price of the previous generation to $99, sales soared and 7.4 million units were moved from July to September. Wow.

“Apple is the undisputed growth name in tech,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech Inc. in San Francisco. “Apple continues to gain [market] share across its major product lines.”

Imagine the spike in sales when Apple eventually releases itself from the exclusive contract with AT&T. We will buy Apple stock when that deal is announced. It’s pretty much the only reason that people who don’t have an iPhone won’t get one.

If you are into jailbreaking iPhones, you will be disappointed. Apparently, the newest shipments of iPhone 3GS’s are not vulnerable to the 24kpwn exploit, which means you’ll need to find another way to hack it.

Here is an image of the new version number:

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.