It seems Apple’s been making calls on their competitors long before their recent suit against HTC.  The technologies in question?  Multitouch seems to be the most important IP Apple seeks to protect, while dozens of other iPhone-related patents also are in place.

From the report:

• “The HTC suit, which is recognized as a proxy battle against Google, is causing OEMs to re-examine the strategy of relying overmuch on Android, lest it prove vulnerable in terms of core IP,” he wrote. “This concern comes atop pre-existing misgivings about Google’s end-game in wireless. (to commoditize the OEMs? To arrogate all value-added services?)”  The conflict, Reiner said, has created an opportunity for Microsoft’s newly unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series, due to launch this fall. Microsoft has also told potential customers it would support them legally if they, like HTC, were hit with a lawsuit over intellectual property.

Now we get to see just how much Microsoft will ante up against Apple’s patent base at a time the two seem to be building alliances.  Looks like we could be headed for another settlement similar to the technology agreement made over a decade ago between the two which sent millions (and a commitment to continue updating Microsoft Office for Mac) to Apple.

As for Google, that relationship seems headed south.

More: Apple’s patent ‘warning shots’ prove disruptive for handset makers.

Apple has announced a lawsuit against HTC for Patent Infringement.  Understand this is only the opening salvo in what promises to be a long, litigious cycle for anyone employing a device that does anything remotely similar to the iPhone.

Why not Palm?  Too small a fish, and frankly they might just die on the phone or get acquired the way things are going.

Why not Google? HTC and others manufacture Google phones at this point.

Interesting question: Did Google stay away from the hardware business because

(a.) Jobs made it clear to Google leadership they’d be going after patent cheaters,

(b.) Google doesn’t want to be in the hardware business,

(c.) they’re waiting for Google and other partners to make some big bucks before making their move,

(d.) they want the some market competition before totally strangling it,

or (e.) there’s still a substantial backroom love affair between the two companies.

We were watching for this after Apple executive made it eminently clear they wouldn’t stand by and let their technology get ripped off – as we recall they were talking about Palm at the time.  This looks like a great way to shape the market precisely the way Apple would wish.  They’re in the command seat and they know it.

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Seeking $335,000 in unpaid advertising bills, Google Inc. filed suit against a small Internet site in Ohio in October. The complaint was so routine it was just two sentences long.  Google never expected the response it got. Last month, the small Internet site countered with a 24-page antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search-engine giant of a litany of monopolistic abuses.

“My reaction was, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Mark Sheriff, an Ohio attorney who represents Google, speaking of the involvement of Mr. Rule and his powerhouse law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, whose antitrust practice is based in Washington, D.C. “It’s not every day that a big D.C. law firm like Cadwalader gets involved in a collections lawsuit in Ohio.”

To Google, the pattern is clear: It contends Microsoft is embarking on a proxy war against it through various apparently unrelated cases, preparing the ground for a broader antitrust assault of some sort on Google’s dominance in the online world. “It’s become clear that our competitors are scouring court dockets around the world looking for complaints against Google into which they can inject themselves, learn more about our business practices, and use that information to develop a broader antitrust complaint against us,” said a Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich.

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More from the Wall Street Journal article.

Ed Finkler represents all of us geeks, but when he discusses the upcoming iPad I think he gets it completely when he says:

• What I’ve learned from interacting with most computer users, though, is that they do not give a rat’s ass about how computers work. They want to accomplish certain tasks, and will do this in the way that is most sensible and direct for them. And the way they end up accomplishing these tasks within the multitasking window motif is typically not the way I would do it.

I completely agree.  When I watch my family use the devices I obliterate, so much of what they do communicates the utter uselessness clutter 70% or more of what a typical computer operating system and its applications can do.  And let’s not discuss the goofy maintenance dance techies do to their family’s boxes from time to time.  That’s what’s wrong with computing today – netbooks are just a smaller form factor with the same problems -

Ed’s full article: We’re the Stupid Ones: Facebook, Google, and Our Failure as Developers.

I’ve noticed a lot of Google-ites going absolutely manic over Google Buzz and its implications. You can tell they’ve bought into Google’s approach without question. Many are unimpressed with the new iPad to the point of parroting the usual “it’s just a big iPod touch” cliché – but they fail to recall recent history and iPhone 1G’s place in it.

It’s easy to forget that the iPhone was launched with no app store and no way to buy and run apps until much later. People criticized this in large part because they knew there would be times their device would be connectionless and/or they didn’t want to have to wait to refresh an app every time they started or ran it.

At the time no one had any idea how data would be manipulated on the device other than your basic scroll and pinch and a tight keyboard and only now they’re starting to get past the stylus or physical keyboard mindset. Every day developers are creating more intuitive uses for iPhone and copycat hardware, particularly on the games front – and the iPad will be driven by entirely new markets. Think carriers like UPS that spend millions on a system they’ve built and maintained that can be easily moved to the iPad for a fraction of the cost, or hospitals doing exactly the same thing. Small businesses will use this thing as a field POS instead of being effectively priced out of the market. Kiosks won’t need to spend thousands just to sell merchandise while other retail outlets could completely overhaul their sales model to more closely resemble what Apple does in their stores but without screen size constraints that effectively lock out other business types. This thing even replaces the pad of paper taken to meetings: people often don’t take laptops because their screen blocks others at the table and sends a negative signal. Now it’s gone and we can even work documents in these meetings using a device that can easily turn to their native portrait form factor.

The iPad is in a similar situation to the iPhone when it was launched. The OS really hasn’t come of age for the form factor and will almost certainly see a dramatic upgrade when iPhone/iPad OS 4.0 arrives. I’m betting the biggest surprise will be the merging of the Mac OS X Dashboard widget design and a class of apps (like the iPhone weather app) that work on the iPad just like they would as Mac OS X widgets. Additionally, and more importantly, the device is perfectly positioned for a substantial segment of the market that wants no part of traditional computing. Some of them purchased or considered purchasing netbooks but this OS will be far more elegant and easy to use with the iPad form factor than the traditional OS + netbook form factor, and pretty much everything they want to do will be available to them.

It’s probably also a good bet that anyone comfortable with Google apps and cloud computing as each stands right now will not have nearly as much of a use for this device. Why? Because eventually HTC or someone like them will build a device that matches its hardware capabilities (barring lawsuit fears) almost feature for feature, just as they already have with Nexus One. Sure, it won’t be nearly as elegant but it will do what it needs to do to accomplish the tasks of an OS that isn’t the iPhone OS while Apple will continue to develop seamlessly forward, rendering existing user experiences continually challenged from a relative standpoint.

Despite being a lifelong techie in an IBMer family I find myself very unfulfilled when faced with the immaturity of most cloud-dependent apps and very particularly disinclined to work with Google’s frontend. It feels like the maximum realized potential of an inferior set of design and appearance standards and forever limited by the need to be basic and cross-platform while being serviceable in a lab geek sorta way. It’s like wearing khakis and a polo shirt to an important event. And even worse, the IA painfully obscures some very important application settings, leading me to actually prefer Microsoft’s overkill design mantra more and Apple’s elegance far more.

Eventually cloud computing should be about sync to and from the device and backend, not about the app frontend since consistency across vendors is a virtual impossibility.  With HTML5 fully exploited and ubiquitous the browser will capably approximate all this regardless of connection state, from synched database to synched interface.  But we’ll still effectively be returning to distributed computing because computing tends to always come back to the user interface, its ease of use, and robustness and feedback.  It’s hard to imagine, all things equal, that this doesn’t put interface masters like Apple in the driver’s seat.  Not only do they execute better than anyone in this space, they’ve already built both closed and browser driven development platforms and baked design consistency standards deep within each.

Though I know I’m by no means speaking for a large bunch of folks, these shortcomings are defeatable by implementing a more mature connectionless/sync-oriented data model (the reason many still use IMAP mail clients, for example) and a far more robust, attractive, and logical interface.

The whole package – software, hardware, and how it works (easily, consistently, expectedly, and beautifully) seems to be the holy grail. And if the hardware paradigm for the iPhone/touch achieves the hardware part of this in its form factor building something highly similar in a larger form factor that takes advantage of the increased real estate (through as yet unreleased software) the familiarity will be a huge win that no one else can achieve. The real questions are how much of the backend will Apple build and how much they will depend (or be allowed to depend) on backend from providers like Google.

For the last two years a segment of the press has worked to keep their eyes on the real long term focus for Apple: their under-the-covers intellectual property.  Not just the software, rather the battery life and more importantly the CPU.  And if the Apple iPad is any indicator, Apple’s purchase of fabless chipmaker PA Semi could be the greatest acquisition any company’s made over the last decade.  That’s right: any company.

Here’s what we know: the iPad is a flamethrower.  It’s nasty fast.  So fast the iPad’s speed is often the first thing anyone who’s touched it mentions.  It’s great to see software and interface guys like John Gruber talk in detail about the iPad’s blazing performance.  When that happens, you know it’s hot.

As Gruber also points out, what’s scary for the competition now is not the package Apple’s put together with this device.  Frankly, Apple’s competitors have spent well over two years being scared and trying anything to catch up or differentiate.  No, what’s got to keep the also-rans up at night is the beginning of the end of the battles on the commodity hardware market.  They used to compete with Apple to be the first to market with the fastest devices, and nowhere has this been more visible and critical than the mobile processor sector.  With Apple’s A4 mobile CPU serving as the iPad’s engine (and companies like Intel and Samsung on the outside looking in), the game has changed forever.

The ‘real’ Web 2.0 and Internet 3.0 begin and end with mobile devices, and that’s why Apple now touts itself as the largest mobile device company in the world.  It can’t be overstated: the mobile industry is now firmly positioned to completely supplant every computing technology we’ve created and used to this point.  The iPhone and App Store set the table, and future devices will drive the hole ever more open.  Starts to make Apple’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless look pretty smart, doesn’t it?

Even if Apple’s competitors come within shouting distance of their technological advantages on the software front (and some might say Google Android and Palm WebOS are in fact in that ballpark), Apple’s ability to deliver far superior processor performance means a massive advantage every time you try these devices head-to-head in the future.

More importantly it raises the performance ceiling dramatically for Apple, meaning their ability to drive more ‘wow’ features into iPhone OS will far exceed what the Googles, Palms, Nokias, and Microsofts of the world will be able to achieve.

This is a one horse race unless another entrant steps up and attempts to change the game rules.

Andy Ihnatko talks about Google’s Nexus One and how it fits in with the competition  Here’s an important snippet:

• The touchscreen is a serious source of concern. I frequently needed to tap buttons more than once to get the Nexus to recognize the tap. Just as often, an app would think I’d tapped an item close to what I had been aiming for.  My suspicions about the Nexus’ touchscreen began to mount and so I charged up my loaner Droid and did some side-by-side comparisons. Yup: when doing the same tasks in the same apps side-by-side, the Droid was far better at correctly interpreting my intentions than the Nexus.

His full writeup can be found here.

In this article Jim Goldman offers some interesting tidbits provided to him on the DL, including these highlights:

• Steve Jobs “hates” Google CEO and former Apple board member Eric Schmidt (hard to believe this one, honestly)
• Apple wants Microsoft’s Bing search API because they don’t want to build search in house
• Apple will use Bing’s search API alongside their own ad system, which came in part from their recent Quattro Wireless acquisition

Goldman goes on to say he believes Apple will actually build their own search system because they feel they need nothing less than what Google’s already built to control the Internet ecosystem running inside their hardware and operating systems.

I tend to believe Goldman’s right in the long term.  Since this capability takes years to build, Microsoft Bing is a great stopgap that gets them off the Google train while they still command an amazing lead on the industrial design front, where no one – especially Google – even comes close to touching them.

Google Wave is a great tool for those using it.  For the rest of us, we’ve frankly no idea why we should be so interested in it. Here’s a feature by feature summary.

Mobile ads are where it’s at.  Mobile OSes, apps, form factors, advertising – all of it – will likely step in front of every other computing space as the harbinger of what’s next in the entire industry.  And since advertising in this space is anything but mature, the Apple versus Google battle here will perhaps be the most fascinating technology story of this decade.  Here’s some detail from the latest BusinessWeek article on the subject:

• The problem is that user behavior isn’t consistent between desktops and mobile devices. Many people shy away from calling up minuscule search bars on their phones and pecking out queries using cramped keyboards. Search ads tend to be less effective, too, since people are reluctant to give over the one browser screen they have on a phone to an ad. In many cases, apps are far more effective; it takes fewer steps to find the best local sushi joint using apps from Urbanspoon or Yelp than to type out “best local sushi” into a search bar and navigate the results. “Eric Schmidt has said that the search problem is 99 percent solved, but, boy, is that self-serving,” says Jonathan Yarmis, research fellow with the consulting firm Ovum. “The fact that I have to go to a search bar at all is a sign of failure.”

Read more of this great article here.