As if Apple’s ridiculous tablet design patent didn’t hold enough ominous tidings for the mobile tech industry, the US Patent and Trademark Office just awarded the company another ludicrous claim: that's right, “slide to unlock” is officially an Apple patent. That means all the non-Apple phones and tablets that use the omnipresent unlocking maneuver are possibly infringing on Apple’s intellectual property – which could lead to complex legal battles that tie up competitors’ products, as Apple has done with the Galaxy Tab in Australia.
HP seems to be rethinking its plans to get out of the consumer business with new CEO Meg Whitman at the helm. According to HP itself, it has been testing the Windows 8 developer release on the defunct HP TouchPad. This is just being done as a proof-of-concept right now, but there have even been talks of reviving the device as a Windows 8 slate.
The bane of every Android user’s existence is the update cycle. Just because Google has updated the platform doesn’t mean that every device maker will be able to get an update to every phone in short order; or at all. That’s why Motorola’s new statement via Twitter is so surprising. In a series of Tweets, the OEM has confirmed that 6 weeks after the code is available, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be in the hands of some Moto users.
After cannibalizing netbook sales for well over a year, media tablets are said to have finally leapfrogged their prey in terms of shipments. According to ABI Research, tablet shipments in 2Q11 numbered 13.6 million units compared to just 7.3 million netbooks. Hit the jump for more.
The Windows engineering team continues to detail changes in Windows 8 one blog post at a time. The latest Building Windows 8 blog post once again turns the spotlight on the Start screen, which has already attracted a “ton of [critical] interest” from users. If the previous posts focused on the evolution and design of the Start screen in the upcoming operating system, the latest delves into the design of the Start screen’s integrated search feature.
The idea of Amazon’s Silk browser, for the Kindle Fire is an intriguing one. By caching web assets ahead of time, Amazon hopes to accelerate the browsing experience. But running all user traffic through Amazon’s EC2 cloud has made some privacy-minded people a little uneasy. Now members of Congress are starting to ask questions, and some of them are not totally ridiculous.
Just how big could the $200 Kindle Fire be when it launches next month? Pretty friggin’ big. Not “Bigger than the iPad” big – at least not yet – but some sales forecasts and thought-provoking, yet unofficial calculations by an Android developer show that the Fire and its custom Android 2.3 interface could own a bigger slice of the market pie than all Android Honeycomb tablets combined before the end of the year.
The tablet war has pretty much been a two horse race: Apple vs. Android. (Yeah, we know about the PlayBook, but let’s be realistic.) And that race has been like a blowout as the iPad 2 has been galloping away from the competition pretty handily. Microsoft’s hoping to hit the ground running with Windows 8 sometime soon, however, and they’ve just got a boost from Dell, who says they plan on heavily supporting the upcoming operating system.
The Kindle Fire isn’t even due to ship to consumers for another month, but already it has attracted its first patent suit. Smartphone Technologies LLC, which as far as we can tell doesn’t actually make anything, has sued Amazon for infringing on four of its patents. These patents seem to describe operating a touchscreen device by tapping on icons; apparently that’s a real patent. 
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