Hasta La Gadget!

Another day, another Apple-Samsung death match. This time, Apple has succeeded in banning the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 across the entirety of Europe, because it was found to have infringed on Apple drawings that date back to 2004. More »

Another legal tangle for Apple in Portugal? Just days after a consumer rights group in the country said it was preparing to bring legal action against Apple over the wording of its AppleCare warranty service, it has emerged that an IT reseller and distributor called Taboada & Barros is already suing Apple over claims of price fixing and unfair trade practices, asking for €40 million ($49 million) in damages.

According to a report in the Portuguese-language Apple blog iPhoneTuga – citing details first reported in the Portuguese weekly newspaper Sol – the suit stretches back to February but seems to have only been made public now, in light of the action being taken by the Portuguese Association for Consumer Protection (DECO). Unlike the DECO case — which has a precedent in Italy, where Apple was fined $1.2 million over a similar matter — this lawsuit is less cut and dry.

Taboada & Barros, which also controls a large Apple distributor called Interlog, alleges that Apple’s intentional restrictions on the quantity of products it distributes through third parties led to the failure of Interlog. And this has coincided with Apple getting more active in the country, it says:

“Apple arrived in Portugal in 2007 and the following year, usurped the distribution channels that were assembled by Interlog for over 20 years, taking over from our distributors.”

Apple has a dedicated site for Portugal but relies on resellers for physical sales.

A post on Portuguese business news site Economico, dating back to May 2011, underscores how demand has outstripped supply at resellers. With iPhone handsets, iPad tablets and other devices and peripherals not arriving after March (presumably due to Interlog failing), some claimed unfilled orders for devices like the iPad tablet.

A source at TB, speaking to Sol, says that on top of restricting the flow of products to third parties, Apple renegotiated the margins that resellers can take on products down to 4 percent from a previous 12 percent. “Apple unilaterally established products, prices and quantities to be sold to large retailers,” it said.

It’s likely that the margin reduction and lost sales over supply issues are both factors in the request for €40 million in damages.

Given that in other countries Apple has played a strong role on the retail side, with its own direct presence in the form of physical and online stores, if all this is accurate, it should be unsurprising to hear Apple cracking the whip and attempting to bring more of the sales effort in Portugal under its wing. Regardless, coming as it does alongside the DECO action, even raising the issue of unfair practices can end up being damaging to Apple’s reputation in the country.

We are contacting both TB and Apple for comment on this story and will update as we learn more.

Two months ago the Netherlands and UK governments ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. Now, figures from a number of ISPs confirm exactly what we, though obviously not the governments, knew: it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to P2P traffic. More »

It was almost a year ago in July that I jumped off the Tube at Oxford Circus in London’s West End and wended my way deep into Soho to Nokia’s chi-chi central London office. There, I sat down with a handful of other journalists to interact via live video conference with Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s legendary design guru, about their new smartphone. By this time we’d already had the Burning Platform strategy unveiled by new CEO Stephen Elop. But Ahtisaari unveiled a beautiful, MeeGo-powered smartphone, the N9, and assured the hacks that Nokia was committed to it. It even had Angry Birds! But, with Nokia in bed with Microsoft, we all knew that this would probably be the only MeeGo phone Nokia would produce.

Last week Nokia released a major software upgrade for the N9, but it’s probably the last upgrade we’ll see. Even then, few people even saw a MeeGo-powered N9, basically the shell of what became the Lumia 800 and 900 devices. So what of the poor neglected MeeGo, the platform that barely existed?

Well, Jolla Mobile – a company without even a website yet – hopes to be its resurrection. In the last couple of days it’s emerged that much of the team inside Nokia’s MeeGo’s development has left to created actual new smartphones based for the platform. A spokesperson has categorically denied to TechCrunch that olla Mobile will get any Intellectual Property Rights from Nokia to achieve this, but, according to the CEO, we will see two – count ‘em – two MeeGo phones appear this year. They are even thinking about entirely new products based on MeeGo.

I managed to rack down CEO and co-founder Jussi Hurmola. Hurmola is someone who, to coin a phrase, knows his MeeGo onions.

“We started at the end of last year looking at MeeGo and the ecosystem around it, and we just knew there could be something we could do,” he told me today via a phone interview. “We started going round talking to partners and some of the ‘heavyweights’ in the business. We understood quickly that you would need to be big to survive, and that offering only a small part of the ecosystem would be difficult.”

Perhaps that’s why Jolla’s play is ambitious. It plans to build two smartphones in the next year – pretty big stuff for a startup.

As Hurmola says: “We are will be making smartphones and in order to do this we’ll need an ecosystem and a platform around us. We are going for a pretty big strategy. This is our mission.”

Big mission indeed. Hurmola believes Jolla Mobile could be so influential that it could in fact allow the MeeGo ecosystems to “come back” – because, he argues, it never went away. Indeed, the MeeGo’s heritage contains within it the original vision of creating a truly open source smartphone platform – not the faux open source that Android represents.

And if anyone can do it Jolla can. Half its team has worked on MeeGo and the other half are hard-core ex-Nokians – the kinds of people who built one of the world most successful mobile companies, at least at one time…

“We’re confident we can do it again” he says. “Jolla alone cannot do this so we are talking to big partners. We’re putting those relationships together. We want to create as big a wave as possible.”

But the question is, with smartphone platforms morphing into tablets, can Jolla service these new categories as well?

“We will look at products like tablets, but the market is changing so fast and the categories are being redefined. Netbooks have already disappeared and the smartphone screens are converging. We will start with a smartphone but in 6 months there could be a category for a new kind of product s that is not just a handheld or a tablet.”

Hurmola says that the actual details of the devices Jolla will make can’t yet be revealed, but they want to address two markets – and that will mean two devices. One will be a ‘mass-market’ smartphone aimed at general users. But the other will be aimed at tech users to, as Hurmola says, “honour the origins of MeeGo, Maemo, Moblin and the others.” Let’s hope it actually makes them some money as well…

MeeGo was created by Nokia in partnership with Intel and Samsung. It was the smartphone platform that might, had it come out, taken on iOS and Android. Can Jolla fulfill that promise?

There are no details on the devices as yet, but Hurmola tells me that although he “can’t say much” right now, the “UI is a major thing and one of the reasons we selected Meego. With Android we can only copy — but with MeeGo we can introduce something brand new to the market.” Sounds intriguing…

Jolla is one of the products of Nokia’s Bridge project and it’s clear Jolla will have an ongoing relationship with Nokia, even it’s pretty informal. As Hurmola says” Helsinki is a pretty small place.”

As the startup’s LinkedIn page says, the Jolla team is formed by directors and professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation… “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued.” Indeed, the COO is Marc Dillon, formerly principal engineer on MeeGo.

Hurmola readily admits he was “the guy shouting about fragmenting the code base” when Nokia lost its way. He had worked on Symbian Maemo and finally MeeGo. He wasn’t going to throw all that away.

It will be intriguing to see what they come up with.

This certainly doesn’t come as a huge surprise given where Acer has been focusing its attention as of late, but it looks like the company is truly intent on shedding its image as a low-cost brand — at least in Europe. Speaking with TechRadar, an Acer spokesperson said that “it can be a slightly conflicting message,” referring to it also offering computers under its Packard Bell brand, and that “Acer is moving away from the lower end.” In this case, Acer is defining low-end as under £400, or roughly $600, although it says there will be some crossover. The spokesperson further added that “Acer will become more premium,” also noting that “we try to separate the two brands as far as possible, so the average consumer has no idea that the two brands are associated.” What that means for Acer in North America (where the Packard Bell brand is long gone) remains to be seen, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment.

Acer says it’s ‘moving away from the lower end’ in Europe, leaving cheaper laptops to Packard Bell originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jul 2012 15:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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