Hasta La Gadget!

Like a desperate suitor unable to take “no” for an answer, Nokia’s come back to the ITC with fresh allegations about Apple using its patented technologies without proper authorization. On Friday, the International Trade Commission made an initial determination that Apple wasn’t actually making use of five patents held by the Finnish company — a ruling that has yet to be ratified by the Commission itself, notably — which Nokia predictably “does not agree” with and is now countering with the addition of seven more patents it believes have been infringed. Those relate to multitasking, data synchronization, positioning, call quality, and Bluetooth accessories, and affect “virtually all products” in Cupertino’s portfolio. Rather boastfully, Nokia informs us that a total of 46 of its patents are now being actioned in some sort of lawsuit against Apple, whether you’re talking about the ITC, US, Dutch, German, or British courts. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, send in the lawyers. See Nokia’s press release about this latest legal activity after the break.

Continue reading Nokia keeps the lawyers well fed, returns to the ITC with fresh complaints about Apple

Nokia keeps the lawyers well fed, returns to the ITC with fresh complaints about Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 06:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Banana TV enables an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to stream photos and video to a Mac.

One of the coolest gimmicks of iOS is AirPlay, a button you press on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to stream photos, videos and audio to a huge display connected to an Apple TV. Problem is, you can’t normally use this nifty feature without your Apple TV (or an AirPort Express, if all you want is audio).

Enter Banana TV, a Mac app that allows you to use AirPlay to beam your videos and photos from an iOS device to a Mac. This way, you can enjoy streaming your media onto a bigger screen even if you don’t own an Apple TV.

The best part about Banana TV is it’s seamless. Launch the app and it’s ready to go, so long as your iOS device and Mac are on the same Wi-Fi network. On your iOS device, open any AirPlay-compatible video or photo, and an icon will appear to stream it via AirPlay. Hit the AirPlay icon and boom, the picture is displayed on your Mac.

This will come useful in many scenarios. Say you’re visiting relatives who have a 27-inch iMac, and you want to share photos of your family vacation, stored on your iPhone. Just load Banana TV on their iMac and stream it from your iPhone with AirPlay.

Or let’s say  you give presentations at work, and the PDFs are stored on your iPhone. Just connect your Mac to the projector, run Banana TV, open the PDFs on your iPhone and hit the AirPlay button. Voila — the image will be showing on the projector, and you can swipe the screen to move between PDFs while you’re giving the presentation.

Created by prolific programmer Erica Sadun, Banana TV cost $8 over at BananaTV.net. It’s not available in the Mac App Store, probably because Apple wasn’t cool with people reverse-engineering the AirPlay code, according to Sadun.

“There’s never been anything Apple’s built that I haven’t wanted to reverse engineer somehow,” Sadun said. “I’m sure there’s probably medication for that, maybe therapy.”

Wired.com previously covered Banana TV, which was formerly called AirPlayer, when it was still a work in progress. The near-final version of Banana TV released last week is snappy and fast, as if it came straight from Apple headquarters. It’s a must-have app for any Mac customer with an iOS device.

With Lala’s founder gone from Apple (having moved on to buzzy new startup iPhone app, Color), one wonders what the future of that once-promising service will be within the confines of One Infinite Loop. We saw Apple roll out a social networking feature for iTunes in the form of Ping, which seems to have a tenuous connection to the shuttered service. The future of iTunes in the cloud, however, is no more clear than it’s ever been.

Apple's Steve Jobs appears on stage in San Francisco to introduce the iPad 2. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Apple has traditionally debuted new iPhones at its annual software developers conference, but this year’s event in June will be 100 percent software news, according to a report.

Citing anonymous tipsters, well-sourced Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple claims there will be no iPad, iPhone or Mac hardware introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which kicks off June 6 in San Francisco.

Apple’s press release announcing the event doesn’t give much hope for any hardware announcements.

“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”

Apple will likely give details on the next-gen Mac operating system, OS X Lion, and the next version of its mobile OS, iOS 5.

New cloud-based features will likely be included in iOS 5 (think online storage, or a “music locker” service). It may not be released until fall, according to a TechCrunch report. That means an iPhone 5 would probably release in the fall timeframe with the launch of iOS 5.

See Also:

• ‘IPhone 5′ Video and Photos Leaked?
• Gadget Lab Notes: iPhone 5 Could Have a Flat Metal Back

If you are waiting for iPhone 5, now you have a solid target day: Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference will start on June 6. The iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 were all launched at previous WWDCs. In the words of Phil Schiller: More »