Hasta La Gadget!

San Francisco passed a new law last month that requires all retailers to display the amount of radiation a cellphone emits. Predictably, that law is now coming under fire from CTIA, the wireless industry group. CTIA has filed a lawsuit to block enforcement of the ordinance.

“The ordinance misleads consumers by creating the false impression that the FCC’s standards are insufficient and some phones are safer than others based on their radio frequency emissions,” says CTIA, which seems geared up for this battle.

CTIA has already canceled plans to hold future conferences of its ‘Enterprise and Applications’ show in the city. The event this October will be the last one CTIA will have in San Francisco in the “foreseeable future,” it has said.

The effect of radiation from cellphones on users has become a highly contentious issue. As consumers become increasingly glued to their phones, researchers, environmental organizations and cellphone industry groups are debating the question of what exactly is the impact of the radiation emitted from the phones. So far, there has been no conclusive answer.

In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sets the acceptable radiation standards for cellphones. As part of the device certification process, all handset makers have to use an independent lab to test radiation emissions from the phone. The certificates and radiation levels are displayed on the FCC’s site along with the product details but they are not easily accessible to consumers.

Earlier this year, a non-profit organization called the Environmental Working Group created a database where customers can look up the Specific Absorption Rate–the rate at which energy is absorbed by a mass of tissue, a measure of radiation emitted–for their phones. San Francisco’s ordinance steps it up by requiring retailers to display this information in stores.

That doesn’t help consumers, says CTIA.

“The problem with the San Francisco ordinance is not the disclosure of wireless phone SAR values–that information is already publicly available,” says CTIA Vice President of Public Affairs John Walls in a statement. “CTIA’s objection is that displaying a phone’s SAR value at the point-of-sale suggests to the consumer that there is a meaningful safety distinction between FCC-compliant devices with different SAR levels.”

“The ordinance is not only scientifically unsupported, it violates the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the United States Constitution and must be stricken,” says CTIA.

San Francisco city officials are fighting back.

“I am disappointed that the association representing the wireless communication  industry has decided to challenge our landmark consumer information law in court,” Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco says in his statement. “This law is not an attack on the wireless industry or their products.”

See Also:

• Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You’re Getting
• Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab
• Video: Cellphone Radiation Pops Popcorn
• Cellphone Use Changes the Brain, Say Scientists
• Inside Apple’s Antenna Design Lab
• Nothing to Fear From Wi-Fi Radiation

Photo: Inside a cellphone radiation testing lab (Priya Ganapati/ Wired.com)

“An iPhone, an iPhone, my carrier’s reputation for an iPhone.” Grab a cup of coffee and get yourself comfortable, fans of behind-the-scenes industry drama. Wired has published an exhaustive and fascinating expose on the “loveless celebrity marriage” that is Apple and AT&T — all from sources familiar with the matters but who cannot (or will not) be named, of course. In other words, don’t take this as gospel, but frankly, none of this sounds too crazy or outside the realm of what we’ve already surmised ourselves. In brief, the two companies have been contentious towards one another since just after the iPhone was unveiled. For AT&T’s part, the carrier was reportedly taken aback when its requests (delivered by Senior VP Kris Rinne) to restrict YouTube’s bandwidth usage (or make it WiFi-only) while the network infrastructure was built up fell on deaf ears in Cupertino. Word has it Apple also refused to allow its devices to be used in campaigns to combat Verizon’s Map for That ads: “It was [effective] because of AT&T’s network. We would have been letting them use the iPhone to put lipstick on a pig,” remarked one anonymous Apple exec.

What’s most interesting to us here is the ongoing reported discussion to drop AT&T in favor for Verizon. That chapter apparently begins just months after the original’s launch, with an investigative team (including Scott Forstall) ultimately concluding that Qualcomm‘s CDMA (or CDMA / GSM hybrid) chips would require a complete redesign of the device, not to mention a nasty lawsuit with AT&T over its exclusive contract (perhaps a minor issue, knowing Apple). Back then, Verizon wasn’t seen as a guaranteed improvement, and according to one executive privy to such meetings, the carrier switch has been discussed at least a half dozen times, with the general consensus always being that it would “cause as many problems as it solved.” We can’t imagine this is gonna help stem the perpetual VZW iPhone rumor mill.

Hit up the source link for the full tale, which does hit on a fundamental issue of the mobile industry going forward: as smartphone makers continue to push their devices’ capabilities, bandwidth concerns will continue to grow and carriers are likely to take the majority of the blame. If you ask us, David Fincher has just found his ideal follow-up to The Social Network — we’d especially love to see someone film the part where AT&T asks Steve Jobs to ditch the turtleneck and wear a suit when meeting with its board of directors.

Apple discussed Verizon switch ‘at least half a dozen times,’ and other stories about its AT&T relationship originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember NTP? The tiny company with a portfolio of patents on wireless email technology that wrung a $612 million settlement out of RIM in 2006 after years of litigation? Well, get ready to fall in love all over again, because the company just sued Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC, LG, and Motorola for the same thing. Given the company’s protracted history defending its patent portfolio — the RIM case alone took nearly five years and ultimately involved USPTO re-examining several patents, rejecting some and then ultimately declaring some others valid in 2009 — we can’t see any of this ending quickly or easily, especially with such formidable adversaries aligned as defendants. In particular, we’d note that Apple and Microsoft have a long history of cooperation and cross-licensing in the patent space, so we’re sure their lawyers are ready to party down in lawsuit town, and adding Google, Motorola, HTC, and LG to the mix isn’t going to make any of this easier for NTP. We’ll see what happens — this one’s going to be long and messy. PR after the break.

Continue reading NTP awakes, sues Apple, Microsoft, Google, HTC, LG, and Motorola over wireless email patents

NTP awakes, sues Apple, Microsoft, Google, HTC, LG, and Motorola over wireless email patents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Congratulations Verizon, you’re the latest wireless provider to lose a class-action early termination fee-related lawsuit! It’s a dispute that’s been circulating in courts since 2008, and while the settlement was agreed upon quickly, there were a few lingering appeals that have taken this long to get cleared up — and not in VZW’s favor. The issue at hand was the company’s $175 flat early termination fees, behavior that has proven legally naughty again and again when the same fee is levied regardless of whether you were one month or 20 months into your contract. Each customer named in the suit will receive approximately $87.50 for their troubles, a total of $21 million Verizon will have to pay out. That’s a bit more than AT&T got hit with back in January, but a whole heck of a lot less than Sprint’s massive $73 million fine.

Verizon loses ETF class action lawsuit, ordered to pay $21 million originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What happens when capacitors go bad, spewing out their tangerine innards like the ones in the photo above? Components die. In the early to mid naughties there was a rash of failures, the so-called “capacitor plague” that affected many manufacturers thanks to millions of bogus units filled with an electrolyte mixture that was a bit off. However, nobody was quite affected like Dell. The company took a $300 million charge in 2005 to cover costs related to the faulty machines that went out with these components, and now we’re getting a better picture of just how bad it was — and continues to be.

According to recently released documents stemming from a three year-old lawsuit, Dell not only knew about the bogus components but some of its employees were actively told to play dumb, one memo sent to customer service reps telling them to “avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had issues.” Meanwhile, sales teams were still selling funky OptiPlex machines, which during that period had a 97 percent failure rate according to Dell’s own study. (And you thought the Xbox 360 had problems.) With that on the minds of shoppers, plus Throttlegate and some other recent laptop quality issues, we have to think consumer confidence for Dell must be at an all-time low at the moment.

[Image courtesy of Bushtails]

Documents show that Dell knowingly sold defective computers, misled those needing support originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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