Hasta La Gadget!

Normally as quiet and retiring as a geek at the Homecoming dance, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been on an unusual e-mail spree in the weeks leading up to the iPad launch, according to multiple reports.

By our count, Jobs has sent at least four e-mails to eager Apple nerds asking about issues such as iPad tethering, future MacBook upgrades, open e-books and Picasa photo syncing.

On Tuesday morning, Cult of Mac posted an e-mail exchange between Jobs and an Apple customer inquiring about whether the iPad would support open (i.e., non-DRM) e-books. Like his past e-mails, Jobs’ reply was terse:

Yep.

Sent from my iPad

Jobs has been known to occasionally respond to e-mails from customers similar to the way a celebrity musician or movie star might write back to fan mail. Though extremely concise, his e-mails offer a tiny window into the workings of the famously secretive corporation.

This is also the first published e-mail from Jobs with the “Sent from my iPad” signature.

In another e-mail, Jobs also reportedly told an iPhone customer that the iPad could not be tethered to an iPhone for a 3G internet connection.

No.

Sent from my iPhone

And in another more amusing exchange posted last weekend, someone who likes both Google and Apple asks Jobs whether iTunes will sync with Google’s Picasa photo services, which includes face recognition, and the CEO uses the opportunity to diss his rival:

No, but iPhoto on the Mac has much better Faces and Places features.

Sent from my iPhone

Another e-mail, posted Monday by MacRumors, quotes Jobs telling an eager Apple customer “Not to worry” about the slower upgrade cycles for the MacBook Pro, even though Apple appears to be focusing most of its energy on the iPad. That would imply new MacBooks and MacBook Pros might soon be on the way.

And now the fun part. From this flurry of e-mails, we can extract a few key factoids about Jobs:

• He checks his e-mail about as often as most of us do — that is to say, obsessively.
• He’s still got hard feelings against Google’s Eric Schmidt, and the two have yet to settle their dispute like mature adults: arm-wrestling in the cafeteria.
• Even though the ability to read open e-books on the iPad is a big plus worth bragging about, apparently the iPad keyboard is too hard to type more than one word with. (We’re half-joking, but from our hands-on testing, the iPad’s virtual keyboard leaves a lot to be desired, and text-entry will likely be the iPad’s greatest challenge.)

Meanwhile, we can also add two more bullet points to the list of things the iPad can’t do:

• Tether with the iPhone;
• Sync with Google’s Picasa services.

See Also:

• Steve Jobs’ 6 Sneakiest Statements
• Rumor: Apple Considers iPhone Tethering Option

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Nothing sells papers (or ads) like turning a little corporate competition into something personal. Case in point, a New York Times piece from the weekend titled “Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal,” that opened with this rather ominous, one-sentence paragraph:

“It looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Cue the orchestra. The lengthy piece chronicling the relationship between the Silicon Valley titans was formed by two dozen interviews with industry watchers, investors, and current and former employees. It covers a timeline spread that began with Google and Apple working in harmony to prevent Microsoft’s domination of online services and mobile devices, and ends with Apple’s patent lawsuit against HTC that reeks of a proxy battle against Android and Google. According to the NYT then, the heart of the dispute is betrayal, or Jobs’ belief that Schmidt (a former Apple board member) “picked his pocket” by developing cellphones that “physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone.” Here’s how one especially feisty encounter is described:

“At one particularly heated meeting in 2008 on Google’s campus, Mr. Jobs angrily told Google executives that if they deployed a version of multitouch – the popular iPhone feature that allows users to control their devices with flicks of their fingers – he would sue. Two people briefed on the meeting described it as “fierce” and “heated.””

And that’s just the beginning. Read the rest after the break.

Continue reading Apple vs. Google gets personal: ‘Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt’ (video)

Apple vs. Google gets personal: ‘Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt’ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 9to5Mac, VentureBeat  |  New York Times, TBray  | Email this | Comments

Ämne: Re: Dear mr. Jobs
Från: Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>
Datum: 5 mars 2010 17.01.29 CET
Till: Jezper Söderlund <>
Return-Path: <sjobs@apple.com>

No.

Sent from my iPhone.

Well, that settles that.

Hey Steve, can the iPad tether with the iPhone? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The iPhone Blog  |  9to5Mac  | Email this | Comments

Looks like Apple’s going on the warpath, kids. Just a few months after Cupertino got into it with Nokia over phone patents, Apple’s filed suit against HTC, alleging that the company is infringing 20 patents “related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture, and hardware.” Steve, you have something to say?

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Okay then. We’re pulling the complaint filing now, we’ll let you know the exact details as soon as we learn them.

Update: HTC just gave us a statement — this is apparently coming totally out of the blue for them, since Apple hasn’t even served the complaint yet.

We only learned of Apple’s actions based on your stories and Apple’s press release. We have not been served yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years.

Update 2: We mean it when we say this was all just filed in the past few hours — it’s not yet in the court’s systems. We just got the PDFs and put the full list of claims from the federal lawsuit below, but remember not to take the names of the patents literally or directly, since they don’t mean much. We’ll poke each one apart and tease out what’s really at stake as we go along.

[We’ve now looked at each and every patent in both cases in-depth — check it out here.]

Update 3: We’ve just learned that Apple submitted over 700 pages of exhibits to the District Court, which is a little nuts. In addition, the ITC complaint lists a number of specific HTC handsets as exhibits, including the Nexus One, Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Touch Pro2, Tilt II, Pure, Imagio, Dream / G1, myTouch 3G, Hero, HD2, and Droid Eris. That’s really a full range of HTC phones, running both Android and Windows Mobile, with and without Sense / TouchFLO. Interestingly, the Android sets are specifically included because they run Android, while the WinMo sets are called out specifically for including DSP chips, not anything to do with Windows Mobile.

Apple sues HTC for infringing 20 iPhone patents originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to Steve Jobs, running Flash video on the iPad would cut its battery life from 10 hours to a measly 1.5. At least, that was his pitch to Wall Street Journal execs recently. But could it possibly be true?

Well, yes and no. Jobs is picking and choosing here between hypothetical versions of Flash. If the iPad version of Flash were to have hardware acceleration, which Flash 10.1 offered up for desktops (though not OS X), that wouldn’t be remotely the case. If Flash on the iPad were to support hardware video decoding where available, it wouldn’t require nearly as much CPU. You’d lose battery life, sure, the same way you lose battery life watching any type of video on any system, but nothing near as dramatic as 85%.

Of course, that hardware acceleration isn’t currently possible on Macs, because Adobe doesn’t have access to the appropriate APIs. So Jobs can easily on a imaginary version of Flash that doesn’t have hardware acceleration and come up with an imaginary battery life impact.

Jobs’s bigger fib might be his description of ditching Flash as “trivial.” It’s not. While HTML5 is good, it’s not great—yet. And even when it becomes great, it’ll take major sites years to make the switch—however long it takes for the majority of internet users to stop using outmoded browsers. And that won’t be for a very long time. Certainly longer than the first few generations of the iPad.

So. Would Flash make the iPad’s battery life only 1.5 hours? Maybe, maybe not. But the bigger question is: will we ever get the chance to find out for ourselves? [Gawker]