On Monday night the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued an order to temporarily stop the Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) takeover of Motorola’s wireless group. Huawei was worried it’s intellectual property and wireless patents that it shared with Motorola could be accessed by Nokia.
The District Court said, “Defendant Motorola [is] hereby ordered not to disclose any of the Plaintiff’s confidential information to Defendant Nokia Siemens Networks.” The court also ordered Motorola and NSN to give Huawei notice if China’s Ministry of Commerce, the last regulating body holding up the sale, takes any action regarding the purchase.
It’s only fair that Huawei would get to protect it’s patents and intellectual property from it’s competitors in the market like NSN.
Well, that didn’t take long at all: in response to Huawei’s lawsuit yesterday over concerns that Motorola could tell its dirty secrets to Nokia Siemens Networks in the wake of their $1.2 billion unit sale, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has issued a temporary ruling banning Motorola from disclosing any Huawei proprietary information to NSN. Technically, we suppose that doesn’t prevent the sale — which the two companies had hoped to close in early 2011 — from going through unabated, but in reality it probably does since there’s no clean way for the transfer to happen without including information that Huawei had previously shared with Moto. We’re sure this will take a little time to work itself out, but for the interim, looks like Huawei’s gotten its wish.
This has been a big month or so for leaked devices and earlier this week we saw some leaked pics of the Nokia MeeGo device. We have also seen some pics of the ST-Ericsson U8500 leak as well. Today another leak has turned up with a pic of a Nokia device and it looks a lot like the reference platform for that U8500.
The reference platform is thought to be running a pair of 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores. The platform would surely make for an interesting mobile device. There are few facts about the leaked device at this point.
We do know that Nokia is supposed to be brining the U8500 platform to market in an upcoming device. A lot of questions remain and we aren’t sure what the leaked pics mean for new devices coming to market just yet. The U8500 platform is expected to hit in the first half of 2011 so we will know what’s what in a few months at least.
Yesterday’s leaked image of a purported Nokia tablet device seems to have been more informative than we initially believed it to be. An eagle-eyed forum member over on mobile-review has spotted the similarity between it and a reference platform for ST-Ericsson’s U8500 system-on-chip. Last we heard, that little powerhouse was running a pair of 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 cores, so excuse us if we find the prospect of it driving Nokia’s next flagship a rather exciting one. You can see video of the reference device in question after the break — it ends on the delicious and unequivocal assertion from the ST-Ericsson rep that Nokia has signed up to deliver the U8500 in an upcoming device. Bear in mind, however, that the video is from November of last year and we still don’t know for sure that the Nokia slate above is its MeeGo progenitor or just a prototype. Either way, the U8500 is expected in smartphones at some point in the first half of this year, which kind of fits Nokia’s roadmap, no?
After tying off a $1.2 billion deal last July, Motorola and Nokia Siemens Networks — the new owner of Moto’s telecom infrastructure business — have had a little roadblock thrown in their way courtesy of China’s Huawei. Turns out Moto and Huawei had a partnership in place that involved the former reselling the latter’s equipment, which necessitated some rather cozy information sharing — and now Huawei’s concerned that Motorola might be turning over some or all of that intellectual property to NSN as a part of the sale. You’d think this is the sort of thing that would’ve been squared away prior to inking a ten-figure deal, but Huawei says that it “had not been given assurance that Motorola would not transfer proprietary information” over to NSN, one of Huawei’s fiercest rivals in the infrastructure biz… so you can kinda understand their concern. More on this as it develops.
What looks to be a prototype Nokia tablet running MeeGo has surfaced, though it’s unclear whether it’s an authentic slate, an oversized smartphone or merely a development device for the Intel/Nokia collaborative platform itself. Discovered over at mobile-review, the specific details of the tablet are unknown, but it has a much thinner screen bezel than the N900.
Nokia was previously believed to be working on a large-screen tablet called the Z500 but rumors suggested that it had been cancelled after carriers expressed reserves over its potential pricing. Whether this is the same device or something different remains to be seen.
The plane icon in the top left-hand corner would seem to suggest an “Airplane” mode with wireless options switched off, and we’re assuming – given Nokia’s phone background – that means integrated WiFi, Bluetooth and probably some form of 3G/UMTS.
Consider this little slice of photography uncorroborated for now, but we just couldn’t ignore a device that’s ostensibly running MeeGo software while sporting a bold Nokia logo front and center on its shell. This mysterious slate has cropped up over at the mobile-review forums, where amateur sleuthing has already noted that the landscape centering of the Nokia logo is atypical — both the N97 and N900 have it off-center — which may well suggest this is a landscape-centric tablet first and a phone second (if at all!). Assuming the brand name imprint is the same size as on the N8 (Nokia loves to standardize those), we could be looking at a 4.5-inch screen on what is either an internal test device, or, more optimistically, a prototype for actual hardware. It’s worth noting that the MeeGo seen on board is of the stock variety, whereas Nokia intends to ship its new flagship device(s) with an as-yet-unseen set of UI customizations collectively known as Harmattan. So we’re certainly not looking at anything close to a final hardware / software pairing, but we are looking at something.
When your core business is as wrapped up in emerging markets as Nokia’s is, then you’d better know a little something about KIRFs — those cheap handset clones that our Chinese friends can often stamp out faster than the time it takes for Nokia to ship a handset after its announcement. Nokia executive board member, Esko Aho, says that one out of every five cellphones now sold around the world (primarily in Asia, Latin America, and some parts of Europe) is an illegal or unlicensed clone. We’ve certainly seen more than our share when browsing the Shenzhen markets of China. Gartner claims the number to be even higher than 20 percent. While we poke fun at KIRFs around here for their shoddy software, comically similar branding (Nokla!), and cheapo materials, they’ve clearly become a very serious issue for top-tier cellphone manufacturers. How serious we’ll see on January 27th when Nokia announces its fourth quarter results.
The ongoing war between Apple and Nokia took another heated step late Wednesday evening, as the Cupertino-based company revealed they would be suing Nokia in the United Kingdom, in hopes of invalidating a particular touchscreen patent. The patent that Apple is looking to invalidate is the touchscreen scrolling patent that Nokia used to sue Apple in Germany, way back in September of 2010.
As of right now, the total count for patent disputes going on between the pair of companies is up to 37. Considering Nokia started the whole thing, most recently, it’s no surprise that Apple is continuing to push the necessary buttons to make the legal actions continue. As we’ve seen in the past, Apple has already moved one legal battle to another court district. With all of the details swirling around, and more legal actions obviously going to take place into the distant future, it will be interesting to see how this whole thing turns out, one way or another.
As for the most recent suit, Apple hasn’t commented on it, while Nokia has stated they will put up a strong defense against the current action.
