Red Carpet Diamonds

Nokia is gearing up for some big smartphone announcements at Mobile World Congress next week, and not all are related to Windows Phone. In addition to a few Windows Phone handsets, the company is also teasing a camera-centric Symbian phone with one of the largest camera sensors on a mobile phone yet.

First, the Symbian outlier: the Nokia 803 will have a large imaging sensor that will be Nokia's big step up to 1080p video, according to PocketNow. With a 4-inch AMOLED screen, the phone will be an all-touchscreen successor to the Nokia N8, a phone revered for its photo prowess. Nokia's teaser commercial offers little information, but has some 1080p shots of winter scenes.

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Microsoft today filed a competition law complaint against Motorola Mobility with the European Commission, claiming that the company—and, by extension, its soon-to-be-owner Google—is charging outrageously high licensing fees for patents essential to complying with industry standards.

In a blog post titled "Google, Please Don't Kill Video on the Web," Microsoft general counsel Dave Heiner said Motorola "is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products" by charging unusually high fees for patents related to the H.264 video standard. On a $1,000 laptop, Motorola wants a royalty of $22.50, Microsoft claims. Microsoft said its complaint, which is not a publicly available document, is filed against both Motorola and Google.

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Comcast is launching its own video streaming service this week, the company announced on Tuesday. Dubbed "Xfinity Streampix," the new service appears to address concerns that customers are increasingly attracted to online services such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and Hulu Plus.

Comcast already offers limited streaming access to current TV shows and other content to cable subscribers via its Xfinity TV service. Xfinity Streampix, on the other hand, will give users access to an expanded library of TV shows and movies. Disney-ABC Television Group, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. Digital Distribution, and Cookie Jar Entertainment have signed on as launch partners for the service, which goes live on Thursday.

Like Xfinity TV, Streampix will be included in certain cable subscription packages. However, it will also be offered as a $4.99 per month add-on for other customers. Unfortunately, Comcast appears to be offering the service only to existing video services subscribers; if you're merely paying Comcast for its high speed Internet service, you won't be able to add Streampix.

Customers will be able to access Streampix content away from home via the Xfinity TV website and iPad app. Comcast said it plans to expand access to consoles like Xbox 360 as well as mobile devices running Android "in the coming year."

Given the fact that a cable box isn't needed to access the content, we see little reason why Comcast isn't offering a version of the service to its Internet-only subscribers. These users still have no other choice but to subscribe to competing services like Netflix, which already have much larger libraries of content to choose from and are already available on more devices.

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Canonical has announced a new product called Ubuntu for Android that will bring the popular Linux distribution to high-end Android smartphones. The product consists of a complete Ubuntu desktop experience that is intended to be installed on the device alongside the standard Android environment.

Users will be able to run Ubuntu from their phone when they plug the device into a dock that connects to a keyboard and monitor. The underlying concept is similar to that of the WebTop environment that Motorola ships on the Atrix handset and other devices.

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Version 2.0 of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS is available for owners of the tablet as of today, Research In Motion announced. The update will finally add a native e-mail application to the tablet, among other new features, ten months after the tablet's initial release.

The BlackBerry PlayBook was derided upon its release for its lack of e-mail and calendar apps without an accompanying BlackBerry smartphone to feed it that information. The new version of the OS gives users a unified inbox that can not only handle e-mail, but also messages in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

That social network integration extends to the Calendar and Contacts apps, which can be automatically populated with content pulled from the services above. One of the most popular apps from RIM, BlackBerry Messenger, remains absent from the company's tablet.

The PlayBook went through rounds of price cuts and deals from retailers last fall, and received a flat price cut following the release of the Kindle Fire. The base 16GB WiFi model now retails for around $200.

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Google was caught last week bypassing default privacy settings in the Safari browser in order to serve up tracking cookies. The company claimed the situation was an accident and limited only to the Safari Web browser, but today Microsoft claimed Google is doing much the same thing with Internet Explorer.

In a blog post titled "Google bypassing user privacy settings" Microsoft's IE Corporate Vice President Dean Hachamovitch states that "When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies."

Hachamovitch explains that IE's default configuration blocks third-party cookies unless presented with a "P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) Compact Policy Statement" indicating that the site will not use the cookie to track the user. Microsoft accuses Google of sending a string of text that tricks the browser into thinking the cookie won't be used for tracking. "By sending this text, Google bypasses the cookie protection and enables its third-party cookies to be allowed rather than blocked," Microsoft said.

The text allegedly sent by Google actually reads "This is not a P3P policy" and includes a link to a Google page which says cookies used to secure and authenticate Google users are needed to store user preferences, and that the P3P protocol "was not designed with situations like these in mind."

Microsoft said it has contacted Google to ask the company to "commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers." Microsoft also updated the Tracking Protection Lists in IE9 to prevent the tracking described by Hachamovitch in the blog post. Ars has contacted Google to see if the company has any response to the Microsoft allegations, and we'll update this post if we hear back.

UPDATE: It turns out Facebook and many other sites are using an almost identical scheme to override Internet Explorer's privacy setting, according to privacy researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University. "Companies have discovered that they can lie in their [P3P policies] and nobody bothers to do anything about it," Cranor wrote in a recent blog post.

UPDATE 2: Google has gotten back to us with a lengthy reply, arguing that Microsoft's reliance on P3P forces outdated practices onto modern websites, and points to a study conducted in 2010 (the Carnegie Mellon research from Cranor and her colleagues) that studied 33,000 sites and found about a third of them were circumventing P3P in Internet Explorer.

"Microsoft uses a 'self-declaration' protocol (known as 'P3P') dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form," Google Senior VP of Communications and Policy Rachel Whetstone says in a statement e-mailed to Ars. "It is well known—including by Microsoft—that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality."

Facebook's "Like" button, the ability to sign into websites using your Google account "and hundreds more modern Web services" would be broken by Microsoft's P3P policy, Google says. "It is well known that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing this web functionality," Whetstone said. "Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational."

That 2010 research even calls out Microsoft's own msn.com and live.com for providing invalid P3P policy statements. The research paper further states that "Microsoft's support website recommends the use of invalid CPs as a work-around for a problem in IE."

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As an expected early March reveal for the third-generation iPad 3 approaches, details are leaking from Chinese sources. New photos detail what is claimed to be the logic board for an iPad 3, sporting an "A5X" processor. Pictures of the rear casing show a more tapered rear panel with what appears to be a lens opening similar to that of the iPhone 4S, suggesting a possible 8MP rear camera. These new leaks support earlier rumors that the iPad 3 would get an improved dual-core processor and a serious bump in camera resolution.

MacRumors published an image discovered on a Chinese forum post of a purported iPad 3 logic board. The board sports a processor labelled "A5X," suggesting that it's a revision of the current dual-core A5 processor used in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. Several signs pointed to the possibility that Apple could move to a quad-core design for its next-gen mobile processor, and earlier rumors suggested this was so. However, a recent report from The Verge indicated that the processor would retain the same dual-core processor with improved Imagination Technologies GPU cores. An "A5X" (A5 eXtreme?) would fit in with that description.

The A5 is no slouch in general processing, but improved graphics processing would be especially useful if the iPad 3 contains a 2048 x 1536 pixel "Retina" display. Such a display has long been predicted, and has been all but confirmed by a leak of upcoming display parts sporting doubled linear resolution last week. Whatever other improvements an iPad 3 might have, a Retina display seems a sure bet.

MacRumors also recently highlighted images of the purported rear unibody enclosure of the iPad 3 published by NextMedia, a Taiwanese news source that publishes the Apple Daily tabloid. While NextMedia is not considered a highly reliable rumor source, the images are similar to others of the same purported iPad 3 parts that have leaked out of China.

In particular, the newer images reveal a more gradual taper of the rear of the iPad compared to the iPad 2, as well as a much larger lens opening for the rear-facing camera. Hiding behind that larger lens opening is what looks to be a camera module similar to that of the iPhone 4S. An earlier rumor suggested that the updated iPad would get camera hardware comparable to that of the iPhone 4S, with a 720p front-facing "FaceTime HD" camera, and an 8MP rear-facing camera. These images seem to support that notion, though we're not sure such expensive parts will make it into a $499 device. Consider us cautiously optimistic that this rumor is true.

The next iPad hardware revision is expected to be announced during a special media event on or around March 7.

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Google's Chrome development team is working on a system to automatically generate passwords, which would help users secure their online identities with passwords that would be diversified across different sites, and are randomized and thus harder to guess. Detailed in developer documentation on the Chromium Project site, the system would detect account sign-up pages and "add a small UI element to the password field" giving the user the option of letting Chrome manage the password for them.

Initial versions of the system would create passwords on an individual basis, at the user's request. But Google's development team states that "At some point in the future it might also be possible for us to automatically change all of a user's passwords when we realize that their account is hijacked." The developer documentation notes that the feature would make Google "a higher value hijacking target," than it already is, although "Google is already a high value target so this shouldn't change much."

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A group of researchers at Georgia Tech have created a new piece of software called BrailleTouch that allows users to type on a smartphone without looking at the screen. It takes advantage of gestures and multitouch interaction to support a chorded typing system that is modeled after Braille keyboards.

A group of visually impaired test subjects using the application on an iPhone were reportedly able to type at up to 32 words per minute with 92 percent accuracy. This speed is said to be considerably faster than what has previously been achieved with other "eyes-free" text input prototypes.

The researchers contend that the chorded typing system used by BrailleTouch is easy to learn and that it could potentially be useful to a broader audience, including sighted users who want to be able to type on their phone without looking. The interface has six dots, three on each side of the screen. The user holds the phone in landscape orientation with the screen facing away from them and types by tapping the dots.

"Research has shown that chorded, or gesture-based, texting is a viable solution for eyes-free written communication in the future, making obsolete the need for users to look at their devices while inputting text on them," the project's lead researcher, Mario Romero, told is in a statement.

The researchers intend to distribute the program under an open source software license. They are also working on ports to other platforms, including Android. For additional details about the software, you can reader a paper (PDF) published by the researchers. You can also see it in action in a YouTube video.

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A report from Taiwanese news publication DigiTimes claims that Google could launch Android 5, codenamed Jelly Bean, in the second quarter of 2012. The report cites unnamed manufacturers in the supply chain.

The report indicates that Jelly Bean will integrate "Chrome system functions." DigiTimes also claims that Google aims to bring Android 5 to the netbook and laptop market. These rumors together raise questions about whether Google is looking at a potential path forward for converging Android and Chrome OS. It's worth noting that Google recently launched an Android port of the Chrome Web browser, which is now in public beta for Android 4.

DigiTimes further claims that hardware manufacturers will be able to produce dual-operating system tablet devices that run Android 5 and Windows 8. Such products will reportedly allow the user to switch between the operating systems without having to reboot, which distinguishes them from traditional dual-boot configurations.

DigiTimes has a mixed track record on rumors, so its claims regarding Android 5 should be taken with a grain of salt. The rumored second quarter release date seems dubious in light of how long previous Android development cycles have taken, but it's possible that the work Google did to overhaul the platform during the transition between Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich has allowed the company to accelerate development.

As BGR pointed out in its coverage of the DigiTimes report, moving Android to a faster release cycle could seriously exacerbate the fragmentation caused by Android's version spread. Many popular Android handsets aren't scheduled to be updated to Android 4 until the second half of this year, so it's not clear what a Q2 release of Android 5 would mean for the hardware vendors that are struggling to get Android 4 out the door.

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The Spark tablet is now available for preorder from the Make Play Live website. Registering for a preorder doesn't require a credit card and will secure a place in line to purchase the tablet when it is finally available later this year. The product is expected to ship to customers in May.

KDE developer Aaron Seigo announced the Spark last month and revealed that it will ship with a tablet-friendly user interface based on KDE's Plasma environment. Under the hood, the Spark runs the Mer platform, which is a community-driven mobile Linux environment based on the MeeGo project.

The Spark will have a 1GHz ARM CPU, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, and an 800x480 display. Seigo has confirmed that it's based on the Zenithink C71, an Android tablet produced by a Shenzhen manufacturer. The retail price of the Spark hasn't been finalized yet, the developers are aiming for €200 ($262).

The tablet sets a relatively high standard of openness. The software environment is built with open components from the KDE and Mer projects, both of which are community-driven and welcome the participation of independent developers. Users can also optionally choose to replace the operating system that is installed on the device. In a blog post about the product's openness, Seigo explained that the only parts that aren't completely open yet are some of the hardware drivers.

"Right now we're still stuck with a few binary drivers which is not a perfect situation. With time I'm confident we'll get the binary drivers out of the picture, one by one, even if it takes time, effort and some pain," he wrote. "We've already managed to get source for some drivers that were not previously available so the trajectory is right."

Seigo also documented the answers to some frequently asked questions about the Spark in another recent blog post.

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A German court ruled on Thursday that Motorola's smartphones infringe on an Apple patent that covers certain implementations of the iPhone's "slide-to-unlock" feature. Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Guntz of the Munich I Regional Court awarded Apple a permanent injunction it can enforce against the sale or distribution of Motorola's Android-based smartphones within the country.

The patent in question, EP1964022 "Unlocking a Device by Performing Gestures on an Unlock Image," was already at the center of a patent dispute between Apple and Samsung in The Netherlands. A judge there did not grant a preliminary injunction against Samsung devices on the basis that he believed the patent may be ruled invalid.

The German court disagreed, noting that two different "slide-to-unlock" implementations used in Mototrola's Android smartphones violated the claims of that patent. The court ruled that the Xoom tablet's particular implementation did not infringe on Apple's patented claims, however.

Apple is asserting the same patent against Samsung in Germany, as well. The win today makes it more likely that German courts could rule against Samsung or other Android handset makers based on this patent. However, it is currently subject to a validity review in a separate court case; if Apple wins injunctions which are later overturned because the patent is ruled invalid, it will be required by German law to pay out damages to Motorola and any others affected by such injunctions.

The "slide-to-unlock" decision follows a recent win Apple gained over Motorola concerning standards-essential 3G patents, and reverses a string of losses against Motorola in Germany. Apple and Motorola are also currently duking it out over smartphone patents in US District Court as well as at the ITC.

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Motorola has laid bare the Android 4 upgrade plans for all of its recent phones, and many devices won't get the upgrade until the third quarter of this year. Some, like the Motorola Xoom and the international version of the Motorola Droid Razr, will get the upgrades in the second quarter, and some phones under two years old may languish with Android 2.3 Gingerbread or 2.2 Froyo.

An unusual selection of devices have concrete Android 4 upgrade trajectories: the Atrix 2, Photon 4G, and Xoom 2 are all scheduled for third-quarter updates, while the higher-profile Droid Bionic, Droid Razr, and Droid Razr Maxx are still in the "evaluation and planning" stages. Given how recently these phones were released, they will definitely make the Android 4 cut; it's just a matter of when.

Some of the company's phones from summer 2010 seem like they will not make the cut. The Droid 2, Defy, and Droid X don't appear to have made it to evaluation and planning considerations, but instead are listed alongside the most recent upgrade currently available (2.2 or 2.3). Of course, by the time the rest of Motorola's devices finally receive Android 4, those phones will have release dates over two years in the past, which means it will be hardware upgrade time for most conventional owners. 

Motorola did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

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The privacy controversy following the public blowup over Path's uploading of user data to its servers has now grabbed the attention of Congress, which is now looking to Apple for answers. US House Representatives Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and G. K. Butterfield (D-NC) sent a joint letter on Wednesday to Apple CEO Tim Cook to inquire about the incident and whether Apple is making it too easy for iOS developers to collect user data without users' permission or knowledge. Apple, for its part, has acknowledged the problem and says it plans to issue a software update that will help address the issue of user consent.

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In the world of consumer electronics, it's common for companies to create a range of products that are all variations on a theme, containing slightly faster processors or a bit more memory. These products serve two important functions for their producers: they put the price of entry within reach of more consumers, and they induce those with a bit more cash to take steps up the product ladder and purchase a more expensive version. However, a study that has just been released by the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the companies that take this tack have to be careful about how they go about things. Creating a product range by crippling an existing product can work against the company if word filters out.

The study was motivated in part because of a classic example that backfired. IBM once produced a pair of laser printers that differed solely in terms of their rate of output. The lower page-per-minute version, however, actually required that IBM install a specialized chip that throttled the normal printer's output—it took more work to produce, and cost more to make. That approach did not go over well with purchasers, and the authors are able to cite a history of similar products that resulted in a distinctive (and derogatory) vocabulary: "crippleware," "product sabotage," "anti-features," "defective by design," and "damaged goods."

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Cisco came up with an interesting prediction in its latest forecast of global mobile data traffic: by the end of this year, there will be more Internet-connected mobile devices than people on Earth.

"By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on Earth, and by 2016 there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita," Cisco said in its Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update released today. "There will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices in 2016... exceeding the world's population at that time (7.3 billion)."

The numbers include not just phones but tablets, laptops, handheld gaming consoles, e-readers, in-car entertainment systems, digital photo frames, cameras, and "machine-to-machine modules." That latter category includes applications such as using wireless networks to update digital billboards.

Global mobile data traffic doubled for the fourth year in a row in 2011, and will grow 18-fold by 2016, hitting 130 exabytes a year (the equivalent of 33 billion DVDs, 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files, or 813 quadrillion text messages), Cisco said. Not surprisingly, streaming content, video in particular, is expected to play a huge role in increasing data traffic. Good news for users: mobile network speeds will increase nine-fold by 2016. Bad news: the days of unlimited data plans seem to be expiring quickly, with few exceptions.

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UPDATE: Google has now received the all-clear from the US Department of Justice's antitrust division, which announced this afternoon that it has closed its investigation. The Justice Department also approved the $4.5 billion sale of Nortel patents to Apple, Microsoft, and RIM, and the sale of Novell patents to Apple.

Original story: European Union officials gave Google regulatory approval for its acquisition of Motorola Mobility today. The deal is expected to gain approval from the US Justice Department later this week.

"We have approved the acquisition... because upon careful examination, this transaction does not itself raise competition issues," EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement, according to Reuters. Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola is driven largely by the device maker's portfolio of 17,000 patents, which Google hopes to use to protect Android from patent lawsuits, and perhaps launch a few lawsuits of its own.

The possibility that Google might abuse this patent portfolio was not worrying enough to lead the EU to block the merger. But Almunia said European authorities reserve the right to monitor Google's handling of the patents, and they reserve the right to reopen their inquiries based on future actions. "This merger decision should not and will not mean that we are not concerned by the possibility that, once Google is the owner of this portfolio, Google can abuse these patents, linking some patents with its Android devices. This is our worry," Reuters quotes him as telling reporters.

When Google announced the acquisition, it expected to close the deal by the end of 2011 or early 2012. It is still on track to meet that goal, if US approval comes this week as expected.

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A teardown of the recently released Motorola Droid 4 reveals some quirky features, iFixit has revealed. The phone received a paltry score of 4 out of 10 for user repairability, but its innards contained some unusual wonders.

Though the Droid 4 comes with a rear panel removal tool that looks like a wind-up key, taking the back cover off revealed a sticker saying the battery is not user-removable, a big departure for Motorola's Droid phones. The battery is held in with two Torx screws and a generous amount of adhesive—not insurmountable, but it appears Motorola wants the days of the pop-out battery to be over sooner rather than later.

Another of the more unfortunate features of the Droid 4 is that, unlike the Droid 3 that came out only six months ago, the keyboard's pressure sensors are attached to the back of the motherboard. If one gets worn out, the entire motherboard has to be replaced. iFixit also found that that the raised rubber over the pressure contacts are in the shape of the letters they correspond to, a very odd design choice that they (and we) can't see much reason for, other than ease of alignment. Overall, the authors praised the design and usability of the keyboard for texting.

More positively, the Droid 4's display glass and LCD are separate pieces, so if owners manage to break the first but not the second, they can get away without having to replace both. On the downside, owners would have to take the entire phone apart to separate and replace those pieces.

The Droid 4's 4 out of 10 score in user repairability is bested by the Droid 3's 6 out 10. We'd argue the Droid 4's superior QWERTY keyboard is worth that step down.

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ThinkGeek announced on Monday a new iCade-compatible gaming controller called the iCade 8-bitty. The D-pad style controller will get its first public showing at the 2012 Toy Fair in New York City this week.

The iCade 8-bitty looks a bit like the classic NES D-pad controller, but redone with fake wood veneer reminiscent of Atari consoles form the 1970s. It connects to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using Bluetooth, and is compatible with a growing number of game titles including Atari Arcade Classics, Pac-Man, and Frogger Decades, among others. Developers can add support for all iCade devices using a free SDK.

ThinkGeek hasn't announced when the 8-bitty will ship except to say it will be sometime "later this year." At $24.99, though, it will be much less expensive than the original (and in our view, excellent) $99.99 iCade iPad cabinet.

Ion, which helped ThinkGeek turn the the original iCade from an April Fool's joke into a real product, recently unveiled its own iCade devices at CES this year. The expanding line now includes an iCade Jr for iPhones and iPod touches, the iCade Mobile for iPhone and Android devices, and the iCade Core fighter stick.

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Samsung has announced plans to release a "Galaxy Tab 2," an official Android 4.0 follow-up to the first Galaxy Tab released in October 2010. The 7.0-inch Galaxy Tab 2's specs are underwhelming compared to the offshoot Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, a weird prospect given that the Tab 7.0 Plus is meant to be a bargain model.

The Galaxy Tab 2 will have a 1GHz dual-core processor of unspecified make, 1GB of RAM, a 3-megapixel "fixed-focus" rear camera, and a VGA-front facing camera. The tablet will be able to connect to both WiFi and HSPA+ networks, though Samsung has not yet announced a carrier. The whole thing will run on a 4,000mAh battery, and the 8GB/16GB/32GB storage options can be supplemented by a microSD card slot, up to an extra 32GB.

The Tab 2 comes only months after the Tab 7.0 Plus, which was released at a two-year contract price of $249 to compete with the Kindle Fire (through an extra $10 charge over the two years, customers would still end up paying the same $499 starting price as the original Tab). Despite the Tab 7.0 Plus's low starting price, it has slightly better specs than the Tab 2: a 1.2GHz processor and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.

The Tab 2 will come with Android 4.0, which is a plus, though no release date or prices have been announced yet. The mitigated specs and may mean the tablet could be released off of a contract, finally, for a reasonable price.

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