If you read any other tech blogs (which you of course don’t, you loyal things you), you’ve probably heard all about Apple’s lawsuit against HTC.
I’m not a lawyer, but just to bullet point it – Apple is saying HTC is infringing on several Of their patents. What’s so fascinating (aside from just the drama) is that the patents are not only insanely broad (as many conceptual patents can be), not only do they sometimes apply to just about any OS (phone or desktop) currently in use (and some classics as well), but a ton of the patented behaviors are things that happen on the OS level, not the hardware level.

This has led many pundits to posit that Apple is really targeting Google via HTC. Google’s already come out with a statement saying they support their partners, so they’re certainly not ignoring it. Still, I believe there’s more to it than just coming at Google sideways…

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HTC has already promised that the hot new Touch HD2, the first Windows Mobile handset to use a capacitive screen and sport a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU, will be coming to US carriers soon. Which carrier and when seems to be a carefully guarded secret, however.

Well, rumor junkies rejoice… This is all unconfirmed, however according to a post over at Brighthand, a leaked ROM has shown modules with the title TMOUS, which is traditionally short for T-Mobile USA.

They also claim that there is a rumored released around March. Let’s hope that like the Rhodium (Touch Pro 2) series, it eventually makes it onto all US carriers.

It’s interesting how married to Operating Systems people can become. My first computer was an Apple IIGS, but then we swiftly moved to Windows. I used to join in deriding Macs, then I got one. Mac OS, especially 10 and up, became my OS of choice. However, I still used Windows (and occasionally Linux) on a daily basis. I’m basically platform agnostic. A platform is a tool, and the one that works best for you is the best… for you. There is no perfect platform for everyone, for computer or phone.

I mention this because of discussions I’ve been having with some fellow techies. This week I finally broke down and bought a Pre. The reactions from my iPhone, WindowsMobile and Blackberry using friends (Sort of sad, but I don’t personally know a single Android user – no I’ve never met Justin) were almost comical in their predictability. I even got complaints about the Pre from a fellow Pre owner… because he’s really a Blackberry user. I’m not saying they’re wrong – I’m just saying the Pre is closer to my “ideal” phone than most of those other options (In fact, I recalled a doodle I drew ten years ago and it resembles the Pre to the point of scariness).

Every phone does its job in one way or another and every phone does it for someone. The cell market is really big enough for everyone. So how about we all just calm down and let people find the right solution?

So, why is the Pre my “perfect phone” (so far, anyway?)? Click the read link and find out.

[Warning – this thing is a fricking essay. I clearly have no life.]
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InsideSprintNow has leaked the Getting Started and User guides for the HTC hero (as well as an Activation Walkthrough). haven’t read it yet but, neat leak.

Tonight was a busy night.

We managed to get a hands-one with three phones we’ve been interested in, the Motorola CLIQ, the Sprint Hero, and the Palm Pixi.

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Holy cow, what a week. Every time Mordy or I sat down to write a post, something else happened. I’m going to try to condense it all into one week, going by topic. Bear with me:
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Here are some interesting things from DigitalLook, but not exactly interesting enough to be their own article (no offense to the vendors, who were all awesome)

Note that I do have photos, but I seems to be mangling the photo functions of the blog, so I will be holding off on adding them.
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While MoPocket Didn’t have the money to fly out to London yesterday, we did attend Digital Look in NY last night, where the Hero was the belle of HTC’s booth.

I didn’t get a lot of time with the Hero, due to the fact that just about everyone else there was trying to get some time with it. Still, first impressions are as follows:
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With all the news coming out of Mobile World Congress recently, I almost missed this one.
Apparently Microsoft was not only showing off their new WM6.5 OS, but also “dog-fooding” it (which is geek speak for product testing that aims to spot bugs before software hits the market).
Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo was handed one such device to test, and according to The Daily Telegraph, an unnamed Telstra executive was handed the device and proceeded to get pick-pocketed shortly thereafter.

This is more than just embarrassing for the parties involved, “What if news of those bugs is released early before a final version goes on sale. Those sorts of things could affect the shares of Microsoft,” industrial espionage expert Les Goldsmith said.

In a rare saves-the-day moment, Microsoft staff reported to APC that “the entire operating system and all the user data on the handset were remotely erased as soon as the theft was reported.“.

This raises some pretty interesting questions about what kind of power MS has over the new OS. Is this a “big brother” situation? Or is this whole thing just misquoted, or some sort of scare tactic since its a pretty unlikely feature to spend time to develop and include in an OS? I’ve written up some conspiracy theories on my personal blog, and I’m curious to hear what the public thinks…

Fans of HTC’s Windows Mobile line of devices are no doubt aware of the performance issues created by switching to the new Qualcomm chipset instead of the tried-and-true Intel or TI chips of the older devices.

If you are not familiar with the problem, here it is in a nutshell: Qualcomm’s mobile MSM processors are capable of high performance video playback using hardware acceleration… but in real life situations, they sort of stink at it. Video players like TCPMP and DivX Mobile seem to have a hard time playing full screen, especially at VGA resolution, often dropping frames left and right to keep up.

The reason, as outlined in this blog post at mobile-enthusiast, is that in order to take advantage of full video acceleration, the standard methods (DirectDraw, GDI, etc) won’t do. Rather, you need to use the proprietary Qualcomm Qtv driver, which will take almost all of the gruntwork of decoding/displaying a video, and push it to the hardware accelerator, freeing up the CPU for other things.

Thankfully, HTC fans can rejoice knowing that some of the newer media players, such as CorePlayer 1.3, support Qtv output (in at least partial forms), which will give you roughly the equivalent of DVD-quality video encoded in DivX on your mobile screen.

For more details, read the full write up here.