UPDATED 08:23 EDT / FEBRUARY 23 2012

Motorola Responds to Microsoft, Apple Corrects ABC’s Foxconn Expose

In today’s mobile roundup, we have Motorola’s response to Microsoft’s latest legal complaint, their participation at the Oscars, Apple’s troubles in China and Samsung’s Mobile World Congress offerings.

MoMo Willing To Settle as they Walk the Red Carpet

Motorola Mobility is willing to settle the dispute with Microsoft, who recently filed a complaint against them with the European Commission.  Microsoft claims that the Google-Motorola deal aims to kill video on the web, as they raise the price for licensing patents involving this technology.  The complaint they failed was in response to Motorola’s attempts to block the sale of their products using MoMo’s patents.

Spokeswoman for Motorola Genna Goatly said that, “Microsoft has touted the value of patent licensing for its own patents, but a fair resolution requires that Microsoft also recognize the value of the Motorola Mobility patents it is using.”

But this little hiccup won’t stop Motorola from shining with the stars as they created a special edition “Red Carpet” DROID RAZR MAXX with the Motorola ELITE SLIVER Bluetooth headset for the 84th Academy Awards on Sunday.

“Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nominees received the phone within a glamorous, gold sequined pouch, just big enough to keep the evening’s essentials,” stated the announcement put out by Motorola.  “Nominees for Best Supporting Actor, Best Actor and Best Director were given a high-end shaving kit, so they can keep their faces as smooth, beautiful and chiseled-looking as ever.”

Five lucky fans can also get theirs hands on the “Red Carpet” DROID RAZR MAXX by Motorola via a Twitter sweepstakes that kicks off  today, Thursday, February 23. Interested followers can join the sweepstakes by retweeting #RedCarpetRAZR.

Apple Responds to Foxconn Expose with Corrections in Tow

ABC Nightline’s iFactory: Inside Apple expose was met with a hoard of corrections and clarifications from Apple and Foxconn after it aired late Tuesday.

Apple focused on one worker’s claims that she works on 6,000 units for 10 hours each day, stating that what the worker said was lost in translation.

“In manufacturing parlance this is called deburring. Her line processes 3,000 units per shift, with two shifts per day for a total of 6,000,” Apple said in a statement.  “A single operator at Ms. Zhou’s station would deburr 3,000 iPads in a shift.”

While Foxconn addressed the salary issue, saying they “have over 75 percent of the employees in the category of earning at least 2,200 RMB ($349/month) basic compensation standard. That means they are earning 13.75 RMB ($2.18) per hour. If they work overtime on the weekend, they will earn 27 RMB ($4.28) per hour. In order to reach 3500 to be taxable, they will have to work 47 OT hours to reach 3,500.”

“If the overtime hours are in weekdays, they have to work around 63 hours per month to reach that level of salary to be taxable,” the statement read, adding that the assertion is only true “when applying to the entry-level workers while over 75 percent are already over the probation and earning more than 2,200 RMB basic salary.”

Flash Finds a Way onto the iPad

OnLive, the latest venture from Steve Perlman, a serial inventor and entrepreneur most famous for building Apple’s Quicktime video software and WebTV, released a new version of OnLive Desktop – an iPad application that lets users access a virtual Windows desktop and Windows applications housed on servers in the proverbial cloud.  The new version now inclused a browser equipped with Adobe Flash.

The older version was free to use but the addition of Adobe Flash raised the bar and the app now costs $4.99 per month.  Flash has been an elusive technology on iOS products, and while OnLive’s workaround is significant, it also comes at a transitional time for Flash, which is being abandoned by Adobe in favor of HTML5.

iPad Trademark Faces More Legal Battles

As for the iPad trademark issue, Apple is now facing legal hurdles from the Bank of China Ltd. and China Minsheng Banking Corp.  Both are creditors of Shenzhen Proview Technology and no sale could be deemed valid unless those creditors signed off the deal.

“We can’t make any agreements without the creditors,” Proview founder Rowell Yang said. “We are under the monitoring and control of the court.”

Aside from that, Ray Mai, the Shanghai-based lawyer who represented Proview in the 2009 talks with IPADL, stated that Apple only has themselves to blame since they did not properly secure rights for the China market.

“At that time, Proview was not in good condition,” said Mai, whose signature is on the sales agreement. “On one side is this nearly bankrupt company, on the other is one of the strongest companies in the world. When we signed, Apple dispatched a lot of famous lawyers in front of me, very big law firms.”

Samsung At MWC

Samsung’s done its own due diligence, filing for trademark names such as the Samsung Galaxy Rite, Samsung Galaxy Heir, Samsung Galaxy Awaken, and Samsung Galaxy Axiom.  Since the Mobile World Congress is just around the corner, people are hoping these newly named devices will make an appearance during the event.  Others are doubtful, since it’s unlikely that a manufacturer file for trademark just a couple of weeks before a product’s launch.

One thing we do know Samsung will be showcasing at MWC is its Learning Hub, its take on digital education.

“We’re going to launch the service in Korea late this month and then go global after April,” a Samsung executive said. “We’re consulting with major foreign educational content developers about possible collaboration.” The company plans to make it possible in the long term for anyone to post educational content online through the service.

And Samsung is also said to be unveiling the quad-core Exynos 4 for tablets and high-end smartphones at the MWC.  The processor has four Arm Cortex-A9 cores running at 200MHz to 1.5GHz, quad-core ARM Mali graphics, a 64-bit NEON media engine and dual-channel controller that supports LP-DDR2, DDR2 and DDR3 memory.


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