A little over five years ago, Apple and Motorola were still buddies. Although Apple had famously announced its intention to drop the PowerPC processors manufactured by Motorola (and IBM) in favor of Intel's x86 architecture, the companies were cooperating on the launch of a new Motorola phone, the ROKR (the first handset with any iTunes integration). My, how times have changed. Apple and Motorola are battling for mobile phone market share, and the war is moving further away from store shelves and into the courtrooms with a new patent infringement lawsuit.

Patently Apple was first to report that, late Friday, Apple filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Motorola in the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, both mentioning the Droid by name. One lawsuit accuses Motorola of infringing on Apple's multitouch patents. The other targets Motorola's alleged infringement of patents covering smartphone user interface elements. 

Windows Phone 7 from an iPhone user's perspective : Most Windows Phone 7 early adopters will come to the platform after using a competing smartphone OS. One iPhone user's impressions of Windows Phone 7 inside.

Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04: During a keynote presentation at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed that the new Unity environment will be the default desktop shell across both the desktop and netbook versions of Ubuntu in version 11.04.

The tablet market is starting to heat up, with Apple moving 7.5 million iPads so far this year, Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Tab rolling out next month, and RIM set to launch its Playbook first quarter next year. Netbook maker Asustek will throw itself into the ring beginning in January next year, starting with a Windows 7-based tablet and following that up with several Windows 7 and Android tablets.

Asustek president Jerry Shen told DigiTimes that the company has moved an additional 200 technicians into its tablet R&D efforts. The first fruit of that labor will be a 12" Windows 7 tablet, planned to launch in January next year. Shen said that the company worked directly with Microsoft to "enhance" several technologies like touch control and user interface. Such changes would be critical to the success of the tablet, as Windows 7 (even with its numerous improvements for tablet use) isn't well suited for touch input.

The company plans to follow up the launch of that product with two 7" tablets and two 9" tablets later in 2011. One of the 7" models will be WiFi-only, while the other will include 3G networking capabilities and "phone functions." One of the 9" models will use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and run Android, while the other will likely use an Atom processor and run Windows 7.

Shen said he expects that tablets will be a major battlefield for ASUS in 2011. Given that every major vendor is scrambling to offer an answer to the iPad, it appears tablets are shaping up to be a major battlefield for the entire computing industry.

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Apple's stellar fiscal fourth quarter results continue to break records for the company. It sold 14.1 million iPhones, and its $20 billion in revenue topped one of Microsoft's best quarters ever. Now, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics, the iPhone has catapulted Apple past both RIM and Sony Ericsson to make the company the fourth largest mobile phone vendor in the world.

Apple's sales of 14.1 million iPhones was enough to capture 4.3 percent of the global mobile phone market for the last quarter. That's double the roughly 2 percent market share the company managed this same time last year.

Despite the boost in ranking, however, Apple still has a tough road ahead to move into one of the top three positions. Nokia is still the global leader with 33.7 percent market share, while Samsung grabbed 21.8 percent and LG held on to 8.7 percent. All three of those vendors still sell millions of feature phones in addition to smartphones, though sales of those devices has been slowly waning as smartphones increase in popularity.

But Apple doesn't plan on backsliding, either. "We've now passed RIM—and I don't see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future," CEO Steve Jobs boasted during Apple's most recent quarterly earnings call.

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Apple may be attempting to embed a custom, writeable SIM chip in future iPhones according to a report by GigaOm. The SIM module could enable Apple to sell iPhones directly to users with little or no direct carrier involvement.

According to GigaOm's sources from inside some European carriers, Apple is working with SIM card manufacturer Gemalto to create a custom SIM chip that would be embedded in the iPhone itself. Instead of popping physical SIM cards in and out of an iPhone, the SIM can be reconfigured to work on a different carrier by uploading a small file with carrier-specific data to the module's flash memory. These files could be uploaded via a Dock connector or over-the-air via the App Store or directly from a carrier.

The system is said to be particularly useful for the European market, where many carriers compete for customers and users frequently roam outside of their local coverage area. A simple phone call may be all that's required to update the internal SIM to work on a different carrier's network. GigaOm notes that representatives from several French mobile carriers have visited Apple's Cupertino headquarters recently, ostensibly to discuss the new SIM updating mechanism.

With this system in place, Apple could more easily offer iPhones directly to consumers via retail or online, allowing them to choose any available carrier at the time of purchase—which could then be easily encoded into the SIM by Apple or the customer when connecting to iTunes. Alternately, buyers to take the devices to a carrier of choice for activation.

In the domestic market the system may not make as much sense, unless it enabled easy configuration to use on CDMA and/or upcoming LTE-based 4G networks.

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The availability of the elusive white version of the iPhone 4 has been delayed by Apple yet again. Those not satisfied with the black version will now be forced to wait until at least spring 2011 to get a shiny bright white one.

"Manufacturing challenges" first delayed release of the white model until a month after the iPhone 4 launched, with CEO Steve Jobs insisting during a press conference that they were on track to ship at the end of this past July. However, just a week following Jobs' comments, the company released a statement saying the white model was being pushed back to sometime late in 2010.

Pity the poor netbook. It used to be cool, but every month there's yet more talk of the new kid on the block, the tablet, stealing its marketshare. And it's not just that consumers are deciding between a netbook and a tablet, and picking the latter over the former—the ongoing economic slump also factors into the steady trickle of reports, anecdotes, and industry executive comments on the phenomenon.

The latest data point supporting the tablet/netbook cannibalization trend comes from IDC, which attributes some of the softness in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to tablet sales both real and planned. From the group's most recent report:

A new version of Barnes and Noble's Nook was announced today at a special event in New York City. The Nook Color, which B&N is billing as a hybrid tablet and e-reader device, has a full-color 7" LCD screen and will be joining the original e-ink Nook in B&N's lineup.

The Nook Color still has built-in WiFi and runs on Android, but lacks 3G support. B&N has announced its plans to launch a Nook Developer program that will allow for third-party Android apps to get some Nook screen time. The Nook software is also newly integrated with Facebook and Twitter.

The new "VividView" display in the Nook Color has a 1024x600 resolution with 16 million colors, as well as a lamination film on its surface to help reduce glare from the backlight. Of course, the partial evolution into a tablet means a tabletization of the battery life: the Nook Color gets only eight hours of use with the WiFi off (for comparison, the regular Nook gets 10 days with WiFi off).

The Nook Color starts at $249, with the first-generation Nook still at $149. B&N is taking preorders now, and the device will ship starting November 19.

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