Proview Escalates iPad Name

The press release continues: "To further this deception, Apple used an intermediary, Farncombe International and its Managing Director, Graham Robinson, to create an elaborate but false pretext for the purchase of Proview's IPAD trademarks. Apple created a special purpose company named IP Application Development Limited ('iPAD Ltd.'), the concealed the fact that this company was acting as an agent of Apple."
"Graham Robinson further concealed Apple's involvement by adopting a false alias, Jonathan Hargreaves, which he used when negotiating with Proview," the statement says.
Proview also claims that Apple and Robinson misled the Chinese company regarding its intentions for the trademark.
Apple would not comment on the matter, but has repeatedly reiterated the company's stance that it bought the rights to the iPad name three years ago.
Apple has also threatened to sue Proview for making misleading statements to the press that could damage Cupertino's reputation in China.
The Mac maker faces several challenges in this battle. First of all, intellectual property laws are much different and much broader in China. Apple won a case in Hong Kong, but lower courts have ruled in Proview's favor.
For more, see PCMag's full review of the iPad 2 and the slideshow below.

At issue is who owns the rights to the iPad name, which Proview has been using in China since 1998. Apple bought the rights to the brand from Proview, a computer monitor maker, in 2009, but the Chinese company claims that only applies to Taiwan, not mainland China. A court ruled in Proview's favor in December, and that reportedly led to the seizure of iPads from stores in cities throughout China.
Proview also alleges that Apple was "pressed for time" when it bought the iPad brand and alleges that Apple was "predisposed to deception" considering Apple knew Proview was against its use of "similar trademarks." 

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Windows on the iPad for Speedy

The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.

Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.
The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection. Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.

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Agreement on App Privacy

The announcement comes on the heels of the news that applications on smartphones routinely transmit people’s address book entries and other personal data, often without their knowledge. The practice came under scrutiny last week from members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates the use of consumer data on the Internet.

Google, which makes the Android operating system, requires developers to ask users upfront for permission to obtain their personal data, but users often are not told why developers need the data, how they plan to use it or how it will be stored. Likewise, Apple has said it prohibits and rejects any app that collects or transmits personal data without permission. But in practice, developers of some of the most popular applications for the iPhone, iPad and iPod have taken users’ contacts and transmitted them without consent.

In a statement, Ms. Harris’s office said that only 5 percent of mobile apps offer a privacy policy, leaving smartphone owners in the dark about what developers, advertisers and analytic services do with their “location, contacts, identity, messages and photos.”

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Always been to make life easier

I was but a wee lad of four years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984 and first brought a graphical user interface to the masses. “Look,” Apple said, “computers are powerful, useful tools, but they’re clumsy and inelegant. Let us show you a better way.” There was no shortage of resistance, especially from those who had gotten comfortable with typing their instructions at the blinking cursor.
Of course, the Mac was derided as a toy and not a tool for serious work, its mouse-driven approach deemed silly. While the Mac’s market share remained small in the following years, the impact of its revolutionary interface was felt throughout the world—because every subsequent personal computer operating system followed the Mac’s example.
And now, 26 years later, we’re still interacting with our computers in fundamentally the same way: a cursor-driven interface in which we point, click, drag, arrange windows, use drop-down menus, and so on. Sure, the trappings have changed, but compare your Mac running Snow Leopard today with an original Macintosh running the first version of the Mac OS and the similarities largely outweigh the differences.
While PC makers tried to push computing forward by adding extra buttons and controls to try and provide more options for telling a computer what to do, Apple went in entirely the other direction, asking itself: how do we remove a layer of abstraction between the user and the computer?
That question eventually yielded the iPhone and the culmination of Steve Jobs’s war on buttons. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for Apple. As others have suggested, I suspect that the iPad was the device Apple had long wanted to release: a touchscreen replacement for the computer interface to which we’ve all become accustomed. But launching directly into such a product, even given the resurgence of the Mac and popularity of the iPod, would have been an uphill slog.
This is the next phase of computing. Apple’s not the only one to realize it, either. The approach of Google’s Chrome OS is pretty different from what Apple is doing with the iPad, but it’s not hard to see that it’s aiming at the same target: making computing easier for the average user. I wager that we’ll see a touchscreen tablet running Chrome OS within a year of the software’s release, though I am skeptical of how effective that combination will be.
The iPad won’t kill the computer any more than the graphical user interface did away with the command line (it’s still there, remember?), but it is Apple saying once again that there’s a better way. Regardless of how many people buy an iPad, it’s not hard to look forward a few years and imagine a world where more and more people are interacting with technology in this new way. Remember: even if it often seems to do just the opposite, the ultimate goal of technology has always been to make life easier.http://www.macworld.com

Apple Ipad

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Android Honeycomb Tablet Expected from ViewSonic First 7-Inch

Big screen Android tablets with Honeycomb 3.0 were all the rage, while smaller tablets were stuck with older smartphone versions of the OS--until now. The first 7-inch tablet featuring Honeycomb is set to arrive later this month from ViewSonic, and it will be dubbed the ViewPad 7x, according to a Pocket-Lint report.
Because Google rushed Android 3.0 to the market to counter the popularity of the Apple iPad, the company was unable to optimize the OS for different-sized tablets fast enough. This meant that you could get Android 3.0 Honeycomb on 10-inch tablets such as the Motorola Xoom, but not on 7-inch tablets such as the HTC Flyer.
Now it seems that ViewSonic will be the first to get on the market a 7-inch Honeycomb tablet at the end of May, if Pocket-Lint's sources are accurate. The tablet will be called the ViewPad 7x, and will reportedly be sold alongside the ViewPad 7 (not as a replacement). Pricing and exact availability are unknown for the ViewPad 7x.
While the details on the ViewPad 7x are sketchy, we do know a bit more about the version without the X in the tail, which runs Android 2.2. It runs on a 600MHz processor and has 512MB of RAM and 512MB of on-board storage (expandable to 32GB via microSD card). The 7-inch screen has 800 by 480 pixel resolution, and the tablet also features 3G antennas along Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Our PCWorld reviewer was not very impressed with the original ViewPad 7, citing a mediocre display, sluggishness, poor battery life, and bulky design as its main flaws. The original ViewPad 7 sells for around $400.

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Dell Streak 7 Gets Aggressive Pricing

Today T-Mobile is announcing the Streak 7 will be available starting February 2, and it will cost $200 after a $50 mail-in rebate (with a two-year contract). Off-contract, and on T-Mobile's prepaid mobile broadband plans, the Streak 7 will sell for $450.
That mail-in rebate bumps the Streak 7 to a lower price than the T-Mobile variant of the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The Tab recently got a price reduction to $250, after a $50 mail-in rebate of its own.
The Streak 7 is one of several Nvidia Tegra 2-based Android tablets coming to market this winter. The pricing clearly makes this tablet an intriguing option, but keep in mind it's just the first of a coming flood of high-profile tablets (and many others that are less so). Over the next couple of months, we expect to see the first Android 3.0-based tablet, the Motorola Xoom (also introduced at CES), as well as the RIM Playbook; and, we expect more formal news of the second-generation Apple iPad.

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T-Mobile Springboard Budget Tablet

The Springboard's specs include the 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and support for T-Mobile's 4G network. There is even a micro HDMI out port, in case you want to view your tablet content on a larger screen. I was disappointed to find out that the promised battery time is only 6 hours. Still, this is the first 7-inch tablet where I've honestly been impressed by its overall performance.
While no pricing details have been announced yet, T-Mobile and Huawei bill the Springboard as the most affordable Android tablet. With other Android tablets (such as the Amazon Kindle Fire) coming in at $200, hopefully Huawei and T-Mobile follow suit on pricing. A $200 Android tablet running Honeycomb would be a major boon to the Android tablet ecosystem.
When asked exactly how affordable the tablet would be, a Huawei spokesperson simply replied: "You will be surprised." Here's hoping that the surprise will happen in a good way.

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Hands-On With the T-Mobile Springboard

I managed a few minutes with the Springboard, and came away reasonably impressed with the tiny tablet. Its screen measures only 7 inches, which makes it fit nicely in a pocket or purse. The tablet has a mostly aluminum body.
The Springboard was extremely responsive thanks to its Snapdragon processor. While T-Mobile's 4G network may not be the fastest, webpages loaded smoothly for me, and I was able to stream some video over Netflix without a hitch. Though small, the screen looked very sharp. Text was very easy to read, and the tablet is comfortable to hold in one hand.

I've used 7-inch Android tablets before, but all, so far, have run Android 2.3 or lower. What makes the Springboard standout is that it runs Google Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). Note: Acer has already started shipping its Aconia Tab A100 7-inch tablet, which also runs Honeycomb. It is priced at $329.

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