Windows Phone Articles - Software Expert Witnesses & Litigation Consultants

8February

Quandary Peak Assists in Nokia v. HTC Patent Litigation

By Quandary Peak Research

Nokia’s recent settlement with HTC over smartphone patents was widely reported in the media on Friday, resulting in the dismissal of all pending patent litigation worldwide between the two companies. Industry observers widely cited the outcome as an important step for Nokia in its effort to generate royalties from its patent portfolio.

Right up until the settlement was finalized, several of our software experts here at Quandary Peak were working earnestly with the attorneys at Desmarais LLP on behalf of Nokia. Nenad Medvidovic, George Edwards, and Brad Ulrich were all down in the trenches, performing the painstaking work of documenting the technical evidence related to the patents-in-suit in the matters before the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patents disclosed inventions related to receiving push messages, downloading and installing apps over the network, video compression and encoding, protecting sensitive device configuration data, Bluetooth connectivity, calendar data management, and other technologies. The analysis by Quandary Peak included C++ source code review and Java source code review.

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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7August

Code Review of Android and Windows Devices Completed

By Quandary Peak Research

Software consultants at Quandary Peak recently completed an lengthy, in-depth source code review of twenty-nine mobile devices running the Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. The consultants, George Edwards and Brad Ulrich, drew on their many years of experience in smartphone application development and mobile systems research to document the structure and behavior of the software components at issue. Both Brad and George have worked on a number of cases as an Android expert witness.

The extensive analysis effort was conducted on behalf of Desmarais LLP in connection with a patent infringement matter, MobileMedia Ideas LLC v. HTC Corporation and HTC America Inc. The case initially involved eleven patents for smartphone technology related to voice dialing, call handling, contacts management, media playback and streaming, and image processing. The patents asserted by MMI were U.S. Patents 5,490,170, 5,841,979, 5,915,239, 5,977,887, 6,043,760, 6,049,796, 6,070,068, 6,253,075, 6,427,078, 6,871,048, and 7,349,012.

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29July

What Mobile Platform Will Get Me App Revenue?

By Ivo Krka

Developing a smartphone app takes a considerable time commitment, and, unless you’re doing it purely for fun, prospective revenue is a motivating factor. In the second part of my Guide for First-Time App Developers series, I discuss the current state of the smartphone app market and the opportunities to consider when choosing a target platform. I provide information about how many potential users to expect, how engaged and willing to try new apps those users will be, and what level of competition you will face. Since the smartphone market is growing at a rapid pace, the presented opinions include my personal projections, so take them with a grain of salt. As in the first article of the series, I focus on two platform giants – Apple’s iPhone and Android – and the slowly-but-steadily emerging Windows Phone platform. At the end of each section below, I will specify a color-coded rating of each platform (red-yellow-green, with red being the worst and green being the best).

Size of the User Base

Generating app revenue depends on having a reasonably large base of prospective users. While the iPhone is very popular in the US, with a market share upwards of 40% (only slightly behind Android), the undisputed worldwide champion is Android with more than 70% of new smartphone shipments (more than 200 million new units every year!). One obstacle for Apple in the global market is that many non-US users prefer more affordable phones, so in some large markets like Russia and China, Apple’s share has decreased. In addition, a number of service providers abroad refuse to pay a high premium to sell Apple’s iPhones. Working in favor of Apple is their devoted customer base, and once (if?) they figure out how to attract international users, they could bite […]

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24June

Android vs. iPhone vs. Windows Phone: Getting an App Out There

By Ivo Krka

Turning a great idea into a great app is not necessarily as straightforward as you may expect, and involves a number of important decisions: Which platform(s) should I target and in what order? Is this going to be prohibitively difficult or costly? How can I make sure that my app reaches the desired users? While you may know the answer to some of these questions (perhaps because of your love of iPhone or, in the reverse case, not owning a Mac for development), if you are a first-time app developer you probably need some assistance. Since there are already about 2 million smartphone apps, there is a plethora of online material about app development. However, this actually makes it difficult to “see the forest from the trees”.

In my attempt to help you, over the next couple of weeks I will publish three articles that shed some light on concerns that should impact your decision when choosing which platform to target (or which platform to target first) – ease of publishing an app, the quality of developer tools (including tools for cross-platform development), and the market opportunities. My first article today will highlight the distinct features of and (subjectively) rank the ease of publishing an app (red-yellow-green, red being the worst and green being the best) on three popular smartphone platforms – Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone (feel free to notify me if you disagree).

Testing Support

Once you have a working app you tested yourself, it’s ready for the store, right? Well, you might want to postpone celebration for a bit (remember the fiasco of the hastily published Apple Maps), and try testing the app with a large group of prospective users. Luckily, all three platforms now have support for beta testing. Android has a very smooth process for creating a […]

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