December 21, 2012
Brazilian consumer electronics maker Gradiente has begun marketing a new device under the iPhone brand after being granted the exclusive right to use the trademark in Brazil through 2018.
But Gradiente can only use the name in Brazil and nowhere else.
The company in fact filed its application with the Brazilian trademark office a few years before Apple ever released its first smartphone in March 2007.
Gradiente said in a statement that it applied for the trademark back in 2000, after realizing "there would be a technological revolution in the world of cellphones with the convergence of voice and data transmission and the reception via mobile Internet."
Not that Gradiente's iphone is itself all that revolutionary. The device, which retails for around US $290 and bears the rather tongue-twisting designation "Smartphone linha G Gradiente iphone, modelo Neo One GC 500," appears to be the same thing as an earlier model that Gradiente marketed simply as the Neo One GC 500. The only thing that has changed is the branding.
This means that Gradiente's new phone is no competition for the genuine Apple device. If it were released in the U.S. market, the Neo One GC 500 would be nothing more than a low-end and cheap Android phone.
The device is an old-technology 3G UMTS mobile unit based on a 700 MHz single-core ARM processor with 2 GB of RAM running Android 2.3.4, the so-called Gingerbread version.
At 320-by-480 pixels, its touchscreen is hardly a Retina Display, and it has no multitouch support. Throw in a predictable assortment of standard features and you've got one seriously uninspiring smartphone.
However, it does support dual SIM cards, but that's quite common, even in developing countries such as Brazil. It seems likely the pre-rebranded Neo One GC 500 wasn't winning over many Brazilians.
Gradiente says it held off on using the iphone brand until now because it was waiting to "conclude a corporate restructuring process that ended earlier this year," but the move seems more like a last-ditch attempt to divvy up its overall product mix.
But now that Gradiente has rolled out its first iphone-branded device, it seems determined to keep up the practice. "In Brazil, Gradiente has the exclusive right to use the iPhone brand," the firm's statement said. "This company will adopt all the measures used by companies around the world to preserve its intellectual property rights."
Of course, Apple is known for doing the same, and its pockets are much deeper than Gradiente's. When asked about that, an anonymous Gradiente executive told Associated Press that the company hadn't heard from Apple on the matter and that she didn't know whether Apple would try to stop Gradiente from using the iphone brand.
However, you need to keep in mind that Apple styles its iPhone brand with an uppercase P, while Gradiente renders the word all in lowercase. It's not much of a distinction, but it does suggest that Gradiente could be wishing that Apple won't fight back with an ugly lawsuit.
In other mobile news
The long awaited 4G wireless spectrum in the United Kingdom is finally happening as expected. British Telecom is among some of the bidders, as confirmed by Britain's mobile communications regulator, Ofcom. But it's not just wireless carriers and mobile operators that are dying to get their hands on the spectrum by June 2013-- managed network firms and the nation's fixed line provider are also in the running.
The auction process kicks off in a few weeks into the new year. Ofcom said that, in all, seven companies have qualified to bid for the 4G spectrum. They are: Everything Everywhere; HKT (UK) Company - a subsidiary of Hong Kong operator PCCW; Three owner Hutchison 3G UK; MLL Telecom; Niche Spectrum Ventures - a subsidiary of BT Group; O2's parent firm Telefónica UK and Vodafone.
To be sure, British Telecom has stepped into the ring to address some of the limitations of rolling out its fibre broadband network, particularly to more remote parts of the U.K.
BT has previously said that homes and businesses that are harder to reach with a fixed fibre line would be connected using alternative new broadband technologies.
The national telco will be bidding alongside the six other 4G operators to acquire new capacity to deploy mobile broadband services across the country. The 4G spectrum is expected to increase the amount of airwaves available to mobile devices by more that 75 percent, Ofcom added.
Ofcom's general manager Ed Richards said that the 4G bidding war would be a "competitive process that will dictate the shape of the U.K. mobile market for the next decade and beyond".
Two separate bands - 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz - are up for grabs, Ofcom said. The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne indicated in his Autumn Statement late last month that the auction could raise as much as £3.5 billion for the public purse and thereby ensure a fall in the country's deficit for 2012.
But Ofcom has in fact set a reserve price of £1.3 billion, far short of the Treasury's estimates. Ofcom has approved an application by Everything Everywhere in August this year to use its existing 1800 MHz wireless spectrum to deliver 4G services.
It became commercially available in major cities in late October, but coverage remains spotty for now, as the company is building its network, and is still in the process of testing a new leg that was added in November.
And while all of this is happening, O2 and Vodafone will have to wait for the outcome of Ofcom’s frequency auctions before they can roll out their own 4G services. The two firms recently complained to the regulator about Everything Everywhere's temporary monopoly of the spectrum by arguing that the decision was anti-competitive.
In other mobile news
A U.S. court has denied Apple's numerous attempts to get a sales ban on a number of Samsung devices, more than four months after a jury found some patent infringements.
The presiding judge denied Apple's bid to ban Samsung's devices from sale in the United States, a week after a hearing on the matter.
In a late ruling Monday, Judge Lucy Koh -- who presided over the entire trial between the two tech giants last year -- denied Apple's bid for a sales ban on no less than twenty-six Samsung products, saying that any infringing features were just part of a larger feature set, thus making a sales ban too broad.
"The phones at issue in this case contain a broad range of features, only a small fraction of which are covered by Apple's patents," Koh wrote.
"Though Apple does have some interest in retaining certain features as exclusive to Apple, it does not follow that entire products must be forever banned from the market because they incorporate, among their myriad features, a few narrow protected functions," Judge Koh added.
As its usually common in most litigation cases, Apple declined to comment on the ruling, and Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As part of a previous verdict in August, a California jury said 26 of Samsung's mobile devices infringed on a handful of Apple's patents, leading to a $1.05 billion damages award in Apple's favor. Following the decision, Apple filed for an injunction against a number of the infringing products, attempting to keep them off store shelves.
Despite the fact that there were infringements found, Koh said in her ruling that a large number of the devices targeted within the ban are no longer on sale, and those that were had other features that would negate the rest.
"It would not be equitable to deprive consumers of Samsung's infringing phones when, as explained above, only limited features of the phones have been found to infringe any of Apple's intellectual property," Koh said.
However, it wasn't entirely a homerun for Samsung. Along with the order on the permanent injunction, Koh said she didn't buy into Samsung's argument for a retrial over what the company said was misconduct by the jury's foreman for not disclosing a legal spat with Seagate, a company that Samsung invested in.
The orders represent the first major ones to come out of the court since the trial wrapped up in August. Still expected is a ruling from Koh that could change the damages tally. During the three and a half hour long hearing earlier this month, Apple made its bid to increase damages while Samsung predictably argued to lower them.
In other mobile news
A new brief published by the Open Technology Institute (OTI) suggests that wireless carrier-implemented data caps are unnecessary and constitutes a direct result of decreasing competition in wireline and wireless markets in the United States.
The paper claims that the technical or engineering rationale for relying on monthly data caps to address wireless network congestion is questionable, when bottlenecks are often limited to certain peak hours and specific locations in the U.S.' largest cities.
"Tiered pricing and data caps have also become a great revenue generator for the two largest wireless carriers-- Verizon and AT&T, who already were making impressive margins on their mobile data service before abandoning unlimited plans," the report states.
The group also argues that the increasing prevalence of data caps both on the nation’s wireline and mobile networks underscore a critical need for policymakers to implement reforms to promote competition in the broadband marketplace, noting that "making bandwidth an unnecessarily scarce commodity is bad for consumers and bad for innovation itself."
Wireless providers have long claimed that unlimited plans are needed to stave off network congestion, which the report recognizes up to a certain degree.
"Claims of congestion in the wireless segment are more legitimate than they are on the wireline side, as growth in data traffic in the past few years has placed some pressure on the capacity of existing mobile networks," the report states.
Nevertheless, the report goes on to state that past warnings of overwhelming data demands have been exaggerated in an effort to monetize congestion. Tiered pricing plans rolled-out by Verizon Wireless and AT&T the report claims are less about broadly managing network use or addressing congestion itself, and instead are designed to further increase revenue and profit margins on existing consumer data usage as overall subscriber growth in the mobile market slows down.
The paper argues that the overall results of the shift from unlimited to tiered plans has consistently boosted average revenue per user (ARPU) from monthly subscription wireless data plans since 2009, which have climbed at a higher rate than the ARPU for other metrics such as retail service and other postpaid fees.
The OTI adds that the overall trend is likely to continue to increase as AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless push their new shared data plans, which offer additional opportunities to boost data ARPU as well, something that would cost consumers even more.
AT&T and Verizon could not be reach for comment on the brief. This isn't the first time that the wireless industry's claim of short spectrum and congestion has been questioned. In late 2011, a report from Citigroup claimed that the U.S. wireless industry isn't facing a spectrum shortage and needs to do a better job at managing the bandwidth it already has under its limited management.
The OTI also claims that wireless operators and other spectrum holders like cable operators are using only a portion of their spectrum to provide wireless services, something that the FCC has been saying for the past two to three years.
The CTIA quickly refuted OTI's report, saying that there is a need to bring additional spectrum to market to fuel what is one of the country's key industries and touted member companies lining up to spend billions of dollars at auction for the right to use the available spectrum.
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