Tim K alerts us to the news that phone maker HTC has sent a cease & desist nastygram to the developers of an Android widget that certainly had a similar look and feel to HTC's own Sense UI. Except, many people claim that this newer widget, from LevelUp Studios, was actually better. LevelUp apparently has no interest in fighting this, and are ditching the widget, but it seems that they could have a decent argument here. The bigger question, though, is why HTC is bothering? I'm actually a big HTC fan. My last two mobile phones have both been from HTC, and I had been expecting my next one to be from HTC as well. But this sort of bullying for no good reason makes me wonder why I'd want to support a company like that. Honestly, what was HTC "losing" by letting this widget be created? This seems like bullying just for the sake of bullying.

This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on "a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone. It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others. Amusingly, the company actually first filed the lawsuits on Monday, but realized it was jumping the gun and pulled them, only to refile just past the stroke of midnight.

As the link above explains, the patent itself is based on a bunch of continuation filings, which are commonly used by patent holders who want broad patents to cover the latest technologies well after they've already come about in the market. It would seem like the concept itself, merely combining a bunch of things that people were already talking about, should never have been granted based on the Supreme Court's recent KSR ruling that merely combining existing concepts doesn't deserve a patent. Also, as noted in the comments to the link above, it would appear that there's a fair amount of prior art. In fact, Apple even sent over some prior art concerning the patent just before it was originally supposed to be issued last summer -- but somehow patent holder's lawyers talked their way around it. In the meantime, it looks like we've got yet another case of an overly broad and obvious patent being used against a huge number of firms. I'm sure that's exactly what Thomas Jefferson expected when he created our patent system.

After Apple finally announced its iPhone, all the folks who spent years and years passing around rumors about it needed to move onto something else. The first easy target was the gPhone from Google, which has been rumored to be all different things over the past year. However, in the last couple of months, Google and its partners started leaking out a lot more info to tamp down expectations. They stated a few times that they were not building hardware, and then it came out that it was really just software that device manufacturers and mobile operators could offer that would be more "open," but would clearly promote various Google services. Not quite as exciting as some of the earlier rumors. Today Google finally put out the official announcement and there are no real surprises. It appears to be exactly what the lowered expectations set it to be: an operating system built on Linux, that is open source and free for anyone to use. That is, it's not a phone at all, but simply a platform for others to use.

Sprint and T-Mobile have signed up as partners agreeing to offer it -- but it isn't expected on handsets until the latter half of 2008. Despite some rumors that Verizon Wireless would put aside its dislike of Google and participate, so far it is staying on the sidelines. This isn't surprising both given Verizon Wireless' distaste for Google and its insistence on walled gardens over anything open. Also staying away is AT&T, which is hardly surprising at all, given its investment in the iPhone. The big handset partners are HTC and Motorola -- again, no surprise. Motorola has dabbled around with Linux phones before and knows that it needs some kind of differentiator after getting clobbered by others in the market. HTC is a huge producer of Windows Mobile phones but has long had a pretty rocky relationship with Microsoft, so seeing a way to potentially get out from under that yoke must be appealing.

All in all, this is a good step forward for the mobile industry -- offering a more open alternative with some big name backers. However, it's not a revolutionary leap forward just yet. It's an enabling move that hopefully will drive more innovation and potentially push operators towards a more open, more innovative world, but it's going to be an incremental process. Even though it clearly wasn't for everyone, the iPhone redefined what mobile phones could be overnight. Almost every company in the space has adjusted at least some part of their strategy to deal with the iPhone. The Google phone platform won't have that same overnight impact, and depending on how well it works, it may never have that kind of impact. There will be a number of powerful forces working against Google in this space -- and unlike Apple, since Google isn't controlling the initial rollout and everything around it, it may make things tougher to fight through the initial noise. However, if it can get through any initial troubles towards adoption, then its openness and Google's commitment to push it forward could lead to mobile devices and services that are a lot more powerful. So, while it's not the flashy overnight sensation that the iPhone was, it has the potential to have a much larger long-term impact, though done so in a more typical understated manner.

Despite manufacturing plenty of the most recognizable electronics products in the world, and making plenty of money, the names of most Taiwanese contract manufacturers aren't familiar to consumers. For instance, Hon Hai Precision Industry generated revenues of more than $26 billion last year by making products for Apple, Dell, HP and other companies. But the Taiwanese firms are increasingly trying to leverage their experience and expertise by establishing their own consumer brands and using them to boost their product margins. Contract manufacturing is a low-margin, volume based business: for instance, one analyst says contract manufacturers of laptops have 3-5% margins; compare that to the 40% or more Apple enjoys on iPods. But growing the brands can be a tricky proposition, and not just because the companies are looking to enter new and unfamiliar consumer markets. The problem is that these companies are looking to become competitors to their biggest customers: for instance High Tech Computer, which makes mobile phones for a variety of companies, is building up its HTC consumer brand, and competing with clients like HP and Palm in the process. Some are trying to get around this by splitting off their consumer operations from their contract-manufacturing businesses, such as Acer did successfully several years ago. Still, that's not the only obstacle. Getting the consumer marketing right remains a big issue -- particularly when the new consumer brands are competing against companies for which marketing, not manufacturing, is a specialty.