The Apple vs. Motorola patent trial scheduled to start on Monday has now been dismissed with prejudice by Judge Richard Posner, who says that “neither party can establish a right to relief.” We’d heard earlier that Judge Posner had canceled the start of the trial but didn’t know the extent of his decision to close down proceedings; his latest order makes it clear that neither party has put forth what he considers to be a valid case.

Posner’s been openly frustrated with both Motorola and Apple from the start — Apple’s attorneys were given a stern warning about filing too many motions in May, for example. His order denying the case is just as tart as you’d expect: he says that neither Apple nor Motorola has proven exactly how much money…

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It was just last week that FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said he was “enormously concerned” about technology firms abusing standards-related patents in the global smartphone patent wars, and today his agency is asking the US International Trade Commission to carefully reconsider banning products like the Xbox 360 that allegedly infringe upon patents that are required to be fairly licensed as part of standards agreements. It’s a major milestone in what has become a serious international dispute about rights and responsibilities of standards-patent holders — companies like Motorola and Samsung have relied heavily on their standards-related patents in various lawsuits, and the FTC is expressing deep concern about the validity of that…

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It’s just moments away from Nintendo’s E3 2012 event and the first official details of the Wii U, but it looks like detailed specs have already leaked out in a post on VGleaks. If they’re true, the Wii U will be very similar to the Xbox 360, with a three-core PowerPC chip, 1.5GB of RAM, and 32MB of EDRAM. That sounds about right, but we’re sure to find out more during the event. Stay tuned.

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Facebook continues to try and push people into using its Smart Lists to manage privacy: a new “star your close friends” window just popped up for us at the top of the News Feed, and has apparently been appearing for others over the past few weeks. While highlighting the functionality this way is somewhat new, it’s really all just an additional UI for adding people to the existing Close Friends smart list, which prioritizes their updates in News Feed. (Your friends can’t see if you’ve starred them or added them to any other lists.) It’s a solid idea, but the suggestions are a bit strange: they appear to be a combination of the people you most frequently interact with and then a random assortment of other friends. (I haven’t talked to some…

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The hard drive industry continues to contract: today Seagate announced that it will acquire boutique hard drive vendor LaCie at a total valuation of $186m. Seagate will first purchase 64.5 percent of LaCie’s stock from CEO Phillipe Spruch, and then try to buy all the remaining shares over the next few months; if it succeeds in purchasing 95 percent of the company within six months, it’ll bump the final price paid to Spruch by 3 percent. Spruch himself will join Seagate as head of consumer products.

The move follows Seagate’s $1.4b acquisition of Samsung’s traditional hard drive business in December and rival Western Digital’s merger with Hitachi in March. While the LaCie buyout is much smaller, it offers Seagate an established consumer…

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Comcast just announced that it’s getting rid of its controversial 250GB data cap on home internet connections in favor of what it calls a “more flexible data usage management approach.” That basically means that the company will eventually switch to a tiered plan arrangement with overage fees just like wireless providers, with base plans starting at 300GB per month.

The 250GB cap will be suspended everywhere while Comcast trials two different types of tiered plan packages in various test markets over the next few months. The first plan simply gives users at every speed level a 300GB allotment, with additional capacity available in blocks; Comcast’s blog posts suggests it’s considering $10 for an extra 50GB. The other plan starts most…

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The HTC One X for AT&T and Evo 4G LTE for Sprint already bear the distinction of being the first Android devices to face an import block at US Customs for potentially infringing an Apple patent, but the ignominy may be fleeting: sources tell us that HTC’s US devices use a customized version of Android that removes the offending “data tapping” feature. That’s confirmed by our own examination of an AT&T One X and Sprint Evo 4G LTE, neither of which exhibit the key behavior excluded from importation into the US by the International Trade Commission, and which both include a new settings screen not present in the international One X.

US HTC devices also include a new ‘app associations’ settings screen built to avoid Apple’s patent

S…

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The HTC One X and Evo 4G LTE are notable devices for many reasons, but today they become notorious: they’re the first devices to face an import delay at US Customs for potentially infringing an Apple patent. We’ve learned today that the One X and Evo 4G LTE are indefinitely delayed at Customs as the agency investigates patent issues with Apple, and sources have further confirmed that some shipments are indeed being held back. The One X is also currently out of stock at AT&T’s online store and at most AT&T retail stores we’ve called — and few had any information on when more units would arrive.

Apple won a wide-ranging exclusion order banning the importation of HTC Android devices at the International Trade Commission last December —…

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The HTC One X and Evo 4G LTE are notable devices for many reasons, but today they become notorious: they’re the first devices to face an import delay at US Customs for potentially infringing an Apple patent. We’ve learned today that the One X and Evo 4G LTE are indefinitely delayed at Customs as the agency investigates patent issues with Apple, and sources have further confirmed that some shipments are indeed being held back. The One X is also currently out of stock at AT&T’s online store and at most AT&T retail stores we’ve called — and few had any information on when more units would arrive.

Apple won a wide-ranging exclusion order banning the importation of HTC Android devices at the International Trade Commission last December —…

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Apple’s updated MacBook Pro rumored to arrive this summer will feature Nvidia graphics alongside Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, a switch from the AMD GPUs in the current models. The news comes to us directly from a trusted source, and it’s further corroborated by Joanna Stern at ABC News, whose sources also tell her that the new machines will indeed feature high resolution Retina Displays.

While we can’t yet confirm what specific Nvidia chip Apple will use, an 9to5 Mac report from earlier today located references to the GeForce GT 650M, a 28nm chip built on the “Kepler” architecture that should offer similar power and performance efficiency to the well-regarded 28nm GeForce GT 640M. We recently tested the GT 640M in the Acer Aspire…

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TiVo hinted that Netflix and YouTube apps for the Premiere would get an update this spring, and it just so happens that update is rolling out today. Fire up your Premiere and update to find a Netflix app that looks and feels much like the one on many other integrated platforms, and a new YouTube streaming app with Google’s “Leanback” UI to go along with it. Both have search boxes with on-screen keyboards that find results as you type, and the Netflix app now does 1080p with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound for assorted titles. You’ll also find that parental controls are now accesible from the HD menus, although the settings themselves still use the older SD interface.

I had a chance to play with the update on a loaner Premiere XL4, and…

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Apple just released Safari 5.1.7, which includes one very notable security update among the usual bug fixes and patches: it disables older versions of Adobe Flash and directs users to download the latest update from Adobe’s website. The move isn’t as draconian as it seems at first: Flash Player for OS X has had a built-in update system since version 10.3 was released last May, so those who get flagged are probably running year-old code and should probably update anyway to avoid exploits like the one Adobe patched just four days ago.

We don’t have any other details on how Apple is detecting what version of Flash you’re running or if it plans to update the minimum required version over time; the latest beta of Flash Player 11.3 for OS X…

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Apple just released OS X Lion 10.7.4, which fixes a nasty bug that exposed FileVault passwords in plain text if Snow Leopard users upgraded to Lion but kept using their legacy FileVault settings. (FileVault 2 in Lion never had a problem, so if you bought a new Lion machine you’re in the clear.)

The update also fixes an issue that kept the “reopen windows when logging back in” setting permanently enabled, fixes a couple issues with network file servers, and improves compatibility “with certain British third-party keyboards.” Those cheeky Brits.

We’re downloading the update now, we’ll let you know if we find anything else.

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Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris may be inciting a very different kind of revolution than the one he intended: a fight between Twitter and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Twitter today filed a motion to quash a subpoena by the DA’s office requesting “any and all user information” related to Harris’s account; among other arguments, the social networking service says that being forced to turn over Harris’s information would constitute an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Harris was arrested on October 1st of last year when he marched on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of an Occupy protest. As part of the proceedings against him, the Manhattan DA subpoenaed Twitter, requesting “any and all user…

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Samsung has a long history of confusing and over-the-top keynote events, and yesterday’s Galaxy S III launch was no exception. The London Metropolitan Orchestra played for the audience, the S III was repeatedly described as being “designed for humans,” and Samsung’s own presenters referred to the phone’s features as “bizarre.” The presentation’s finale, a one-more-thing reveal of Samsung’s upcoming Mobile PIN popup shops, failed as the stage’s backdrop didn’t fully open as intended — leaving the orchestra to continue swelling in awkward anticipation.

And then there were the videos.

Samsung chose to illustrate the S III’s features with a series of short, almost surreal videos that played at seemingly random intervals throughout the…

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Nokia just announced that it’s suing HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic for patent infringement in the US and Germany. All told, there are 45 patent in the various lawsuits, covering what Nokia says are proprietary technologies — i.e., not industry standards. Specifically, Nokia’s patents cover hardware features like antennas, radios, and power management, as well as software features like multitasking, navigation, app stores, retrieving email attachments on mobile, “conversational” message display, dynamic menus, and certain types of data encryption.

The patents in question makes these cases slightly different than Nokia’s now-settled litigation with Apple, which involved several standards-related patents that were required to be licensed under…

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RIM CEO Thorsten Heins just officially launched the “BlackBerry 10 Platform,” or everything that makes up the development stack for BB10, including many architectural elements of the PlayBook OS. What’s new is something that RIM has only hinted at before: Cascades and the Cascades UI.

“Cascades” is RIM’s shorthand for a set of developer tools and resources for building apps that fit the look, feel, and interaction models of BB10. Developers can build apps using Cascades tools in either C/C++ or Qt and will now be able to do something that developers for every other smartphone platform have always been able to take for granted: create standard UI elements like buttons and lists without having to hand-code them individually. In addition to…

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Although the Google / Oracle trial is endlessly entertaining drama with countless inside revelations, the actual dispute between the two companies over Java and Android at one time was extremely small: Sun wanted just $30-50 million for a Java license, by Eric Schmidt’s estimation. So why didn’t Google just pay? It wanted complete control over the Android platform, and it wasn’t prepared to let Sun be involved. That’s according to Andy Rubin, who wrote to Eric Schmidt in a 2006 email that he could “smell fear” and that Sun would probably accept a final price of $28m for a Java license. However, Rubin also warned that Google “did such a good job of convincing them our platform was a good idea, they want to have a hand in its design and…

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According to a presentation given by Andy Rubin in July 2010, Google expected to sell some 10 million Android tablets a year in 2011 and 2012 and capture up to a third of the entire tablet market. Those are some lofty numbers, especially considering Google and Motorola hadn’t yet shipped the Xoom tablet, which at the time was still a prototype device codenamed Stingray. (It’s also notable that Google used a Morgan Stanley estimate that the entire tablet market would be 46m units in 2012; Apple dominates the tablet market with over 67 million iPads sold thus far.) Google also expected Android tablets to contribute up to $110m in search revenue in 2011 and $220m in 2012 — goals almost certainly missed as Android tablets have floundered…

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The Google / Oracle trial continues to reveal a wealth of inside information about Android — in addition to seeing the earliest mockups of a “Google Phone” earlier today, we’re also seeing how the platform was doing in 2010, courtesy of a quarterly review presentation given on July 12, 2010 by Andy Rubin and four of his deputies.

There’s a staggering gap between ads and apps

The most interesting aspect of the presentation are the revenue numbers presented, since Google has never explained exactly how much money Android generates for the company. Obviously things are different now with many more Android devices activated, but in July 2010 with 20m phones in the market, Google forecast that it would double the number of phones to 40m by…

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