Microsoft put out a press release last week announcing that it had struck a deal with HTC to receive royalties for HTC’s entire lineup of Android devices. CNet is reporting that the deal comes after Microsoft pointed out to HTC that they were using some disputed patents that ranged from the user interface to the Android OS itself. This is the first time Microsoft has publicly said that HTC was violating patents, but they have for years now been muttering about how Linux infringes on some of their patents and have tried to score licensing deals with other manufacturers using Linux.

“HTC and Microsoft have a long history of technical and commercial collaboration, and today’s agreement is an example of how industry leaders can reach commercial arrangements that address intellectual property,” Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft, said in the official statement. “We are pleased to continue our collaboration with HTC.”

HTC is also being sued by Apple for some other patent infringements on both HTC’s Android and Windows Mobile devices, so this deal with Microsoft must be a bit of a relief, at least on one front.

These lawsuits are the norm in the mobile industry and I’d be surprised if there was a single major player that wasn’t being sued and suing some other company as I type. It’s fresh of Microsoft to actually strike a deal instead of resorting immediately to litigation!

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Since iPhone OS3-and-under iPhones and iPod Touches won’t be upgradeable to iPhone OS4, Apple will inevitably end up with iPhone users wanting to run apps their devices don’t support, and possibly unable to re-install their OS or legacy apps after a crash or a hard reset. Chuong goes on to compare this to the fragmentation troubles that Android now finds itself facing and from which Windows Mobile has long suffered.

He correctly points out that the schism in Apple’s case comes from a software update, not hardware differences. In Android-land, the fragmentation comes not only by way of software updates (from both Google and the open-source community) but also from hardware differences between devices, like strange screen resolutions, differing CPUs, GPUs and form factors, touchscreen/not touchscreen, etc.

And Microsoft?

Microsoft was a victim of its own moderate early success. Back when it was Palm and Windows Mobile ruling the early, pre-iPhone, PDA/smarphone show, Microsoft got locked into supporting the thousands and thousands of apps that were written for the platform. Massive enterprises adopted Windows Mobile solutions and professional, corporate and enterprise software was written and distributed to millions of users… whom Microsoft could not abandon.

Yes, yes, they also suffer from the same troubles as Android with differing OS versions and wacky hardware out there, but all of that was manageable for a veteran OS company like Microsoft (more later).

In fact, I really feel for poor Microsoft! I remember my first WinMo device – a UT Starcom PPC6700 running Windows Mobile 5: my buddy Crabtree dubbed it “the pocket instrument of mass destruction”, and I was just blown away by what it could do – with a little persuasion – and by how little it couldn’t do. That was in the spring of 2005, and I’m so sad that 5 years later I’ve still got something almost identical in my pocket! Why?

Dang legacy users! What do you do with your legacy users!?

So while Apple and Google waltzed in late to the party with their killer mobile OSes – so nice and finely tuned thanks to the lessons learned through the early travails of Palm, Microsoft, Compaq and others – Microsoft was still trying to figure out what to do with their legacy users.

Well, after 5 years of thought, deliberation, study, the multi-year Project Pink and the massive consumer research project that started before it, Muse, the purchase of Danger and their SideKick device… and Microsoft has finally came up with their answer to legacy users: dump them!

By biting the bullet and committing to no backwards compatibility in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft positions itself pretty nicely for this next round of the smartphone wars, as Microsoft is very familiar with supporting multiple OSes on a wide variety of hardware. With the introduction of the Kin line of devices this week, Microsoft now has three mobile lines going:

1. Windows Phone 7,
2. Windows Phone Classic (Windows Mobile 6.5x), and
3. Kin (essentially the new, bottom-of-the-line dumb phones of the future)

This is a very manageable plate for Microsoft. The Kin are no-brainers, nothing to support there. Windows Phone Classic, still building on CE (despite its well-justified critics) is a pretty mature OS and Microsoft continues to fine-tune it.

Perhaps most importantly – and annoyingly for us fanboys – Windows Phone 7 devices will be the only smartphones that don’t support natively written apps, which means Microsoft won’t get caught in this legacy user situation again. Apple and Google, meanwhile, will be facing this challenge for some time to come!

Grin ;)

Welcome to the Legacy-User club, Apple! We ‘Softies call it the L-User Club! Oh, you too, Google!

Pwn2Own is currently running both desktop browser hacking challenges as well as mobile operating system hacking challenges. The big five platforms – Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Symbian – are all represented and willing to shell out $10,000 to the hacker that successfully breaks through their security barriers… in exchange for the code, of course.

We don’t know yet how good these mobile OS hackers are, but I’m betting several people will walk away swingin’ a big ol’ bag of cash. The browser hacking challenge has already seen one galant programmer break into Safari in 10 seconds! Nice work!

Phones (and associated test platform)
* Blackberry(TBA)
* Android(Dev G1)
* iPhone(locked 2.0)
* Nokia (NYSE: NOK)/Symbian(N95-1)
* Windows Mobile (HTC Touch)

Day 1 (Raw functionality out of the box, users configured for service) post phone, post email
* SMS
* MMS
* Email (arrival only)
* wifi on if default
* bluetooth on if default
* Radio stack

Day 2
* All of Day 1
* Email/SMS/MMS (reading only – no secondary actions)
* wifi on
* bluetooth on (not accept pairing by default. Paired with a headset. pairing process not visible)

Day 3
* All of Day 1 and 2
* one level of user interaction with default applications
* bluetooth on (not accept pairing by default. Paired with a headset/other devices upon request. pairing process visible)

What is owned? Must demonstrate…
* loss of information (user data)
* incur financial cost

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Totally useless? Or… totally awesome? I’m gonna go with somewhere in the middle — mostly awesome, arguably useful.

From the above screenshots it looks as though Marchin-PRV has successfully used DOXBox to emulate the x86-class processor on the Symbian handset in order to install and run Microsoft’s Windows 3.1
.
Ouch, Symbian. Ouch.

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It’s blurry and hard to make out, but nevertheless – it’s a video and it’s the only one out there. What you’re seeing is the BlackBerry OS running on top of Windows Mobile.

BGR is saying that it doesn’t do wifi… or GPS… or even calling(!) but I’m not really surprised as it is just in Alpha or Beta, I’m sure. The fact that it’s missing such key features only tells me that it’s not finished yet, not that it has been left undone.

It does, however, look like it runs quite slowly, but the novelty is far too cool to not try out. When I get my hands on it, you’ll be the first to know.

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