Hardly a week goes by without yet another story about some sort of patent fight involving Apple. Sometimes it’s a company that bought up a bunch of intellectual property portfolios and is hoping for lucrative pay days to make the investments worthwhile. They don’t actually produce products or services; they just collect royalties. But other […]

If you accept the conventional wisdom, Consumer Reports is the best product review publication in the U.S. The reason is that it’s run by a non-profit corporation that not only doesn’t accept advertising, but actually purchases the items it tests, most often from regular dealers. In other words, it’s incorruptible. So how can you beat […]

As I speculated in yesterday’s column, the makers of competing smartphones are trying to mirror Adobe’s approach on the Flash controversy with smoke and mirrors responses to Antennagate. Whether HTC, Motorola, Nokia or Samsung, the spin control reads the same, using near-identical talking points playbooks. They know all about antennas, and Apple doesn’t, and is […]

As all the bad news about Apple and the alleged iPhone 4 antenna problem piles up, I fully expect that the company’s competitors are cheering loudly, not to mention people who already prefer other mobile platforms. And I am loathe to refer to this episode as Antennagate, as some have done. Certainly, Apple’s stellar success […]