All Things Digital

With its curvier edges, stylish silver trim, half-VGA 480-by-320 pixel screen and improved iTunes compatibility, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) new BlackBerry Bold should be a big hit with IT operations professionals convinced the iPhone isn’t an enterprise-class mobile device but driven to near-aneurysm by discontented employees demanding them.

The device is largely as expected–an iPhonish-looking thing with both GPS and Wi-Fi, 1GB of permanent flash memory, a 2-megapixel camera, full HTML browsing, 3G support on GSM networks with HSDPA access and, of course, the BlackBerry’s one-trick killer app: instant, secure email. That’s a compelling combination for business users and casual ones not easily swayed by the iPhone’s hype juggernaut as well. Indeed, Citigroup analyst Jim Suva says it could boost RIM’s quarterly shipments by 200,000 to 400,000.

But perhaps not without a bit of struggle. The BlackBerry Bold won’t ship until as late as August, which means Apple (AAPL) could beat it to market with the enterprise-friendly 3G iPhone it’s rumored to be uncrating at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference in June. Which has got to worry RIM. After all, the first-generation iPhone had claimed a 28% market share by the fourth quarter of 2007. That’s still less than the BlackBerry, which holds about a 41% market share, but the iPhone hasn’t even been on the market a year.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s claim that Safari is responsible for 71% of mobile browser usage apparently echoed throughout Microsoft HQ like a hearty Nelson Mundt “Hah Hah!” since Microsoft (MSFT) has developed a more robust version of Internet Explorer Mobile with which to challenge it. At the CTIA conference in Las Vegas this morning, the company announced Windows Mobile 6.1 and along with it a new desktop-grade version of IE Mobile. With support for Adobe Flash and Silverlight, the browser should help Microsoft better compete with the full Web-browsing experience provided by Mobile Safari. Expect it at market in the third quarter of 2008.

Our relationship with Apple is like a relationship in any marriage, good or bad. It’s an important relationship for both of us to maintain and make stronger, knowing that there are differences.”

–Former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, Sept. 2003

The iPhone doesn’t support Flash and according to Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs it’s not going to anytime soon.

In remarks during the company’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday, Jobs said Flash Lite, the mobile version of Adobe’s (ADBE) popular Flash Media Player, simply isn’t good enough for the iPhone. The device needs something more robust, but not so much so that it compromises its performance. Apparently, Flash Lite is insufficient, and the standard Flash player runs too slowly on the iPhone’s processor. Flash “performs too slow to be useful,” Jobs said. And Flash Lite “is not capable of being used with the Web. … There’s this missing product in the middle.”

“Too slow to be useful.” “Not capable of being used on the Web.” That’s a disparaging way of describing the products of a partner with whom you’ve had strained relations over the years, isn’t it. Certainly, it’s not the most diplomatic. But then Jobs isn’t exactly renowned for his diplomacy. As a recent profile of him Fortune explains, “Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are ‘insanely great’ or ’shit.’ … Subordinates are geniuses or ‘bozos,’ indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second’s notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his ‘hero-shithead roller coaster.’”

So why take such a pot shot at Adobe in a public forum like this? Is Jobs telling the company to get its act together and develop an iPhone-specific Flash player, or is he suggesting that Apple itself might develop that “missing product in the middle”? Hmm. Perhaps it already has.

The next-generation DVD format war was a costly one–for Sony (SNE). In addition to the untold funds the company spent on pro-Blu-ray propaganda, it also reportedly spent quite a bit to buy the allegiances of Hollywood.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Sony paid Warner Bros. as much as $400 million to throw its support behind Blu-ray and abandon HD-DVD. An interesting little footnote to the DVD format war, since Warner’s decision all but sealed HD DVD’s fate.

So it was a reported $400 million well spent, then. For the time being, anyway. “People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares,” Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said last year. “The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that. In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost.”

Ribbit is as much “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company” as the region’s first to boast a silly name and grandiose claims.

Still, the Silicon Valley start-up, which officially opened its Web-based telephony platform to third party developers this morning, is generating a lot of buzz for its Flash/Flex-based telephones (see video below), and rightly so. The company has essentially built a software version of an operator-class telephone switch that connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile and landline phones and other Web-based phone applications.

Using its Ribbit API, developers can write applications that support full telephone capabilities–voice mail, call-logging, text-to-speech transcription services, etc.–and because they’re Flash/Flex-based, they can be embedded into Web sites and integrated into Web-based services.

“What we have done is made voice an object that you embed into your workflow (or software),” said Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs. “We didn’t want to change how people did things, like communicate via Skype, and wanted to integrate the platform to work with any phone.”

Smart, eh? But how’s the company going to make money? Ribbit says it plans to charge for services like calls to traditional landlines, voice-mail transcriptions and billing. A reasonable plan, but as Ovum analyst Brett Azuma notes, an unproven one. “Unless there’s a foolproof way to get the products out there and make them successful,” Azuma told Wired. “I think the consumer applications are a little unclear for now. Being able to use text-to-speech transcription services and archive voice calls are many of the features that consumers have shown interest in over the years. However, whether or not they’re willing to pay for these features is going to be the big question.”

Flash memory maker SanDisk has apparently devised a means of offsetting the legal bills that might arise from the price-fixing suit filed against it (and 23 other companies) earlier this year: suing the better part of the removable flash storage industry for patent infringement.

SanDisk filed three patent-infringement lawsuits against 25 companies that make, sell or import USB flash drives and other removable flash storage products yesterday, seeking damages and a permanent exclusion order from the U.S. International Trade Commission banning importation of infringing products into the United States.

SanDisk hasn’t yet disclosed publicly the patent(s) at issue here–and there are certainly a number of possibilities– but No. 5,602,987, Flash EEprom system may be one of them. After all, the company has used it for these purposes before.

Anyway … Among those on the receiving end of SanDisk’s suit: LG Electronics, Buffalo, Corsair, Kingston, Verbatim Transcend and Imation/Memorex. “These actions demonstrate SanDisk’s long-term commitment to enforcing its patents, both to protect our investment in research and development by obtaining a fair return on that investment, and out of fairness to third parties that participate in our patent-licensing program,” E. Earle Thompson, chief intellectual property counsel at SanDisk, said in a statement, noting that defendants named in SanDisk’s suits would be offered the chance to participate in its patent-licensing program. “Otherwise, we will aggressively pursue these actions, seeking a prompt judicial resolution awarding damages, obtaining injunctive relief and banning importation of infringing product.”

Microsoft is gearing up to launch the second generation of its Zune digital music players this week, perhaps as early as today.

Sources with knowledge of the announcement tell BetaNews that Redmond is readying both hard disk and flash-based players for the launch. The flash device is said to be similar in size to the second-generation iPod Nano and will reportedly offer video and WiFi support. The existing hard disk drive device is said to be slightly leaner than its predecessor, but otherwise largely unchanged (no word yet on new color schemes, but it will be hard to match UPS brown). Which seems to suggest that Microsoft, against all odds, has managed to make the second-generation Zune just as underwhelming as the first generation.
(Photo courtesy Engadget)

Thanks to its iPod Shuffle and Nano, Apple’s appetite for NAND flash memory is akin to McDonald’s for potatoes–near insatiable and market moving. Back in 2005, Apple made headlines for a reported agreement to buy 40% of Samsung Electronics’ NAND flash-memory chip output and rumored plans for a joint foundry with the South Korean company.

Today, the company is in the headlines again–this time because it’s on track to consume 25% of the world supply of flash memory in the third quarter. And according to Taiwan-based online chip clearinghouse DRAMeXchange, that will lead to a chip shortage. “According to DRAMeXchange’s figures, in the wake of the expected hot iPod sales and chip inventory buildup for 4Q07, the iPhone and iPod will take up roughly 25% of worldwide NAND flash production in 3Q07,” the company said. “As a huge portion of the capacity is being allocated to Apple in meeting the anticipated demand in 2H07, many downstream vendors have been unable to secure enough flash chips. … A flash chip shortage will occur in the third quarter. Flash prices are thus projected to continue rising.”

Seems Apple’s not only reshaping the music and cellphone industries, but the memory industry as well.