It's a well-known fact that Apple and its Android competitors fight all the time, but now one piece of mobile technology from the iPhone has been discovered on Android-powered devices. Tim Cook must be fuming by now.
You see, the iPhone's Passbook app can store cash-saving vouchers, gift certificates, airline tickets, theatre passes and similar things, along with QR codes on iThing screens that are scanned by a reader to enable their use. Apple could wirelessly transfer this data using NFC, as used by pay-by-wave systems, but its gadgets don't implement the technology - unlike rival Android devices.
But Apple published the Passbook voucher format so that app developers on other platforms can work with other companies buying into the Passbook system.
And software developer Attido has done just that by building Android app PassWallet that can use a phone's NFC electronics for pay-by-swipe with the phone.
PassWallet can also flash up QR codes to use a token, but if the person reading the voucher is using Skycore's CodeReader then a swipe will do just as well.
NFC World spoke to Skycore, which has high hopes for the NFC capabilities of Android, and firmly believe swiping a cell phone is the future of token redemption.
You have to wonder how long Apple can survive without NFC before iDevices start looking distinctly dated. But we're reasonably confident that Apple is already addressing the issue and will provide a fix soon.
Some still argue that Near Field Communications is a technology looking for a problem, but the investment is now so great that even if it has no long-term future it's going to be everywhere for the next few years, and Apple surely won't be able to resist joining the bandwagon.
In other mobile and device news
Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn't like OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays and he's pretty vocal about it to anyone that asks his opinion.
Speaking at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs in San Francisco Tuesday, Cook said that the color saturation of OLED displays are simply awful.
"If you ever buy anything online and really want to know what the color is, you should really think twice before you depend on the color from an OLED display," Cook said.
However, Cook called the iPhone 5's retina display a much superior experience, noting that it is twice as bright as your average OLED.
That's a shot at mobile devices that tend to use OLED displays, including Samsung's flagship Galaxy S3 smartphone and a few others from similar device makers.
Cook brought up the brightness, contrast and general experience of the display when addressing a question about whether Apple would create an iPhone with a larger display.
He wouldn't comment on the company's plans, but criticized the focus on size and specifications as something companies do when they can't "create an amazing experience," according to Cook.
For example, in the PC industry, companies tend to compete largely on specifications, speed and price he said, suggesting that Apple doesn't want to get into that kind of battle.
Cook noted that most consumers don't know or don't even care how fast the processor is on their mobile device or PC, and said it doesn't matter as long as the experience is great. With Cook, everything is about experience, in a very similar manner that was a hallmark of the late Steve Jobs, Cook's predecessor and one of Apple's founders back in the early 80s.
"What Apple does is sweat every little and most minute detail," Cook said. "We want the best display, and I think we got it, and we're certainly not planning on changing any of that."
In other mobile news
Dish Networks and Sprint are still fighting hard for control of Clearwire, but the WiMax services provider yesterday delivered disappointing fourth quarter results, proving once more that its wireless spectrum is still its most valuable asset. Clearwire ended last year's fourth quarter with about 9.6 million wireless subscribers, down 8.1 percent from 10.4 million subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter in 2011.
Clearwire's overall subscriber base consists mainly of wholesale customers, which accounted for 8.2 million. On average, only 1.4 million were retail Clearwire subscribers and 8.2 million wholesale subscribers.
Clearwire's subscriber numbers reflect 9,000 retail net subscriber additions and 915,000 wholesale net subscriber losses during the fourth quarter of 2012.
The company said that the decline in wholesale subscribers, which consist primarily of Sprint 3G/4G smartphone customers, is primarily due to the cancellation of postpaid WiMAX offerings by Sprint.
Net losses for the quarter attributable to Clearwire were $195 million, or $0.28 per share compared to $236.0 million, or $0.81 per share, respectively in the same period in 2012.
Overall 4th quarter total revenue declined 14 percent year over year to $311.2 million, primarily due to the expected year over year decline in wholesale revenue. Fourth quarter wholesale revenue of $116.6 million, was relatively flat compared to third quarter 2012 wholesale revenue of $116.5 million, and down 29 percent year over year.
The wireless operator is currently looking at two offers. Sprint has offered to buy out the remaining share of Clearwire that it doesn't currently own for $2.97.
At the same time, Dish Network has offered $3.30 per share for Clearwire but has stipulated a number of conditions, among them a commitment by Clearwire to help Dish rollout a wireless network.
But that offer is further complicated by Sprint's current majority stake in Clearwire, something that's been hanging over the company's head for many years.
At the end of the fourth quarter 2012, Clearwire operated networks in the U.S. covering areas where approximately 137 million users reside, including approximately 135 million people in markets where it provides 4G services.
Shares of Clearwire were flat following yesterday's report, trading at $3.17 in morning trading on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see if the company accepts one or the other offer, or if it refuses them both.
In other mobile news
Wireless infrastructure provider and mobile network equipment maker Ericsson and Gemalto have partnered to create SIM-less mobile smartphones aimed at machines rather than people, and the technology will most be likely well-received by iPhone and iPad maker Apple.
The newly proposed partnership will create a provisioning system to allow elements such as cars, medical devices and electricity meters (among other things) to be fitted with an embedded mobile phone, without knowing the network on which it's going to operate, or even in which country it will be used. All new European cars will need a mobile network within two years, to conform with eCall legislation.
M2M (machine-to-machine) works very well in the Cloud, and Gemalto will kick in the secure provisioning system which will make the removable SIM redundant.
To be sure, European mobile phones are required to conform to the GSM standard, which mandates a removable SIM card so that subscribers can easily switch networks. However, Apple has been successfully leading a project to extend the standard to encompass embedded SIMs.
Technically, the eUICC (embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card) does perform the functions of a SIM, but through a chip soldered on the handset's motherboard rather than a detachable, removable unit.
Such SIMs could dramatically change how network operators work, and could allow Apple to sell connectivity in the iTunes store and car buyers to select a mobile network on the first turn of the key, something that could take away billions of dollars in annual revenue from the wireless carriers and mobile service providers.
Of course, doing that in a secure way is difficult, and replicating the long-term success of the removable SIM will be very tough in deed. But time will tell.
Each GSM SIM stores a different secret key, which is replicated in the Authentication Server at the network operator. The key is never transmitted and can't be extracted from the SIM without an enormous amount of effort, and physical access.
That shared secret is used to create matching "session" keys with which GSM communication is secured, and those session keys have been broken from time to time, but the shared-secret authentication made possible by the SIM still remains secure, at least for now anyway.
Shared secret is always the best cryptography, assuming the secret can't be intercepted. Dual-key systems (such as RSA or ECC) only exist because of the difficulties in distributing a shared-secret, and such systems are only used in order to safely create a shared secret.
The removable SIM solves this issue by sending the secret in a secure package (the SIM) over a separate communications medium (the post), removing the need for more complicated solutions.
So an operator-independent SIM will have two options-- one, store a shared secret for each network operator, and two, select which one based on user choice, or store a shared secret from a third party such as Gemalto, or Apple, then use that secret to encrypt the selected operator's secret on request.
The latter solution is more efficient as it offers more flexibility and wider application, but it requires the network operators to share some secrets with that third party, and that is an enormous favor to ask for most of them. It's difficult to imagine the operators agreeing to share secrets with anyone, but Gemalto is already providing the SIMs to many of them (and thus responsible for programming the secrets into those SIMs anyway) so if they'd trust anyone then it would be Gemalto...
In other mobile news
Just a couple of days after its initial release, one of the most high-profile iOS jailbreaks in the history of Apple turns out to be the fastest to be adopted as well.
Evasion, which gives iPhone, iPod, and iPad owners deeper access to its software on their devices that Apple allows, has been downloaded and used by almost 7 million people since its release on Monday, Forbes reports.
To put that number into perspective, in January Apple said that it had sold more than 500 million iOS devices cumulatively, and that about 300 million of those were running iOS 6, its latest major release before iOS 6.1 on Monday.
The seven million tally comes from the maker of Cydia, the mobile application that quickly became the unofficial third-party software repository for jailbroken devices.
Like Apple's own App Store, the app, which is typically installed in the process of jailbreaking, lets people search and discover new software.
It also allows users to search other system tweaks that can be installed on top of Apple's own software.
But unlike Apple's system, Cydia does not need to adhere to a strict set of guidelines for what can be offered. Evasion's arrival earlier this week was noteworthy for being able to jailbreak the most recent version of Apple's iOS 6 software.
And that's something that had already been accomplished, but came with numerous caveats. Evasion also worked with newer iOS devices, including the iPhone 5, which up until then proved to be a tough little fellow to break.
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