By Greg Mills

Microsoft has announced the Kin phone is dead. The Barbie phone may also be canceled. Mattel, maker of the Ken and Barbie phone for Microsoft had no comment. Here is the press release from Microsoft:

"Microsoft has made the decision to focus on the Windows Phone 7 launch and will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally,  we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team,  incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in  the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."

(Greg Mills is currently a Faux Artist in Kansas City. Formerly a new product R&D man for the paint sundry market, he holds 11 US patents. He's working on a solar energy startup using a patent pending process of turning waste dual pane glass into thermal solar panels used to heat water. Married, with one daughter still at home, Greg writes for intellectual web...

By Greg Mills

The Monday morning coffee at too many law firms is still brewing while the top legal minds are plotting a new law suit against Apple. Frankly, I get tired of reading stories about the new law suit of the day being filed against Apple, for whatever reason.  

Some of the lamest suits have been filed and dismissed in recent years. It is interesting to me that the filing of a suit and the dismissal of most of them are treated far differently by the press. With great fanfare the suite is filed' without even a blip on the screen the suite goes away. The hope of most of those filing suits is for an out-of-ourt settlement.  

At any given time, there are likely a hundred or more suits still pending against Apple. It takes a small army of lawyers to keep up on them all and not allow a deadline to pass without answering actions of the other side. Holding a portfolio of patents also costs a fortune and requires another division of lawyers to...

Several Apple patents have appeared at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent 7,747,765 is for a method and apparatus for media data transmission. A digital processing system is provided with a time related sequence of media data provided to the digital processing system based on a set of data, wherein the set of data indicates a method to transmit the time related sequence of media data according to a transmission protocol. The set of data, itself, is a time related sequence of data associated with the time related sequence of media data. The time related sequence of media data may be presented and/or stored by the digital processing system. The inventors are Anne Jones, Jay Geagan, Kevin L. Gong, Alagu Perlyanna and David W. Singer.

Patent 7,747,784 involves a data synchronization protocol. Among other things, techniques and systems are disclosed for syncing data between a client device and a...

Needham & Company analyst Charles Wolf, predicts that Apple will sell nearly 13 million Macs this year. With those figures in mind, you have to wonder if that number would increase still more if Apple released a Mac with some really bang-up features rather than incremental improvements.

As Wolf points out, Apple sells Macs for nearly twice the price of Windows boxes, yet the sales keep growing faster than the rest of the industry. Of course, we're not figuring in return-on-investment, but that's a topic for another day.

So what's in store for the Mac? Well, obviously there's USB 3.0. It's just a matter of time until we see that. I'll be surprised if the iMac doesn't get an HDMI port a la the latest Mac mini. I still think Apple is making a mistake if it doesn't offer Blu-ray playback on some Macs, at least as a build-to-order option. And, to me, adding a built-in tuner to the living room-friendly iMac seems logical.

Also, as Arik Hesseldahl at...

I'd love -- REALLY LOVE -- to have an iPhone 4 (assuming, of course, I could get my hands on one). However, AT&T's crappy wireless service in my neck of the woods prevents this -- though Verizon's service has gotten increasingly worse. Maybe I need a femtocell.

International research firm Parks Associates today announced the results of the most comprehensive survey to date of U.S. consumer attitudes to femtocells, conducted on behalf of the Femto Forum.

AT&T, among other companies, is rolling out femtocells that, when connected to the home's broadband modem, will pick up signals from the cell phones in the home and relay them through the Internet connection. In essence, they're small cell towers for the home. AT&T wants to sell me one for $150. But if their wireless service stays crappy, they should give 'em away.

Regardless, lots of folks are going the femtocell route. A new survey by the Park Associates research group finds that more than half of...

Amid all the hoopla over the iPad and iPhone 4, a handful of folks have predicted that the Macs days were numbered. If so, it's because that Apple wants to lose money.

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com) has released its "Global Top 10 Computer and Peripherals Companies -- Industry, Financial and SWOT Analysis. Apple is, of course, in that group, along with HP, IBM, Toshiba, Dell, NEC, Canon, Asustek, Acer and Lenova.

The global computers and peripherals industry generated total revenues of $540.1 billion in 2008, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5% for the period spanning 200408. And now the important (for this op-ed anyway) part. According to Research and Markets, the personal computers segment proved the most lucrative for the global computers and peripherals industry in 2008, generating total revenues of $236.9 billion. That's...

By Greg Mills

While Apple supports open source software and even provides powerful program elements, such as WebKit, their tendency is to have a closed system. While some hate that concept, the truth is, Apple has thrived on it lately.  

The late 80's saw the much more "open" PCs as cheap PCs and Microsoft swamped Apple in the market place. Apple even dabbled with licensing software to Mac clone companies. That experiment was aborted as Apple returned to a solo, closed business model.  

The openness the PC world craves is also open to malware of every stripe and color. The relative safety of the Mac platform is commonly passed off as a function of the smaller size of the installed computer base. Why waste time hacking Macs when there are so many easy PC to infect? I think the truth is that the more closed system of the Mac helps ward off attacks due to the infrastructure being more secure from the foundation up and in no small part, the work of...

And in writing for "InfoWorld" (http://macosg.me/2/f0), Paul Venezia has an interesting premise: "Rumor has it that Apple may release a gyroscopic Wii-like controller, too. Couple a 27-inch LCD panel with a Mac running Mac OS X and games developed for the iPad/iPhone, all controlled by the equivalent of a Wiimote, and you suddenly have a compelling gaming system that could run the same games on devices ranging from the iPhone to the iMac. From the developer's perspective, it's develop once, run on every Apple device."

In fact, it's similar to a GameDock system proposed by "Mac/Life": "Take this nifty little gaming platform and assign it double duty as both a handheld and a console system. The GameDock accommodates the iPhone and iPod touch and hooks directly to your TV and the Internet. Whether you download a game wirelessly via the handheld or wiredly via the GameDock, you pay just once for two versions of...

Here's another reason I think we'll see an iMac 3D sooner rather than later: interest in 3D gaming is strongest among early adopters and gaming enthusiasts, but a new study from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) shows that interest in 3D gaming extends to the casual video game player as well.

The "3D Gaming: Entertainment’s Next Dimension" study of online U.S. adults also found that more consumer demonstrations and education are needed before adoption can take off. Interest in a 3D gaming experience is not limited to the devoted gamer. While two-thirds (64%) of those interested in 3D gaming say they are video game enthusiasts, more than a third (35%) that showed interest are casual gamers.

No matter what their gaming level, consumers interested in 3D gaming expect 3D gaming devices coming to the market to serve as multi-media players. Most consumers expect to use their 3D gaming device to watch 3D movies (58%) and connect to the Internet (51%). Nearly half...

Here's another reason why Apple won't be abandoning the Mac: money. On the heels of an exceptional fourth quarter in 2009, global personal computer shipments followed suit with year-on-year growth of 27.1% in the first quarter of 2010, according to the IDC research group (http://www.idc.com). And we're just getting started.

Unlike most of 2009, the recent market recovery has also seen a small rebound in higher priced SKUs as netbooks became less of a driver of volume (perhaps thanks to the iPad, eh?). Although low to mid-range portable computers still dominate the market, desktop computers also recovered with its first yearly growth since the second quarter of 2008.

Commercial desktops posted positive growth, a first since the downturn, while the popularity of all-in-ones was a major factor in driving consumer desktop growth. That's good news for the Mac Pros -- way overdue for an update -- and the iMac --...

A handful of Apple patents have appeared at the US Patent & Trademark Office. Here's a summary of each.

Patent number 2010053450 is for a system and method for authentication using a shared table and sorting exponentiation. Disclosed herein are systems, computer-implemented methods, and computer-readable media for authentication using a shared table. The method receives an authentication challenge from a first entity including an accumulator with an initial value, lists of elements in a shared table, and a list of sorting algorithms, each sorting algorithm is associated with one of the lists of elements and modified to include embedded instructions operating on the accumulator. The method then generates a temporary table for each list of elements in the shared table by copying elements from the shared table as indicated in each respective list of elements, each temporary table being associated with one sorting algorithm in the list of sorting algorithms...

A new Apple patent (number 20100150276) at the US Patent & Tradmark Office shows that the company may be planning HD radio features in upcoming iPhones, iPads and iPod. The patent is for digital radio tagging using an RF tuner accessory.

According to the patent, an accessory having an RF tuner for digital radio, such as HD radio, can be in communication with a media player such as a portable media device ("PMD"). The user can be given the ability to command the accessory to provide raw digital data, the ability to scan only for stations having digital audio content (or for all available stations), the ability to provide station lists of stations having digital audio content (or all available stations), and the ability to request and store metadata beyond that for stations actually being listened to provide enhanced search capabilities. Enhanced metadata and searching can provide the listener the ability to refine station choices without having to listen at length to any...