Remember that initial ruling Motorola Mobility won against Microsoft hoping to ban imports of Xbox consoles and other products? While that ruling is still waiting on a six-member commission for approval, Motorola has recently won a similar injunction in Germany.

The injunction prevents Microsoft from selling Xbox 360 consoles, Windows 7 system software, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player in Germany, following a ruling that Microsoft’s products violate two patents regarding H.264 video coding held by Motorola.

However, because Motorola is waiting for a judgement hearing to be held in Seattle on May 7, the company can’t do anything at the moment. The judge may also hold this ruling at a later date. If Motorola were to win the injunction, however, Microsoft would have to pay $4 billion a year in royalties to the mobile giant.

At the moment, Microsoft is also planning to appeal against the German ruling and states that Motorola’s claims abuse Frand-commitments, “a promise to licence innovations deemed critical to widely-used technologies under reasonable terms.”

Source: BBC

Bloomberg reported today that Motorola Mobility won a U.S. International Trade Commission Judge’s initial ruling to block imports of Microsoft’s Xbox systems.

ITC Judge David Shaw stated that Microsoft was violating four of five Motorola patents: two patents that cover aspects of an industry standard for video decoding, two for Wi-Fi technology, and a patent on the way to establish communication between the Xbox and accessories. According to Shaw, “the second Wi-Fi patent wasn’t infriged, and one aspect of one of the video-coding patents was invalid.”

Motorola has demanded that Microsoft pay a 2.25 percent royalty on products that use its inventions. If Motorola’s demand are met,  Microsoft would have to pay $4 billion a year in royalties.

“We are pleased that the ALJ’s initial determination finds Microsoft to be in violation of Motorola Mobility’s intellectual property,” Motorola said in a statement. “Microsoft continues to infringe Motorola Mobility’s patent portfolio, and we remain confident in our position. This case was filed in response to Microsoft’s litigate-first patent attack strategy, and we look forward to the full commission’s ruling in August.”

Microsoft also released a statement saying: “Today’s recommendation by the Administrative Law Judge is the first step in the process leading to the Commission’s final ruling. We remain confident the Commission will ultimately rule in Microsoft’s favor in this case and that Motorola will be held to its promise to make its standard essential patents available on fair and reasonable terms.”

This ruling still needs to go through a six-member commission, and its final ruling will be issued in August, Reuters reports.

Google will buy Motorola’s former phone making division, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion in cash, marking the search engine giant’s largest acquisition to date.

“Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. “Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers.”

Google Android competes directly with iPhone, Blackberry, and Microsoft Windows-based devices. Mobility makes smartphones for the Android, but sales have floundered, especially against the iPhone/iPad.

Motorola Mobility split from the rest of the company in January.

In the sale, Google will pay $40.00 per share, 63 percent over Motorola’s closing stock price on Friday.

The Associated Press reported that Google is likely interested in Motorola’s many, many patents on mobile phone technology, as a consortium of its competitors, which included Microsoft, Apple and Blackberry maker Research In Motion, recently won the chance to buy thousands of patents from bankrupt Canadian networking gear maker Novell.

With assorted Droid phones seemingly hitting stores every month or so, purchasing a smartphone (if your service provider is either Verizon or Sprint) has all of a sudden become much like buying an automobile or a desktop computer. Meaning, as soon as you take it off of the lot or walk out of the store, it’s almost immediately replaced by something infinitely better.

Well, fear not, owners of the HTC Droid Incredible. The Droid X isn’t that much better than what you already own. In fact, to me, it’s not even close.

Now, don’t get me wrong, (and not to sound like a hypocrite) the Droid X is a technically superior phone to the HTC Incredible. It features more storage space (up to 40GB compared to 24GB) slightly better resolution (854 x 480 to 800 x 480) image stabilization, better battery life, and an HDMI output. The X also has a bigger screen, too; the 4.3-inch touchscreen (with Swype, but you can now install that on the Incredible) beats the Incredible’s 3.7 inch screen. And while that doesn’t sound like it’s THAT much bigger, it is. Trust me.

Silly as it may seem to some, it’s the aforementioned size difference that’s really the reason I can’t say I’d buy the Droid X. To me, it’s like trying to carry around a dinner plate in your pocket. I can’t stress this enough.
IT’S HUGE.
I know it’s just my personal preference, and I realize that smartphones are going to get larger just based on added “bells n’ whistles”, but I still want to use something that is the size of a normal cellphone. While trying to talk on the Droid X, I constantly found myself trying to get comfortable while using it, and I just couldn’t. Also on a device this size, it’s next to impossible to click on anything in the top left corner (missed calls, messages, Tweets) with your thumb, unless you’ve got giant “man hands”.

Speaking of which, I purposely let my girlfriend use the Droid X for a few days (and no, she doesn’t have “man hands”) just to see what her reaction would be, and she returned it to me after one day saying, “I think it’s pretty, but it’s too big for my hands.”
If only she could say the same about yours truly. *sigh*

So, what if the size of the Droid X isn’t an issue for you? Well, while I personally don’t know anyone (no matter how tech dorky they may be) who would hook up a smartphone like the X to their television to watch a movie more than once or twice, perhaps that’s something you want from your phone.
Me? I just want fast internet access, clean and clear reception, some fun apps, a decent camera, and a high res screen. Yes, the Droid X features all of these things, but it just feels like there’s too much going on with this thing. Again, I still want to feel like I’ve got a cellphone in my pocket, rather than a laptop that makes phone calls.

The bottom line? Despite it’s enormous girth, the Droid X is a very powerful device. You get Verizon’s top notch service, and yes, it’s got much better multimedia features than the HTC Incredible. However, if I was forced to choose between this and the Incredible, I’d much rather plunk down my $200 on HTC’s gem of a smartphone.

For the full specs on Motorola’s Droid X, click here.

Motorola today backed off the announcement it made earlier this week promising Android 2.1 for the Droid cell phone by week’s end.

The announcement, revealed on Motorola’s Facebook page earlier this week got Droid users excited, as the major update, with  multi-touch support and lots more was finally to arrive, but it wasn’t to be.

According to BGR the announcement was made in  haste, and was never really true. Ouch.

“According to Matt, forums manager over at Motorola, the information was prematurely released” and that “the DROID update page on Motorola’s website has been pulled and all links to the update page have been deleted from the forums.”

As a Motorola Droid owner, this is painful news. I was looking forward to this all week, constantly checking my phone for the update, but no, I was lied to!

When the update finally does roll out, we’ll update the story!

Source: BGR via Gizmodo

Every day it seems like there’s another social network you need to keep updating. We’ll freely admit that should you try to keep up with all of them, it can get overwhelming. While there are sites like Friendfeed which aim to collect all of your social network happenings on one website, you’re still tied to your computer to be able to keep tabs on your friends.

But now, Motorola is introducing the Cliq with Motoblur, which allows you to update, post, and read everyone on all of your social networks all on the homescreen of your phone.

Motoblur is Motorola’s first offering built on top of Google’s Android phone OS. Motoblur is the “solution” that allows you to post to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail, and last.fm. Content is delivered to the home screen of the phone in different categories to let users better handle the stream of information.

Updates, including statuses, wall posts, and friend feeds from social networks are delivered to the “Happenings” box, while email and networking messages are delivered to the “Messages” box. You can update all or some of your networks from the “Social Status” box, and an RSS feed reader will deliver headlines to your home screen.

The underling Android system allows tight integration between Google’s offerings, including Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as contact syncing with your Google account.

The Cliq phone itself is packed with 3G and A-GPS, wi-fi, a 5 megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a standard headphone jack to let you listen to music or stream last.fm playlists. The Cliq doesn’t have an official release date other than “fourth quarter” from T-Mobile. Definitely looks like something to add to the Christmas list.

We’ve all had one of those days. Your phone is incessantly beeping in your ear, wasting what precious little power it has left to tell you that it, in fact, has no power. Your charger is nowhere to be found. Your friend offers her charger to you. Your hopes are smashed when her charger does not fit your phone. You miss the phone call from Ed McMahon “" rest in peace “" telling you that you’ve won a million dollars. Your lift is ruined (see picture).

OK, so that’s slightly dramatized, but we’ve all felt the sting of needing an inexplicably different cell phone charger for every phone we’ve owned. Why are they different, you ask? Just because. However, change is afoot “" at least in Europe “" where cell phone manufactures have agreed to all use micro-USB as the standard for charging and data transfer on their phones.

At the behest of the European Commission of the EU, manufacturers ranging from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, and many others have all agreed to an industry-wide standardization. These companies control 90% of the phone market in Europe, so this is nothing to scoff at. The EU hopes that this will reduce the amount of waste thrown into landfills (though we feel like one charger every couple of years is a whole lot less than say, the one or two water bottles we throw away every week, but every little bit counts).

The universal chargers will initially be bundled with the phones, but eventually phones will not come with a charger at all, in the hopes that consumers will be reusing them. The price of the chargers is yet to be determined.

While this is only Europe-wide at the moment, the hope is that the world will follow suit, for both convenience and the environment’s sake.

Wireless carriers consistently rank low in customer satisfaction rankings. One only need troll the pages of sites like Consumerist to understand why. Expensive, spotty service couples with poor customer service makes for quite a set of disgruntled customers.

One of my big beefs with carriers (or even phone makers-I’m looking at you Apple) are carriers that cripple their phones because they’re worried that missing income could erode their bottom lines. Early on, Verizon crippled the RAZR so that uploaded mp3′s couldn’t be used as ringtones, forcing people to purchase expensive twenty second clips of songs that they already purchased for $0.99 from iTunes. Even still, most Verizon phones do not allow personalized mp3 ringtones, and customers must purchase them. On the flip side, Cingular customers, who have access to many of the same phones, are free to use their phones as they see fit.

Of course, this lead the grassroots efforts that lead to consumers hacking their phones. Apple routinely blocks apps from the App store that they find threatening. Such was the case with Podcaster which Apple blocked for “duplicating functionality.” Nevermind the clock apps, and calculator apps, and stock watching apps, and … Need I really continue? On a similar vein, AT&T forced Apple to remove NetShare because tethering your iPhone as a modem violated their contract. Of course, solutions to both of these missing apps are available to users who jailbreak their phones, leaving AT&T and Apple without any income.

While AT&T has allowed VoIP apps to run on iPhones, they have to restrict data to Wi-Fi networks only, eliminating the possibility of using data networks for free minutes. However, not all carriers are so generous. Nokia wants to bundle Skype on their upcoming flagship device, the N97 in Europe. Clearly, this would make the phone quite attractive to consumers already strapped for cash. However, O2 and Orange have refused to even stock the device unless Nokia strips the software out.

Businesses need to stop treating their customers like shoddy criminals and realize that it’s our nature to try and save money any way we can. If the technology exists, why can’t we use it? Carriers should realize that by allowing the software with a small surchange would sell more phones, bringing in more customers and more money. What about that situation isn’t attractive? Could this be why the US and Europe have some of the most underdeveloped wireless networks when compared to Asian countries?

Change may be scary, but it’s time for carriers to embrace new technologies and move forward. People are paying good money for devices-they’re going to want to use them to their fullest extent.

With everyone’s eyes directed to the flashy touch screen phones, like the iPhone, the LG Dare, Sprint’s Instinct and the Blackberry Storm, one little touch screen phone seemed to have slipped under the radar. The Motorola Krave ZN4, though, is by far one of the best touch screen phones that has been released so far.

The Krave is unpretentious in a way that that the Dare, Instinct and Storm are not. No, it does not come close to besting the iPhone as the best touch screen phone out there, but the Krave offers new and unique capabilities and has one of the better touch screens in the market.

What sets the Krave apart, and confuses some at first glance, is that it combines the flip phone with the touch screen. The Krave has a clear cover that, in order to text message, access the internet or e-mails or talk on the phone, flips open like a normal flip phone would. However, when closed, users can touch through the cover to access new text messages or music, V Cast TV, photos or VZ Navigator; a helpful and compact way to use the Krave’s four main amenities. There is a “lock” switch on the side of the phone as well so that the touch buttons do not accidentally get pressed when the phone is put in a purse or pocket.

Though using the phone’s inner touch pad when it is locked causes some issues with the accuracy of the touch pad, the Krave has one of the best touch screens in the market. While it is not as accurate as the iPhone, the touch screen on the Krave buzzes back at the user whenever they touch the screen so they can tell whether the tap was registered or not. This comes in especially handy when using the key pad, which is a regular keypad when held vertically or a QWERTY keypad when held horizontally.

Similarly, the browser is one of the easier to use because of its own unique quirk: instead of just tapping on the link that the user wants to access and hoping that the phone registers the right one (one of the major problems with the Dare), the Krave has a pointer that lines up with the proper link, and the user clicks on the pointer to guarantee accuracy. There is no need for zooming in to try to click the appropriate tiny link with this helpful addition.

The inner menu is easy to navigate. By contrast to when the Krave is closed, the four main icons when it is opened are for messages, the dial pad, the full menu, and contacts. After clicking either the “Menu” button or just the bottom half of the touch screen, a full menu opens up, offering a full array of options from Bluetooth and Media Center to Tools and Settings. All access points in the phone can be reached via this menu.

How many times have you dropped your phone on the ground? Can you even remember the last time it fall out of your pocket and the cover split into tiny little pieces? Have you had waking nightmares of dropping your phone and never being able to put it back together?

Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme — or maybe it’s just us — but the fact is: phones are breakable. Before the only solution was an unattractive protective case or an expensive insurance policy, but now Motorola and Verizon are teaming up to come up with a better solution: an unbreakable phone.

And oh, did we try to break it.

The most damage we did to the new Motorola Adventure V750 was the plastic outer-coating protecting the battery falling off. The battery remained intact, the plastic piece was resilient, and the phone continued working unscathed.

While there is no guarantee that the phone will be able to survive a trip the bottom of a lake or being run over by an 18-wheeler, (our resources are only so vast) the Adventure can hold its own against whatever its owner wants to put it through.

The phone is a bit bulky and the material used to make it feels a bit cheap, but all that is part of the package: you can’t expect a sleek, flashy phone to survive a tumble down concrete stairs or falling to the ground while flipped open — yet.

The Adventure offers a great camera with 2.0 megapixels and loud speakers that make it easy to hear conversations over speakerphone or blast some downloaded music. The phone sports VZ Navigator and push-to-talk technology, but beyond that, it felt like just an average phone.

It’s not that the phone was lacking in anyways, it just didn’t have any features that put it above and beyond the rest. It just felt like one of the cheap phones that you get when you sign up with Verizon, albeit an extremely durable one. The Motorola Adventure is the phone for those who want a phone to just be a phone, but might need that extra bit of protection.

The Adventure can be bought on the Verizon website for $119.99 with a two-year contract or for $299.99 with a month to month contract.

While it is the right step in the right direction, the Adventure didn’t offer enough beyond a sweet camera, clear music playing, and a durable outer coating to really “Wow” us at Blast. If an unbreakable Blackberry Storm comes out, though, maybe we would be willing to dish the cash out for it.