by Charlie White
All week, everybody was wondering if the Blackberry by Research in Motion (otherwise known as a RIM) was going to be shut down, and sales stopped by a court in Virginia. The Blackberry is a communications device that is used by a lot of swanky people to stay in touch with their e-mail 24 hours seven-days-a-week. They get so dependent on a that a lot of people are calling it a CrackBerry. Anyway, a company called NTP, which is a company whose job it is to own patents and sue people for violating them, said that Blackberry had violated their patent. They took RIM to court, and won the suit. Now they're asking a judge to halt the sales of the Blackberry and award them $126 million in damages. But yesterday, the judge said he wasn't going to issue a ruling yet and he stopped the hearing. So I guess what this amounts to is, the Blackberry has dodged another bullet, but this is not over yet. The judge said that he will issue a ruling, he just needs to think about it for awhile. The problem is that some government leaders use this Blackberry all the time, and the attorneys for research in motion are saying that it's become part of the nation's infrastructure. So the judge probably wants to figure out if our country will fall apart without the Blackberry, if the trains keep running, if all the power will go out, whatever.
But what about patents? Has this whole idea gone too far? This brings up a whole host of questions about patents, copyrights, who owns what and whether it's actually good or bad. I think something like this is ridiculous. Some things are very basic, like breathing. Wonder why that's not patented? Sending and receiving e-mail via wireless device? That seems like a pretty generic task. Well, I'm no lawyer, but it looks to me like this company NTP is just a bottom feeder waiting for someone to create something that happens to be mildly similar to something they’re holding an their portfolio of patents, and is in the business of suing people. I don't think this is what our founding fathers had in mind when they thought the idea of patents.
Another big story, rumors are running rampant that Verizon may release a brand-new smartphone next week. The Motorola Q is the phone I'm talking about, and it's a beautifully designed smartphone, which is a combination computer, cellphone and MP3 player. So, there may be a Q on the Verizon. I like this Q phone. It looks to me like Motorola took the regular klunky smartphone concept, sort of like the one that has made by Treo, the Treo 650, and ran it through the RAZR machine. I think it looks thinner than any smartphone yet developed, and it has a beautiful design, I think. Some people don't like that it has Windows Mobile 5 operating system on it. But I don't mind that, I just don't want to use it if it's too big -- when I'm not on the road I just need a cellphone, so I want to be carrying around a lot of extra baggage just so I can use this smartphone when I'm in road-warrior mode. I'm going to take a look at this Motorola Q phone, though, and I'm thinking it might be released next week. If it is, I will give you a full report next week on Coolness Roundup.
And here's one more thing that happened: a company called Chi Mei Optoelectronics in Taiwan (that's the third-largest flat panel maker in the world, by the way) developed an HD display that's unlike any we've ever seen. It's a 56 inch LCD, nothing new about that -- but the big news is that it's what's called Quad Full High-Definition, which is the next step in high-rez display technology. This flat panel is capable of cranking out 3,840 x 2160 pixels of ultra high-definition madness. This is quite a technology exercise, where this is four times the resolution of high-definition TV. At this point, there's not really much program material you could watch on it -- you have to crank out the video from a computer, that would have to be a monster computer indeed. Just to run the video takes 1.4 GB per second, that's gigabytes, not gigabits. Who knows how much it’s going to cost, or when it will be released, but just to think that there's resolution on the horizon that is four times higher than high-definition, I'm looking forward to seeing one of these in the home theater about 10 years from now.
