Henry Balanon Blog

Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least.

Mini Motor Racing and Mini Motor Racing HD ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) are excellent top-down racing games from The Binary Mill.  A good racing game requires three main features to come together: vehicle control, a variety of challenging courses and a heart-thumping soundtrack. Mini Motor Racing excels at all three. But the real kicker is the game’s head-to-head multiplayer action.

Mini Motor Racing supports four styles of steering and an optional auto acceleration feature to accommodate your prefered style of gameplay. “Wheel” mode uses a virtual steering wheel on the left side of the screen very similar to the iconic d-pad. “Toggle” provides a left and right button on the left side of the screen, whereas “Tank” places the left and right on separately on either side. “Slider” allows the user to control the car by moving a slide bar to the left and right.

Each style of play will cater to different drivers. Some prefer the Wheel, but I found Tank mode to be the easiest to control.  The final control in all modes is a button that gives the car a boost of nitro during the race.  Thanks to the way that the car navigates the track, as well as careful camera placement, you will never find the controls getting in the way of the game regardless of your control scheme of choice.

The opening sequence and smooth 3-D transitions when navigating the game’s menu system attest to the development team’s attention to detail.  There are over twenty different courses to choose from, and variations in weather and time of day keep replay value high. All fourteen cars on offer are  customizable: You can select the color and style, as well as upgrade each as you collect money and customizations along the various tracks.  If you want to upgrade in a hurry, you can use in-app purchases ranging in price from $0.99 up to $14.99.

Even without multiplayer support, the game is worth buying. Being able to play with up to four racers over Wi-Fi or two over Bluetooth, the multiplayer mode just adds to the bargain.

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The original iPhone, 2007.

Here’s a good primer on how Apple’s initial product design and conception works.

Apple Insider has a great account of former iPhone marketing manager Bob Borchers talking to students at an unnamed California school recently. He explains how his former boss, Steve Jobs, originally approached the iPhone team with the challenge of building a device that to date has sold 183 million units in less than five years.

“His [charge] was simple. He wanted to create the first phone that people would fall in love with. That’s what he told us.”

“Now if you’re an engineer, like I am by training, you’re like ‘what the heck does that mean?’,” he said. “But he was right. The idea was, he wanted to create something that was so instrumental and integrated in peoples’ lives that you’d rather leave your wallet at home than your iPhone.” Borchers noted that Apple’s success largely stemmed from focusing on only a handful of fundamental concepts: break the rules but do so in an exceptionally well manner, pay attention to detail and make people “think differently” about the relationship they have with their device, especially given that smartphones already existed in the market.

Notice the lack of numbers or spec goals right from the start. Later in the talk, Borchers says the overall goals Jobs laid out for the nascent device were to “be a revolutionary mobile phone, the best iPod to date, and also let users carry ‘the internet in their pocket.’” He also didn’t mention downloadable apps, GPS, video or photos. Instead, when breaking into a market in which the company had no prior presence, Jobs started with the concept of an emotional connection with the product and an attitude not to imitate or mimic, but to think beyond, what any other company was presently making.

This is useful for thinking about how Apple will approach future markets too.

You can watch the videos, which have much more about Apple’s unconventional relationship with AT&T, obsession with product packaging and more, here.

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Matthew Waldman’s Nooka watches are far from your standard time-keeping devices, with various dial designs that often use digital squares and circles turning on and off to mark the passing of hours, minutes and seconds. With a new app launched Thursday (via Om), Nooka brings its off-the-beaten path watch design to the iPhone.

The major benefits of the iPhone app are that you get to experience a variety of different dial designs in one place, and that it only costs $0.99 (or free for a more limited version), as opposed to the hundreds you’ll spend on an actual Nooka watch.

The Nooka app provides a basic local time clock, with three different faces to choose from, as well as a world clock, stopwatch and timer. For all of the above, you can choose the color of the clock’s background and time indicator elements using a simple color picker. The app works in both portrait and landscape orientation, which makes it a great candidate for a desk or bedside clock, although the presence of an alarm function would really help that, as would an interface tweak to hide the status bar when the clock is active.

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LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 4 Nooka-app1

Even though I’d like to see those features added in an update, the Nooka app is definitely cool as-is, and fans of good design and visually intuitive time-telling will not regret the $0.99 purchase price.

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Apple’s iPad is still the tablet market leader in terms of sales, despite gains by Android devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire, and a recent survey of tablet user satisfaction suggests it’s well-poised to stay in the lead. The iPad’s customer satisfaction is through the roof, according to a ChangeWave report, while Amazon’s Kindle barely exceeds the satisfaction level of the rest of the tablet pack.

Seventy-four percent of survey respondents said they were “Very Satisfied” with the iPad in an earlier November survey, while only 54 percent said they were “Very Satisfied” with the Kindle Fire in the January survey. The average of Very Satisfied customers for all other tablet devices combined was 49 percent. Why the 20-point gap between the iPad and Fire? It came down to what many users seemed to feel were missing features, according to ChangeWave.

The major dislikes that survey respondents listed for the Kindle Fire included the lack of a hardware volume button, the absence of a camera, short battery life, a lack of cellular connectivity and the size of the Fire’s app library. Cost and screen were favorite features among Kindle Fire owners.

Apple’s focus on user experience seems clearly to be better at winning the admiration of users post-purchase, while Amazon’s focus on offering a low-cost device seems to ultimately leave customers feeling like there’s something missing. That strategy appears to have worked well in the short term. One analyst said earlier this week that Amazon may have shipped as many as 6 million Fires during the last quarter of 2011. But long-term, Apple may have been right when it suggested in December that strong Kindle tablet sales might eventually help boost iPad demand.

Consider that the features tablet users indicated a desire for in expressing their dissatisfaction with the Kindle Fire are all features the iPad currently offers; there’s a clear path of where to get what they want out of a tablet already in place. And if Apple does decide to keep the iPad 2 around as a lower-cost offering when it unveils the iPad 3, the Fire’s No. 1 selling feature won’t seem nearly as much of a marked advantage.

On the flip side, Amazon could also address those deficiencies in future iterations of the Kindle Fire, should it find cost-effective ways of doing so. But Apple will continue to push the experiential envelope at the same time, and so far whatever it provides seems to set the standard in terms of tablet buyer expectations. Pleased customers are loyal customers — as ChangeWave says, it’s found that satisfaction is highly linked to future sales, so Apple’s big lead here is definitely a key measure of success.

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Apple’s iPad is still the tablet market leader in terms of sales, despite gains by Android devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire, and a recent survey of tablet user satisfaction suggests it’s well-poised to stay in the lead. The iPad’s customer satisfaction is through the roof, according to a ChangeWave report, while Amazon’s Kindle barely exceeds the satisfaction level of the rest of the tablet pack.

Seventy-four percent of survey respondents said they were “Very Satisfied” with the iPad in an earlier November survey, while only 54 percent said they were “Very Satisfied” with the Kindle Fire in the January survey. The average of Very Satisfied customers for all other tablet devices combined was 49 percent. Why the 20-point gap between the iPad and Fire? It came down to what many users seemed to feel were missing features, according to ChangeWave.

The major dislikes that survey respondents listed for the Kindle Fire included the lack of a hardware volume button, the absence of a camera, short battery life, a lack of cellular connectivity and the size of the Fire’s app library. Cost and screen were favorite features among Kindle Fire owners.

Apple’s focus on user experience seems clearly to be better at winning the admiration of users post-purchase, while Amazon’s focus on offering a low-cost device seems to ultimately leave customers feeling like there’s something missing. That strategy appears to have worked well in the short term. One analyst said earlier this week that Amazon may have shipped as many as 6 million Fires during the last quarter of 2011. But long-term, Apple may have been right when it suggested in December that strong Kindle tablet sales might eventually help boost iPad demand.

Consider that the features tablet users indicated a desire for in expressing their dissatisfaction with the Kindle Fire are all features the iPad currently offers; there’s a clear path of where to get what they want out of a tablet already in place. And if Apple does decide to keep the iPad 2 around as a lower-cost offering when it unveils the iPad 3, the Fire’s No. 1 selling feature won’t seem nearly as much of a marked advantage.

On the flip side, Amazon could also address those deficiencies in future iterations of the Kindle Fire, should it find cost-effective ways of doing so. But Apple will continue to push the experiential envelope at the same time, and so far whatever it provides seems to set the standard in terms of tablet buyer expectations. Pleased customers are loyal customers — as ChangeWave says, it’s found that satisfaction is highly linked to future sales, so Apple’s big lead here is definitely a key measure of success.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

Updated. The ongoing legal saga of Apple v. Motorola saw two setbacks for Apple in Germany on Friday. First, Motorola was granted a permanent injunction by a German court against a feature of Apple’s iCloud on certain Apple devices. Motorola won another victory after Apple removed several older models of iPhones and some iPads from its German online store due to the enforcement of a separate patent.

Patent blog FOSS Patents says the two actions are unrelated, and that Apple removing some older products comes because Motorola moved to enforce an important patent victory it won back in December. It was then that a judge ruled that Motorola had a patent on a ”method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.”

The result is that only older devices like the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPads were removed. Why not the iPhone 4S? It could be because the iPhone 4S has a chip from Qualcomm. The affected models have Infineon chips. Qualcomm chips could be safe for Apple in this case, according to FOSS Patents, if we assume “that Motorola and Qualcomm have a cross-license agreement in place (just like Samsung and Qualcomm do)” which would mean that “Apple is covered by extension, as a result of what is called patent exhaustion (a patent owner gets paid only once for the same use of a patent in a product).”

Perhaps more worrisome for some Apple customers who own the iPhone 4S in Germany right now is an injunction that affects iCloud users who want push notifications on their phones. The ruling affects any Apple devices that can receive push email notifications from iCloud or the earlier version, MobileMe. While neither service will get shut down as a result of the ruling, Apple will likely have to come up with a workaround for its iCloud/MobileMe customers there.

Apple won’t be letting this one go. As a company representative told PaidContent in a bit of subtle snarkiness on Friday, “Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid and we’re appealing the court’s decision.”

Update: It looks like the same German court may have suspended the injunction on the older 3G iPhones and iPads and they will be on sale again in “a matter of hours.” Apple told AllThingsD just now: “All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple’s online store in Germany shortly. Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

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Super Bowl weekend is upon us, and this year, the big game is going to be streamed live online for the very first time. Who wants to see the game between the Giants and the Patriots on a tiny laptop screen, you might ask? Cord cutters and other folks without cable or even a TV set for one, but the live stream also comes with some extra perks that the TV broadcast won’t offer: Viewers will be able to select from different camera angles, pause the game and other fun stuff.

Are you one of those people who just watch the game to catch a glimpse of the ads? No worries, you’ll find all of those online as well. There is also a bunch of second-screen action going on this year to deliver tweets and other extra content to your cell phone or iPad while you watch TV. And speaking of mobile: You’ll even be able to watch the entire game on your handset. You know, in case that laptop screen is to big, or you happen to be away from both Internet and TV.

Here’s our growing list of online resources for Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday 02/05:

• NBCSports.com will show the entire game online starting with some of the pregame action at 2pm ET (11am PT). The kickoff is at 6:30pm ET (3:30pm PT), and the game will feature HD-quality streams from multiple camera angles, DVR-like functionality to pause and replay the action and a number of social features.
• Verizon subscribers will also be able to stream the game on their phones through the NFL Mobile app, which is available for both iOS and Android. More info on the app here.
• Viewers in Canada will be able to watch the game via Bell’s mobile apps.
• Twitter has aggregated all the relevant accounts and hash tags to follow in this blog post.
• Hulu has once again aggregated Super Bowl ads in its Adzone.
• YouTube has Super Bowl ads, recipes and more in its AdBlitz channel.
• At least five of the ads shown during the game will use Shazam to offer free downloads, sweepstakes and other stuff meant to entice you to join the second-screen action. More about this on Shazam’s blog.

We’re gonna update this list with additional links in the coming days. Stay tuned!

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WillCall, the San Francisco ticketing app we profiled just last week, is taking down the velvet ropes and letting customers into its app starting Thursday.

The app, which is free, is available now in the iOS App Store and via the web for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. WillCall helps people who want to make last-minute plans, specifically what kind of concert or performance they want to go to.

At first, there will only be a few events listed per week, mostly for smaller venues and independent artists. As an example, the first list of acts available in the app will be: Shabazz Palaces at Yoshi’s, VHS or Beta at Rickshaw Stop or theater piece Jesus In India at the Magic Theatre.

The coolest part of WillCall — besides enabling poor planners and procrastinators of the world — is its attempt to capture the inherently social nature of concert-going. Users of the app will get a push notification and an invitation when a friend buys a ticket to an event.

“We recognize that folks are generally going to attend shows in groups, and this is our first attempt to making that as easy as possible,” said co-founder Donnie Dinch.

WillCall, for now, is going to be most useful for those around the San Francisco area. However, Los Angeles and New York City are on tap for launch just after the SXSW conference next month, according to Dinch.

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The Wallee is an iPad accessory that’s almost as old as the iPad, yet it’s shown that it can remain just as relevant, and actually become more so as the iPad has evolved. The new headrest mount that works with existing Wallee cases is a good example of smart accessory design that can grow with the iPad, rather than be left behind by Apple’s regular device redesigns.

The headrest mount, which works with Wallee’s existing iPad case mounting system, attaches to the headrest rail of any vehicle, and rotates in and out to provide viewing to one or more unruly kids who need entertaining in the back seat on long trips. It’s a simple, sturdy design in and of itself, but it’s really more impressive as the latest proof that Wallee’s creators at Studio Proper are into delivering long-term value rather than chasing short-term gain.

A lot of my favorite cases for the original iPad, including the ZAGGmate iPad keyboard case, required me to buy a new version in order to play nice with the iPad 2. The Wallee also required a new case, but it stung much less since all the accessories the case is designed to work with remained useful. Wall mounting disks, stands and a VESA mount still work with the new iPad 2 version of the Wallee case, and recent additions to the line, including a hand strap for easy one-handed use, and the upcoming Wallee Lock for secure, interactive iPad-based displays mean investment in the system continues to feel fresh, two years after the original Wallee’s introduction.

Most mobile device users will likely go through piles of device accessories that quickly become as outdated as the gadgets they’re designed for, so it’s nice to see a system that embraces and builds on its past, rather than simply starting fresh with each new whim of Apple’s design department.

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App developer Readdle has been very busy lately. A big update arrived recently for its PDF Expert software, and now the company is also launching a brand new note-taking and PDF annotation iPad app called Remarks. Here’s a hands on look at what the app offers users.

Remarks, like PDF Expert, offers PDF annotation and filling tools, but it’s a much more streamlined tool than that app, with a focus on making it easy to mark up and share documents, as well as create your own notes and notebooks independent of any pre-existing PDFs that can also be marked up and shared with other Remarks users for collaborative work.

Remarks is that rare beast among PDF tools, either on or off the iPad: it features a simple, straightforward interface and everything work very quickly, with speedy response times for turning pages, adding notes, and basically anything else you’d want to do. Tools, including pens, highlighters, preset shapes and text entry, are clearly labeled with simple icons, and there’s no visual clutter or wealth of unnecessary options to distract you from what you actually need to get done.

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LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 7

Sharing may be one of Remarks’ best feature. Using email, you can easily share documents with other Remarks users, including annotated PDFs and notes created in the app itself. But in an upcoming update, Readdle is planning to introduce Dropbox, Box.net and other cloud storage sharing options, too, making it even more convenient for doing collaborative work.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard or stylus, Remarks is even more useful. It features effective accidental touch or wrist-detection, meaning you can write naturally with a stylus without worrying about drawing in the wrong place, and regular Mac key shortcuts like Command+C, Command+V and Command+A work with keyboard text input.

Remarks allows flexibility in creating notes and notebooks, allowing you to rearrange pages as you add them or after the fact, but it doesn’t overwhelm with options like other iPad notebook offerings. And since it’s also a full-fledged PDF annotation tool, and one that can be used collaboratively, it’s probably one of the most versatile iPad apps for students, and a fairly inexpensive one at $4.99.

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What’s the best way to get kids to draw? Well, you can start by having them draw butts. Yep, that’s the premise behind a new iPad app from New York start-up Madbrook that is launching its Butt Art – Kids Learn to Draw Zoo Animals Step-by-Step app today, joining two Everything Butt Art physical children’s books the company already has in bookstores.

The hook behind the free app might sound a little gimmicky but the company has some interesting ideas about how to make drawing more interactive and engaging not only for kids but their parents. The app starts with the idea that kids can learn by drawing the shape of a butt, which can become the basis for a lot of pictures and objects. The app is equipped with a lot of the simple arts tools you would expect in a drawing app, like paintbrushes, pencils, erasers, colors and stickers. But it also has some nice touches like a smart centering feature when zooming out and multiple layers.

The idea is that kids ages 4-11 will pick different animals and learn to draw them using animations and step-by-step lessons, which can be turned off. And all of the finished products can be saved to a gallery.

What’s interesting about Butt Art is that it’s connected to a backend (Get it? backend) so parents can get notification emails every time their children finishes a new piece. So that means they can check out the new work online and they can also share it via Twitter and Facebook. The artwork can also be posted to an online activity feed that notes the child’s profile, date, and the colors used in the image. Children also earn badges for achievements while drawing. That’s helpful because it means parents are able to encourage their children on their progress and feel like they’re involved in what their children are doing. There isn’t a real-time feedback system so parents can comment from the web on their kid’s work but that’s coming soon, founder Brian Snyder tells me.

“If your kids are drawing on a device and the parents are not engaged, that’s not a sustainable approach. There’s no substitution for an engaged parent,” Snyder told me. “We’re trying to bring in parents in a way that’s low friction.”

The fact that Snyder has already put out two books is interesting as well. The company started out with the idea of making an iPad app but decided to first publish children’s books last year to help draw people into the concept and appeal to children who may not have an iPad. The first two books, Everything Butt Art at the Zoo and Everything Butt Art on the Farm, published by Independent Publishers Group, have been picked up by Barnes & Noble and other booksellers. The books also provide more content for the iPad app, which includes a full ebook inside with audio and animated page turning.

Madbrook founder Brian Snyder

There’s also a Butt Hunt game inside the app, similar to a Where’s Waldo game. Snyder said he plans on putting out two more physical books in May and doesn’t expect to stop anytime soon because children’s books will be the last books to go under, he believes. Butt Art monetizes by offering three characters for free and selling packs of six additional characters to draw for 99 cents.

Snyder came up with the idea after teaching his daughter how to draw using the butt technique, something he learned as a kid himself. Since he didn’t see anyone else pursuing the concept, he decided to push ahead with his own start-up, recruiting a couple people to help him. Ultimately, he left his job at IBM, where he was handling sales for the UBS account.

I think the Everything Butt Art franchise has a good chance to succeed. Parents love being able to keep up with their children’s artwork and show it off. This is a simple way to get kids to be creative while keeping parents in the loop. And it doesn’t hurt to have a, ahem, cheeky way to market the app.

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Mention the name Toca Boca to any parent with an iPad or iPhone, and you’re likely to hear them start raving with delight. Since launching last year, the Swedish games studio has become a big hit with families thanks to its sequence of simple, open games — including best-selling titles like Toca Hair Salon and Toca Kitchen.

The company’s apps have been downloaded millions of times, grabbing attention by combining different elements of play into small, self-contained games that are simple, colorful and fun to mess around with.

Now the Stockholm company, a subsidiary of Swedish media group Bonnier, is targeting bigger things — and planning to open an office in San Francisco next month.

“After the past year we started thinking about what we were lacking — and what we could improve,” says Björn Jeffery, Toca Boca’s CEO.

“Generally speaking we don’t think there’s anything wrong with the product. We think it’s about visibility,” he adds. “The product will still be developed in Stockholm, but opening a San Francisco office will give us proximity to Apple, the iOS marketing system and the U.S. market.”

So far getting traction in America has been slower than elsewhere, but breaking in could be a big deal. Toca Boca has already developed a significant following in a range of international territories, from its home base in Sweden (where it has had eight of the top 10 paid apps in iTunes) to unlikelier climes such as Kuwait, where it boasts that it has 40 percent of the top 10 paid apps. While the reasons for some of those successes remain elusive, the team thinks it can ramp up success by concentrating on expanding in particular areas.

“We don’t quite know why Kuwait loves us so much,” chuckles Emil Ovemar, the lead producer. “But it’s testament to our growing fan base: each product does better than the last one, and Toca Kitchen has had 90,000 sales — none of them are free downloads — since we launched it on December 15.”

With its 14 staff working on short, self-contained cycles, Toca Boca has released 10 apps in the past year. But describing its products manages to be both incredibly easy and yet strangely complex. The company doesn’t like to call the things it makes “games,” but prefers to label them “toys”: environments that children can explore either on their own, or as part of a wider playtime. They’re more like building bricks or playsets than rules-based games.

Ovemar says this idea came out of research the duo did once they had finished up working in Bonnier’s R&D department — which was responsible for developing and building things like Mag+, the company’s system for producing tablet-friendly magazines (featured here in point 8 of our article ’10 Features That Would Make iPad a Hit’.)

“Mag+ went into the production phase, which is whole different machinery, and we were wondering what to do,” says Jeffery. “So we started thinking about what happens when a tablet like device enters the home. Before the iPad it wasn’t necessarily an outside bet that tablets would appear, but nobody knew what people would do with it.”

“I got my kids, who are aged four and six, an iPod Touch each to see what they’d do with it,” says Ovemar. “They did things like play timed hide and seek, or take photos and make movies. They used the screens to play, not just to sit and stare at… I realized they were toys — albeit expensive toys — that allowed for free imaginations and free play. Most developers make apps for adults: they don’t encourage pretending and free play.”

Accordingly, Toca Boca’s approach to games and play is one that comes from lots of different directions: members of the team have worked in children’s public service broadcasting and iOS, although they have avoided hiring traditional video games producers. The result is a sort of 21st century Fisher Price meets Sesame Street.

Being part of Bonnier — which owns newspapers, TV channels and magazines around the world, including significant U.S. publications such as Parenting and Baby Talk magazines — has so far been a hands-off experience. But Toca Boca does not see its future as a series of tie-ins with other Bonnier properties.

“We really created a company within the corporation; a startup within a big company,” says Jeffery. “There are good things and bad things about it, but Bonnier is a very decentralized company … they funded the business and then let us grow it. The risk otherwise would have been that we’d become an in-house app developer for Bonnier children’s books — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not what we wanted.”

Jeffery will head the new American office, which will initially be based at Bonnier’s base in San Francisco’s Financial District — but says Toca Boca plans to move out into its own space soon.

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Apple’s huge iPhone sales numbers from its latest quarterly results and the overall success of its iPhone 4S helped it grow its mobile phone business by 128.4 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new IDC report. That was good enough to help the company climb to third place overall in worldwide smartphone shipments, leapfrogging both ZTE and LG Electronics.

Apple’s 37 million fourth quarter iPhone shipments were a far cry from the market leaders, however. Nokia still ruled the roost with 113.5 million handset shipments, while Samsung edged closer to grabbing the top spot with a 20 percent increase compared to the previous year, to a total of 97.6 million units shipped. Samsung succeeded by growing its smartphone sales, but also by increasing its feature phone shipment numbers in an otherwise soft market for those devices.

While Apple was the biggest gainer percentage-wise during the quarter, LG suffered the biggest drop,with a negative 42.2 percent change compared to the same period in 2010. Its total shipments were at 17.7 million for the year, which is on par with 2007 levels. LG definitely felt the hit of the waning feature phone market and was unable to do much to impress consumers with its smartphones, either.

Apple also ranked third overall in terms of  mobile phone shipments throughout the whole calendar year thanks to its fourth quarter results, with 93.2 iPhone shipments and year-over-year growth of 96.2 percent.

IDC predicts that the mobile phone market will continue to experience double-digit growth, despite only seeing 11.1 percent growth year-over-year in 2011, versus 18.7 percent growth between 2009 and 2010.

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Apple has failed to secure a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphone in Germany, thanks to a ruling by the Munich Regional Court Wednesday (via Bloomberg). Apple had claimed that the Galaxy 10.1N, a version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 redesigned to avoid a previous injunction, and the Nexus infringed upon a patent related to touchscreen technology.

In delivering the ruling, judge Andreas Mueller suggested that the court didn’t like Apple’s chances for maintaining the validity of the patent claim, saying that “Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.”

It’s a win for Samsung, and one that will no doubt take the sting out of a ruling Tuesday that saw a Düsseldorf court uphold an injunction against the original Galaxy Tab 10.1. This injunction also would have applied to a technical patent, not design IP, which would’ve been much harder for Samsung to work around with simple software or hardware modifications.

Samsung’s bigger concern will still be the pending European Commission’s investigation related to its legal use of patents requiring fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms, which the EU regulatory body formally announced on Tuesday.

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• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

For the first time since 2009, the biggest manufacturers of electronic devices spent more in total on wireless chips than on standard computer chips, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli. Device makers spent $58.6 billion on chips for wireless devices last year, compared to $53.7 billion spent during the same time period on chips for desktops and notebook PCs. It’s been two years since wireless chip spending last exceeded PC chip spending, but thanks to our obsession with smartphones and tablets, it’s unlikely that trend will reverse itself again.

Spending on the two types of semiconductors was essentially a tie in 2010, when wireless chips totaled $51.2 billion and spending on PC chips was $51.8 billion, according to IHS iSuppli’s calculations. But the growth in 2011 was all wireless, as you can see in the chart below.

The rise of mobile devices, which sold in record numbers last year, is responsible. “Wireless will continue to generate the most growth during the next two years,” said IHS iSuppli semiconductor analyst Wenlie Ye. “A substantial portion of the segment’s increase will be due to rising tablet sales, although mobile handsets like smartphones will continue to account for the lion’s share of semiconductor segment in the wireless area.”

And who’s spending the most on semiconductors for tablets? You won’t be too surprised to find out it’s Apple, the world’s biggest seller of touchscreen tablets. Last year, Apple spent $4.6 billion on chips for tablets, more than any other OEM. The next closest — though “close” is a relative term here — was Apple frenemy-in-chief, Samsung, which spent $603.2 million on tablet chips. HTC was in third with $199.2 million.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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IOS development is not for the faint of heart, and a new blog post by developer Kent Nguyen (the creator of the Denso mobile video discovery apps) does a good job of pointing out exactly why. Nguyen’s target audience is companies who foot the bill for app development, in the hopes of lessening sticker shock and generally making it easier for non-developers to understand why devs need all that time and money to do what they do.

Nguyen goes into a lot of detail, and it’s a must-read for anyone thinking about commissioning an iOS (or really any mobile OS) application. Here’s one passage in particular that I know will resonate with a lot of freelance devs:

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert[ing] it to a fuel-powered motorcycle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense. [Emphasis in the original]

A lot of companies may be interested in what an app can do for their business, but without a good sense of what kind of resources need to be invested in order to create the app in the first place, there is bound to be ample frustration on all sides. Nguyen’s no-nonsense primer is a good way to help avoid some of that frustration.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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If you bought a Mac last year, you probably have a Thunderbolt port on your computer doing nothing right now. At CES 2012, we saw a lot of Thunderbolt solutions on display, but few are shipping yet. As of Wednesday, however, Seagate’s GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter is available to order, which means you could soon be transferring data to external drives at lightning speeds.

The GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter isn’t exactly cheap at $99.99, but it’s still a far cry cheaper than most currently available dedicated Thunderbolt drives. At Apple’s online store, for instance, you’re looking at spending $499.95 just to get in on the ground floor with LaCie’s 1TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt drive. By contrast, you can get a GoFlex 1TB drive starting at $159.99, plus the adapter for $99.99, bringing you to just under $250. Both solutions also require you to purchase a $49 Thunderbolt cable separately, of course, but at least pricing for Thunderbolt solutions is headed in the right direction for wider consumer adoption.

GoFlex’s option also works with their line of GoFlex-branded portable drives, so you actually only have to buy one adapter to use it with multiple drives. There are some caveats, however. The adapter doesn’t offer Thunderbolt daisy-chaining, but on the plus side, it also doesn’t need an external power source.

The other limit is that transfer speeds are capped by the drive’s capability. Macworld ran some real-world usage benchmark tests and found that while the 5,400 RPM drive found in Seagate’s Ultra-portable line transferred data faster on Thunderbolt than on FireWire 800, the gains weren’t huge. But with 7,200 RPM drives like those in Seagate’s higher-end GoFlex externals, you’ll see more benefits from the Thunderbolt adapter.

At $300 total before taxes for a 1TB drive, Thunderbolt adapter and Apple Thunderbolt cable, I still wouldn’t call this drive solution cheap, but it definitely lowers the barrier for entry. The upside is that you can add additional drives for much less after you have the adapter and cable, so long as Seagate keeps its GoFlex interface spec the same for future devices. That makes this probably the most consumer-friendly Thunderbolt storage solution we’ve seen to date.

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• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
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A dedicated Apple TV set was a hot topic at the end of 2011, spurred mainly by comments Steve Jobs made in his official biography by Walter Isaacson. So far in 2012, news on that front has been relatively quiet, but a new note by longtime Apple TV set booster and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (via Fortune) is reigniting discussion Wednesday morning.

Munster claims discussions with a “major TV component supplier” which had been contacted by Apple about its TV display parts lead him to believe Apple is still on track to introduce a dedicated television device in late 2012. However, there’s a caveat: Munster thinks if Apple can’t get a revolutionary new content model in place, then it won’t move on the market this year.

The analyst then goes on to suggest three possible scenarios that might constitute a unique Apple approach to the television market. Those potential solutions break down roughly as follows:

1. Changing the experience, not the service

In Munster’s first scenario, Apple would basically leave TV programming to existing operators and simply layer its own interface software on top, including menus, guides, DVRs and content discovery. Munster notes that Apple was expected by some to manage its own wireless network in the U.S. ahead of the iPhone launch, but instead partnered with AT&T and focused on UI and UX instead of content. Remember that apps came after the iPhone’s original introduction.

2. A hybrid content model

Apple could also partner with existing networks to offer live TV, and at the same time, deliver on-demand content from providers like Netflix, Hulu Plus or any other content partner willing to play via an App Store-style distribution channel, Munster suggests. It’s a “best of both worlds” type solution, and would probably still come complete with an overhauled UX, but might be trickier to negotiate than option number one, since it involves negotiating with two different types of content providers.

3. A la carte

Munster’s last option is a completely customizable, a la carte option that would see users subscribe to live TV packages from content providers. This would be the most revolutionary of the options in terms of the existing TV experience, but it would also involve a dazzling shift in the way providers make their content available, and the negotiations involved in doing so would be challenging, at best. In the end, there’s also no real guarantee that selective programming is what viewers are after, especially if existing, less flexible bundles from other sources cost less.

GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler wrote last year that Apple’s television effort was more about experience than about content, and described a likely outcome of Apple’s TV endeavors that pretty much mirrors Munster’s second scenario listed above.

Given the challenges involved in negotiating the third solution, I have to agree that a system that works with existing content sources, but also opens up the possibility of apps for different kinds of content makes the most sense as a solution that could still make big waves in the TV industry while also remaining realistically possible in the near-term. Which of Munster’s Apple TV predictions, if any, make the most sense to you?

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Being the resident “extreme” iPhone case enthusiast (and also the klutz who drops his phone most often), I was intrigued by the new cellhelmet Kickstarter project. This $44.99 case combines svelte design with protection against drops, but bundles it with an actual insurance policy that replaces your iPhone if damaged while in the case.

The case in and of itself isn’t magical, and according to David Artuso of cellhelmet creator cellpig.com, the case isn’t “superman.” The design has angled edges to protect against drops, and a choice of six different colored backplate shields to protect the glass, providing great protection without the bloat of other solutions.

What sets the cellhelmet apart is the bundled insurance policy, administered by Global Warranty Group. Should the iPhone break while in the case, a $50 handling fee covers any repairs required, or complete replacement if necessary. I’ve written about iPhone insurance before,  this case including the insurance for the $44.99 purchase price is what makes it interesting.

The plan does not cover water damage, nor does the case protect the water sensors, but according to gadget insurance provider SquareTrade, glass breakage accounts for 82 percent of its claims. The cellhelmet is competitive with SquareTrade’s own insurance program, but is slightly less expensive, applies even to used iPhones, and of course, comes with a case. Your iPhone has to be in the cellhelmet for its policy to apply, however.

Coverage lasts for one year from the time you purchase your cellhelmet, and should you ever have to claim a total device replacement, you’ll have to buy another cellhelmet, but that’s consistent with other third-party insurance programs. If all your device requires is a screen replacement after an accident, you get unlimited repairs.

For slightly more money than a stylish iPhone case, and slightly less than a third-party insurance program, you can get both by backing the Pittsburgh-based company’s project on Kickstarter. Not a bad deal, especially if you can’t seem to keep a firm grip on Apple’s beautiful but somewhat slippery smartphone designs.

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• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

China Telecom is getting very near to launching Apple’s iPhone 4S on its network, the carrier said in a press release Tuesday obtained by China Daily. China Telecom subsidiary Beijing Telecom said a CDMA version of the iPhone 4S will likely be available to its customers by the end of February or the beginning of March.

Apple has been taking preparatory steps in advance of a launch with China Telecom, China’s third largest mobile network operator. Earlier in January, Apple secured regulatory approval to sell a device in China that operates using the CDMA2000 network standard, which is the technology China Telecom uses for its 3G network. At the time, the only step remaining for Apple was to get a license from China’s Telecommunications Equipment and Certification Center to begin selling the device, which it gained on Monday this week.

Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty predicted Apple could grow its iPhone sales by as many as 57 million units in China over the next two years if it succeeds in securing partnerships with China Telecom and China Mobile. China Telecom will offer Apple a potential subscriber pool of roughly 15 million high-end subscribers according to Morgan Stanley’s numbers, approximately doubling its current reach through official partner China Unicom.

The deal hasn’t yet been confirmed by Beijing Telecom’s parent company beyond the report from China Daily, and no pricing details have been released, but the pieces are in place, and there’s little reason to suspect Apple wouldn’t want to expand its presence in China as quickly as possible. No doubt a partnership with China Mobile, which reaches 650 million subscribers and has around a 70-percent share of the Chinese mobile market, is also a priority, but technological factors likely precludes official iPhone support until Apple creates a version specifically for China Mobile’s network.

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