Apple Tests Larger Screens for iPhones, iPads

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By Lorraine Luk and Ian Sherr

Apple Inc. is testing larger screens for its smartphones and tablets as it attempts to answer increasing concerns about its product lineup and competition from Samsung Electronics Co.

People at Apple’s suppliers said it asked for prototype smartphone screens larger than its current iPhone in recent months, and has asked for screen designs for a new tablet measuring slightly less than 13 inches. Whether the designs will make their way to market is unclear, but they could lead to Apple phones and tablets that are larger than the current 4-inch iPhone 5 and 9.7-inch iPad.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. Reuters earlier reported Apple was investigating larger screen sizes for its iPhone.

The screen tests come as Apple is set to disclose third fiscal-quarter earnings on Tuesday and provide insight into how the company’s existing lineup is selling. In April, the Cupertino, Calif., company reported profits contracted for the first time in a decade despite strong demand for the iPhone and iPad.

The challenge Apple faces is how to continue expanding its customer base with innovative new products and refinements of current ones. Apple has successfully done both, but analysts note the company hasn’t launched a new product line since the original iPad in 2010.

The tests with suppliers suggest that Apple is exploring ways to capture customer interest in smartphones and tablets from competitors that come in various sizes. Its biggest rival in the tablet and smartphone markets, South Korea’s Samsung, offers products with different features and sizes in what its executives say is an effort to appeal to as many customers as possible. The products have allowed Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone maker, even though Apple still leads in tablets.

“Apple has been slow to react to consumer desire for larger smartphone screens, [and] entry level price points on new phones,” said BGC Financial’s Colin Gillis in an investor note. “Waiting and waiting, for the new products to launch, has become painful,” he wrote.

 

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(Published July 23, 2013, in The Wall Street Journal.)

Apple, Samsung in Renewed Settlement Talks, but Deal Elusive

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By Ian Sherr

Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. have held a series of private negotiations about their patent disputes since last summer when Apple notched a victory in one case, according to legal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The negotiations included face-to-face meetings in Seoul, South Korea, in December, one document states. The two companies even appeared to come close to a settlement in February before talks cooled off.

There is no indication that the two sides are close to a settlement, but talks between the companies are still going on, the people familiar with the discussions said.

In the negotiations, described sparingly in heavily redacted documents from the U.S. International Trade Commission made public earlier this month and by people familiar with them, Samsung has pushed for a broad patent cross-licensing deal that could settle all outstanding litigation between the companies. It is unclear whether Apple was interested in such a deal.

The possibility of a broad settlement, or a series of separate deals, marks another twist in the relationship between the two technology giants that began with Samsung supplying parts necessary to make smaller and thinner iPod music players in 2005, and has ballooned into fierce competition over smartphones.

Samsung, relying primarily on the Android software platform created by Google Inc., stormed into the smartphone lead in 2011, selling 24 million units in the third quarter of that year, according to Gartner. Apple, by comparison, sold 17 million iPhones in that quarter. Samsung widened that lead in the first quarter of this year, selling 64.7 million smartphones, while Apple sold 38.3 million, Gartner said. The companies have been partners and combatants ever since.

Apple claimed Samsung copied its products in a lawsuit filed in 2011, touching off battles in courtrooms around the globe as the two jousted about technology patents and trademarked designs, with attempts to both win jury awards and block the sales of one another’s products.

Samsung has accused Apple of infringing broad patents that are deemed essential for creating wireless devices. Apple has generally accused the South Korean company of infringing patents covering unique functional aspects of its mobile devices or their physical designs.

So far, the results have been mixed, analysts say.

 

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(Published July 19, 2013 in The Wall Street Journal.)

Classic Board Games Win New Fans on Tablets and Online

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By Ian Sherr

Scrabble might want to consider adding iPad to its dictionary of acceptable words.

The Hasbro Inc. board game, which was created about three-quarters of a century ago, has found a new audience as one of the most popular games for tablets. It is now the 14th best-selling app ever for Apple Inc.’s iPad.

Scrabble isn’t alone. Its online cousin, the Zynga Inc. word game “Words With Friends,” is ranked No. 8. Other titles from the board-game world such as TheCodingMonkeys’ Carcassonne, United Soft Media Verlag GmbH’s Settlers of Catan and Hasbro’s Monopoly have become mainstays of the app store’s popularity lists.

Chip Lange, who oversees Electronic Arts Inc.’s digital versions of Hasbro’s classics, says the reason these games have found such an audience on tablets is because they are timeless classics to begin with.

The sales haven’t been limited to tablets, either. Eric Hautemont, chief executive at Days of Wonder Inc., says that 16% of the people who buy the iPhone or iPad version of Ticket To Ride buy the physical version of the game within a month.

Overall, he says, between 30% and 40% of those who purchase the iPad version will eventually buy the board game.

The reason for the tablet version’s popularity and the strong crossover in sales, he adds, is that players touch the screen. “When you play with your computer you know you’re playing on a computer,” he says, and the keyboard and mouse keep players at a physical and emotional distance from the action. “The iPad is transparent.”

 

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(Published July 3, 2013, in The Wall Street Journal.)

Fans Take Videogame Damsels Out of Distress, Put Them in Charge

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By Ian Sherr

Playing “Donkey Kong” this spring, Mike Mika’s 3-year-old daughter Ellis asked him why it is always the mustached Mario who saves Pauline, the damsel in a pink dress who gets kidnapped by a gorilla.

The game has no option for the girl to save the boy. It just works like that, the dad told his daughter. “She was bummed out,” he says.

So Mr. Mika, a 39-year-old videogame developer in Emeryville, Calif., hacked the classic game’s software to make the damsel into a heroine who saves the plumber Mario. He published his version, dubbed “Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition,” online, where it has been downloaded more than 11,000 times since it was posted in March.

Many videogames have long followed the same guy-centered theme: Girl gets in trouble; boy goes on a quest to save girl. Since few of those titles have broken that story mold, a niche of gamers with programming skills makes it their mission to write their own.

ZeldaWith a few redrawn pixels and well-placed lines of computer code, the women crying out for rescue have become the ones who save the day. One gamer turned the namesake character from “The Legend of Zelda,” a princess saved by a guy named Link, into a sword-bearing warrior. (The game’s creator called it “Zelda Starring Zelda.”)

Another made Princess Peach, a different kidnapped friend of Mario, throw her own fireballs as she fights her way through a Mushroom Kingdom to save the plumber.

Even the lipstick-lined Ms. Pac-Man started as a hack of the popular arcade game about her male counterpart.

The hackers do the gender switch by tapping into code from the games. They tend to focus on older titles because the programming and graphics are simpler than modern ones.

There is some debate about how far the hackers should take their artistic license. Some change a lot throughout the game, adding pink color schemes, feminine fonts and even new mystical capabilities, such as the ability to turn into a mermaid for underwater fights. One remade “Super Mario Bros.” into “Hello Kitty Land.”

 

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(Published July 3, 2013, on A1 of The Wall Street Journal.)