Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is suing Apple for infringing on up to 10 of Nokia’s patents with the iPhone. And, it seems Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) could get hit with as much as $1 billion in damages related to their alleged patent infringement. Sounds crazy, but it might just happen.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that Nokia will seek damages of around $200-$400 million – assessed at $6-$12 for each of the 34 million iPhones sold to date. But, that might be Apple’s best case scenario if a judge finds that Apple was in the wrong by not paying their dues to the folks in Espoo. According to Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston Apple could be facing down the barrel of a lawsuit that could end up costing the iPhone maker $200 million to $1 billion in damages.

Apple is something of a newcomer to the mobile phone game. They don’t have the patent portfolio to protect them against lawsuits like this, and it’s hard to see how Apple could make a smartphone these days without treading on at least a few of Nokia’s wireless technology patents. That leaves Apple open to getting legally violated by the mighty Finns.

Some say Nokia’s lawsuit is more a ploy to try and slowdown the runaway success of the iPhone. Others think Nokia just wants to get in on Apple’s cash cow. In any case, Nokia says they approached Apple with several offers before filing suit, so it’s Apple’s bad for not wanting to settle this out of court. It should be interesting to see where this goes…

[Via: Reuters]

Stop the presses! The Finnish dream used to be getting a job at Nokia (NYSE: NOK). They maintained the number 1 position in terms of most desirable employers for years. This year however, they didn’t even make it into the top three. For economists getting out of University, Nokia is now the 4th most popular choice. For fresh out of school engineers, Nokia is now 6th. The only people who like to work for Nokia are IT people, which makes sense Nokia’s IT budget is larger than a small African nation’s yearly health expenditures. What. The. Fuck. Happened?

“Nokia’s competitors and other Finnish companies such as Finnair have managed to brand themselves better on the labour market in the eyes of students.” — Tommi Ora from the Helsinki School of Economics

Which Finnish companies are at the top of this list? Kone, who makes elevators for fucks sake, and Fazer, who makes bread, pastries and chocolate. How badly did Nokia treat students that they’d rather make a career out of fixing elevators and finding out the right percentage of macadamia nuts to put in a chocolate bar?

[Via: YLE]

The crazy expensive Vertu Constellation Ayxta that no one reading IntoMobile is going to buy, but instead admire for a distance, has made it into the hands of Eldar from Mobile-Review. Enjoy:

Carphone Warehouse is a UK mobile phone retailer. They won exclusive rights to sell the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 5530 in the UK for 6 weeks starting on August 11, 2009. When they realized that the device didn’t sell as well as they had hoped, they started shifting units to outside markets. Carphone Warehouse purchased 130,000 units, and have exported over half of them. You may think that sounds all well and dandy, after all if a company purchases goods with the intent to resell them then they what they did, under the strictest tenants of capitalism, is considered doing their job, right? Sadly it isn’t. It violates the rules Nokia enforces upon all of their distributors and resellers. We’ve seen such commotion arise before, in China, when several shops received fines for selling devices to provinces that were not agreed upon.

Nokia is rightfully pissed because Carphone Warehouse sold the 5530 to distributors in other countries who are now dealing with excess inventory within their borders. Economics 101 kicks into play and with large supplies, and little demand, prices drop. They’ve dropped as much as $16 per device in some cases. If distributors make little profit on Nokia hardware then next time they may order fewer units, or worse yet go out of business.

A Carphone spokesperson told Mobile News: “There are a combination of reasons why we would look to sell product outside of our standard channels. These include returns and repairs, end-of-life stock, and over-stocked products. In this respect, we are no different from any other retailer in the industry. Equally, if we do have to sell stock in this way then we want to ensure there is the least disruption possible in the markets that we trade in.”

To which a Nokia spokesman replied: “We take the matter very seriously and are looking into the alleged activity.”

Buying goods on the grey market is nothing new. American Nokia fans were once used to this, often buying unlocked devices that were undeniably from the UK due to that hideously large power plug. Times are better today and Nokia sells a lot of unlocked units to American resellers. Here in Finland, any time someone goes on a trip to America they’ll usually ask their friends if they “need anything”. No, I’m not talking about illegal drugs, and besides everyone knows the UK has the cheapest drugs in all of the EU, I’m talking about the really weak dollar, combined with low taxes, making devices super cheap. Take the new $999 Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) MacBook for instance. In Finland it is 999 EUR, which is $1500. Why wouldn’t you pick up an American MacBook for only $1000, which is 665 EUR, and spend that extra 335 EUR on a small weekend retreat to Estonia or something?

With October coming to an end in a little over a week, and mobile phone geeks around the world eagerly await the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900 to start shipping, it seems that the device isn’t going to be “in select markets … October 2009” like the August press release said. Peter Schneider, Head of Maemo Marketing @ Nokia, posted a message to the official Maemo forum with the latest information regarding availability:

The Nokia N900 is a great example of what we and the open source community have been able to achieve with Maemo software. We are working closely with open source developers and for example, at the Maemo Summit in October, we loaned 300 pre-production units to get more feedback from the community. This feedback is extremely important to us and as such we also want to provide the best user experience with the Nokia N900.

We expect it to start shipping during November 2009.

I didn’t really feel compelled to share this bit of news with you, but a flood of emails and Twitter direct messages informing me of the “delay” changed my mind. It’s only 1 week people. You’ll live.

Now take a deep breath, go out and find yourself a Halloween costume, and get blasted with your friends on October 31st.

When it comes to offering cut-throat pricing that usually undercuts many carriers’ own subsidized handset prices, Amazon isn’t the only game in town. Dell pops up from time to time with amazing deals of their own. Deals like this Dell offer for an unlocked Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E63 for $150, after $100 instant discount.

The Nokia E63 is the little brother to the Nokia E71, but still packs a punch. The E63 features large display, full QWERTY keyboard, 3G data connectivity, WiFi and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Unfortunately, you’re not going to get integrated GPS on the E63. For GPS you’ll want to check out the E71.

$150 Nokia E63 from Dell

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) isn’t just the largest mobile phone maker in the world (although, they’re bleeding market share like a hemophiliac heavyweight boxer), they also hold a lot of technology patents that make the wireless world go ’round. And, Nokia doesn’t like it when other companies use their intellectual property without paying their dues. Today, Nokia has announced that it is suing Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for infringing on 10 of those patents with the iPhone. The patents in question relate to GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WiFi) technologies that the iPhone uses to connect to wireless networks across the globe.

Nokia claims to have invested €40 billion and 20 years of research into securing their various wireless patents, and they want to ensure a return on those investments. The folks in Espoo have alleged that the iPhone has been infringing on various Nokia-held patents since the iconic handset was launched in 2007.

Here’s what Nokia says it at stake:

The ten patents in suit relate to technologies fundamental to making devices which are compatible with one or more of the GSM, UMTS (3G WCDMA) and wireless LAN standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

This is what Nokia has to say on the matter:

“The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for,” said Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President, Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia. “Apple is also expected to follow this principle. By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation.”

Nokia is something of a veteran of IP-related lawsuits. The Finnish mobile phone giant has been in several legal tussles recently to protect their rights and intellectual property. Unfortunately for Apple, Nokia has the means to drag out legal battles across international borders and keep attorneys working for months on end to get what they want. If the patents are truly being infringed, Apple would do well to nip this in the bud and settle the lawsuit with a tidy licensing deal.

[Via: Nokia]

Folks of The Really Mobile Project wanted to show just how horrible experience Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Ovi Store provides. To illustrate their hassle in buying a Twitter client, they made a short video above. As you can see for yourself, something’s fundamentally wrong with the Ovi Store. I’ve no doubts the issues raised will be fixed in time, but in the meantime saying “it sucks” is an understatement…

[Via: Gizmodo]

I just came back from the first of six international Nokia N900 meetups. The Helsinki event took place in none other than the Nokia Flagship Store, a shop that I used to visit quite often during my usual daily strolls down main street, but have lately been ignoring due to Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s present uninspiring portfolio of devices. I’m still on the fence as to whether or not it was a success, but I know that has something to do with the former financial analyst in me who would like to see some hard numbers. A success, by my definition, would be recuperating the costs of these events, with Nokia N900 purchases from the people in attendance. I’ll never know if this event, or the five similar events coming up are actually cost effective, but I did discover something just by showing up. Nokia employees working on Maemo have hearts.

There are four types of Nokia employees. You have the majority of employees, who do their job just so they can pay the bills. They’ve established a mind numbing routine and are indifferent about their role, but they know that working for Nokia allows them a gracious amount of time off, flexible working hours, and a healthy severance package should they become fired. Then you have the people who are actually into the mobile industry and really do care about where Nokia is heading, but unfortunately they’re in roles that have little to no impact towards the future device or service portfolio. There are a healthy number of these individuals, I used to be one of them. Next you have the people who actually work on the future devices and services Nokia will be releasing, the people who get their hands dirty, the people who use an IDE more than they use PowerPoint. These people care about what they’re doing, developers love solving problems and seeing a project rise from concept to product, but they may not exactly care about Nokia or the wireless industry as a whole. Finally you have the people who are in the right place, at the right time, and doing the right thing. These people may or may not have technical savvy, but are in a position to change things and are really excited about the things they’re working on, what their work will mean for Nokia, and the mobile telecommunications as a whole. Few of these sort of people exist, but I was fortunate enough to meet a few at tonight’s event.

Maemo employees, and I’m not going to name names since I don’t want to get people in trouble, know what they’re up against. They know the iPhone offers a fantastic consumer experience, but deep down they really do care that it is a locked down platform where developers play by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s rules. They know Android is on the tip of everyone’s tongues, but they oppose the fact that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) worked to build something that is open on paper, but in reality is just Google saying “we know there is stuff out there in the open source community that does what we want to do, but we’re just going to write, from scratch, the bits and pieces we want to make so they can be exactly how we like them; to shut the community up we’ll just open source everything”. They know that the N900 will be what the technology media people will be talking about when it hits stores next month, but they’re humble and admit that internally their judgement day, when all Maemo employees receive self vindication, will be when the device after the N900 running Maemo 6 will be on store shelves.

The enthusiasm Maemo people have about open source software is astounding. They don’t want to build something from scratch, open source it, and call it a day. Instead Maemo people look at the best at what open source offers today and then takes from all those projects whatever it can to combine it into what you and I call Maemo. I never really understood that until tonight. To me “open source” has become such an overused phrase that I’ve associated it with filthy marketing talk. One Maemo employee whispered to me “notice how there are no marketing people here tonight?” and at that point I realized the whole concept of these events was not about pushing the Nokia N900, but pushing Maemo and the concept of open source to a greater audience.

I may not agree with open source people. They probably hate the fact that I use Windows 7, that I don’t give a shit as to whether my software is open or not, and that I constantly bring up the fact that going to an open source event is like waking up in a world where females never existed. That being said, open source people are free thinkers, and the people who talked to me today did not spew the well rehearsed Nokia corporate communications quotes, they actually started their sentences “well … personally I think …”; unheard of since Nokia marketing people are not allowed to have their own opinions when speaking to a public facing audience.

The Maemo guys have heart, and people with passion get far in life, but can this team execute on a mission to bring the best open source software device to market? I’ll just have to wait and see. I can’t offer anything else that that.

Just wait and see.

Oh and one more thing: congratulations to my mate Henrikki for winning a Nokia N900 tonight.

Long time Nokia (NYSE: NOK) fanbois and fangirls know that Nokia’s Nseries devices pack the latest hardware and software inside, albeit at the cost of some instability, while the Eseries packs the hardware and software from the previous generation, but thankfully has been matured and made highly stable, and finally the numbered devices, 6220 Classic for example, are tried and tested and practically bulletproof. As time goes on however, the Nseries appears to be getting more and more buggy, prompting a mobile shop owner who prefers to remain anonymous to say:

“I’ve found myself advising customers to wait three to four months from a [high-end] N-Series handset’s initial release before purchasing, as we expect all of them to have flaws in the original release.”

I’ve personally jumped back and forth, starting with a Nokia E61, then getting a N95, then E61i, then N82, and now I’m using an E71. Nothing in today’s Nseries lineup excites me. But back to software stability: one thing I can depend on is quick software updates that fix any bugs I may run into. The imported models I used to purchase were usually Finnish, and now living in Finland I obviously get Finnish models. Nokia smartphone buyers in the UK however have to wait a few more weeks for their software updates. What does Nokia UK have to say about this?

“The team are working hard to speed up the process and ensure consumers in the UK and around the rest of the world can get all software updates as soon as possible.”

A typical recycled and well rehearsed public relations line. The UK has it bad, the USA is the worst however. Software updates usually don’t even come out for American variants.

What’s up Nokia, isn’t the Nseries supposed to be your premium brand? The Ferrari of your device lineup?

[Via: The Guardian]