FOSS Patents reports on a truly bizarre curveball in the Samsung/Apple case:

Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there’s actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung’s lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

Samsung then offers a picture of iPadish designs in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ll be amazed and slightly horrified if Samsung gets away with this, because it appears pretty damn clear Samsung ripped off Apple and is now using every tactic possible to try and distract everyone from that claim.

And what if Samsung is successful? Will every tech company accused of copying another company’s products have its legal team sift through classic sci-fi movies and 2000 AD comics, just in case something similar exists? Will it totally obliterate the ability to patent anything remotely futuristic, because it’s all been seen somewhere before? (As Stuart Alexander Arnott wryly pointed out on my Facebook page: “In today’s news, Paramount Television sue Motorola for their Razr phone copying the ‘clamshell’ Star Trek communicator.”)

Still, this could be a shot in the arm for the beleaguered Hollywood movie industry: rather than spending time suing the pants off of people downloading movie torrents, or, for that matter, making movies, studios could instead trawl through their back catalogues for sci-fi and spend the rest of their days in court, claiming prior art on everything from TVs and electric cars to the internet and robot pets. I CAN’T SEE HOW THIS CAN GO WRONG AT ALL.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Long-range weather forecasting is hard. I get it. Even figuring out what the weather’s going to do tomorrow is an inexact science, and so predicting trends months into the future is nigh-on impossible. Some people will say “why bother, then?” but we all know that people crave to know how their summer is going to turn out. This year, Brits—like in a number of recent years—were mostly told to brace for a 1976-style heatwave. Instead, we’ve ended up with one of the most cool, grey, drab and damp summers I can remember. So here’s my tip to all British long-range weather forecasters next year:

Lie.

It really is that simple. Don’t bother spending many weeks fine-tuning your algorithms and massaging data. Just lie. And as we’re British, you really need to be pessimistic, because while Brits love a good moan, they’re secretly happier when bad things turn out good. For example, the following would be the wrong path for you to take:

• Prediction: heatwave and lots of “cor, what a scorcher!” headlines. Reality: like this summer.

What happened there is you told people the UK will get a summer and the reality is it didn’t get one. Net result: the bad summer is all your fault, weather forecaster. You somehow jinxed it with your scientific powers. Much better to take this route:

• Prediction: mediocre summer, with a lot of cloud and rain, with temperatures at or slightly below average.

Now, if the weather follows the pattern from the past few years, this will be accurate, and you’ll be hailed as some kind of weather genius, despite not having done any actual work. Yay you. If, by some small miracle, the UK actually gets a summer and people end up lobster red and baking in an utterly ungainly manner, in only the way Brits can, well, who cares? Things were better than you predicted, so no-one’s going to blame you. They’ll be too busy slapping aloe vera on their sunburn.

If you need to get more detailed, feel free to copy and paste the following to your research papers and websites. I’m sure it’s at least 50 per cent accurate, despite me typing it up while distractedly playing Strategery on my iPad.

Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2012

• January: Look, it’s winter, so it’s going to be cold. It’ll probably also snow a bit, causing the UK to grind to a standstill in shock and surprise, despite being a country in the north of Europe, where it tends to snow. There will, however, be sunny periods, most notably near to sunset, blinding drivers countrywide who thought “well, it’s January, so I won’t need any sunglasses in the car today”.
• February: See January.
• March: Winter’s done, so summer will do a quick sneak attack to see how well-prepared Brits are for heat. Within 24 hours, the weather will, at some random point, go from “brr, it’s a bit nippy” to “OMG HOTTER THAN THE MED!” Most people will turn off their heating, whereupon the sneak attack will withdraw. Most weather forecasters will now also predict a 1976-style heatwave summer, but you know better than that, don’t you?
• April: A mixture of coolish showers and quite nice sunny days. Since Easter holidays are at the start of April, predict with 99 per cent confidence that the nicer weather will start immediately after the kids return to school.
• May: Grey.
• June: Summer will try to get started rather like someone attempting to fire up an old, battered motorbike. You’ll think it’s going to fire, and it almost will. But then it will sadly die. By the end of the month, it will be slightly cooler and wetter than everyone would hope for, with clouds lurking menacingly.
• July: Because of the ‘jet stream’ and ‘high pressure in the wrong place’ and ‘low solar maximums’ and ‘sky genies’, the Atlantic will throw all its awful weather the UK’s way like a stroppy child flinging snot at a wall. There will be a glimmer of sunny weather the day before the kids break up from school, after which the weather will attempt to drown the entire British population by raining as much as possible.
• August: Cool, grey and rainy, bar in the evenings when it’ll annoyingly get quite nice and sunny right before sunset.
• September: People will want an ‘Indian summer’; they’ll get the end of a ‘British summer’. In other words, see August, but a bit cooler.
• October through December: As autumn turns to winter, it’ll get colder. Now and again, the sun will arrive for a quick look, which will make the nights very cold indeed. In December, it will snow. A lot. Dear Royal Mail: please make note of this last point, rather than acting all surprised that it snows in December and that people tend to send a lot of mail in December.

Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2013

• See “Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2012”.

Smart editorial from Tap! magazine editor Christopher Phin on why people buy iPads. His arguments are in part a rebuttal to a piece on Engadget that bangs the ‘tablets have no obvious use-case’ drum:

But there’s something I see time and again with the iPad: people often don’t have, as Darren implies, a clear practical use in mind when they’re buying one; but over weeks and months, they start using it more for all kinds of both predictable and unexpected tasks, and using traditional computers less.

I fully admit I’ve so far bought two iOS devices for purely work-related reasons: my old (since sold) iPhone 3G and my iPad. I bought them because I figured I could write about them, not because I thought they would become devices used for anything other than testing the odd app and then writing about it. In fairly short order, the iPhone became my primary games machine, a mobile web browser, a musical instrument and a pocket book. The iPad did similar tasks but was also handy for comics, creating artwork, messing about with photos and for writing articles. And, yes, I use computers less, very rarely bothering with a laptop at all these days.

But while this is a fine argument (and Phin adds that a tablet is more suitable for a relaxing environment than a ‘proper’ computer, and notes that apps can rapidly enhance an iPad’s abilities), I was more drawn to the editorial’s conclusion:

[W]hat kind of joyless monochrome world would this be if we all made decisions based solely on the grounds of practicality and productivity?

This can be read two ways. I suspect detractors will yell: “SEE! I knew Apple fan-boy idiots just liked the shiny shiny and don’t care about anything else, the dolts!” But it can also be read that sometimes it’s fine to be drawn to something that seems exciting, even if you don’t know exactly why.

Only by embracing new technology and then seeing what we can do with it can we ensure we don’t remain stuck in the past. And for everyone moaning about the lack of obvious utility in tablets, people once said the same thing about computers—and look where that got us.

Via Harry Marks, AllThingsD reports on BlackBerry Music:

Five dollars a month.

Well, that’s not too bad.

Fifty songs

Sorry, what? 50 songs? For five bucks? The same price as you get thousands of songs from Spotify for? Are you MENTAL?

you can share with your friends.

Aha. And there’s the possible non-stupid of this idea. See, one thing’s pretty obvious when bumbling about in cities: the kids love their BlackBerries; also, kids love sharing and they rather enjoy music. A low-cost service where you can easily share your favourite songs with your friends actually sounds pretty interesting.

There are just two snags:

1. Most kids don’t see any value whatsoever in music. It’s online and ‘free’ via torrents, and so why pay?
2. Isn’t BlackBerry primarily a business-focussed company? What’s with trying to compete with Apple all the time? JUST STOP.

Add to this the hardly surprising revelation that the music is trapped on BlackBerry devices and won’t be accessible to any other hardware and you have the music service equivalent of so much RIM output: a nice idea realised in a ham-fisted manner. Here’s hoping someone gives it a wee boost before it’s revealed to the general public, or it’ll be yet more ammo for the ‘RIM is out of touch and directionless’ crowd.

Slightly odd article from the BBC, with Rory Cellan-Jones asking if Apple is now winning too often in the tech industry. It’s safe to say Apple’s doing rather well of late, but it’s easy to forget that it is a marginal player in desktop and notebook computers (even if its savvy business methods ensure high profitability) and has a scrap on its hands regarding smartphones; only in tablets does Apple look to have an iPod-style lead as its rivals flounder and find it nigh-on impossible to beat so-called ‘rip-off Apple’ on pricing.

Nonetheless, Cellan-Jones asks if Apple’s success is now destroying the industry. He notes Google’s patent land-grab and suggests Apple won’t be worried about that; he mentions HP’s tablet fire-sale and PC spin-off, and offers this:

Apple executives – like the England cricket team – must be asking themselves “where did it all go so right?”

Strange quote there. It’s not like success has come as a surprise to Apple in the spaces it’s doing well in.

It’s only 18 months since Steve Jobs told us that the iPad was part of a revolution that would take us beyond the PC – and now HP is not only agreeing, it’s throwing in the towel.

In particular, the axing of its Touchpad tablet computer, just weeks after a hugely hyped launch, is not only a humiliating and expensive setback for HP, it threatens to sap the confidence of consumers in all rivals to Apple’s device.

I’m not sure most casual buyers will distinguish between WebOS or Blackberry or Android tablets, seeing them all as just potential iPad alternatives.

This neatly sums up the problem with Apple’s rivals—they don’t offer anything new. None of Apple’s rivals has sought to be like Apple and be truly disruptive. With the iPad, Apple didn’t look at what existed and rip off the leading product; instead, it created an entirely new market.

So if a product like the Touchpad can die within weeks who’s going to want to invest in any of the other iPad killers?

Here’s where Cellan-Jones starts to slide into the gravel trap. No-one has yet invested in any kind of ‘iPad killer’, because no-one has done anything other than look at Apple’s product and try to create some kind of facsimile. Every tablet on the market right now tries as much as possible to look like an iPad and then offers some feature or other that Apple deemed unnecessary in the tablet space. Thus, you have the ‘iPad with Flash’ and the ‘iPad with a USB port’; what you don’t have is any real innovation, nor anything that will do to the iPad what the iPad did to desktop and notebook computing.

In short: you don’t create an iPad killer by ripping off the iPad; you create an iPad killer by doing something totally amazing that Apple itself hasn’t thought of yet but that makes the iPad look as archaic as the iPad made most notebooks look.

Cellan-Jones then says the one tablet that could give the iPad a scrap is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but there’s a problem:

Apple is in the middle of a legal battle in a German court over the alleged similarities between the Tab and the iPad, which saw Samsung’s device temporarily banned from most European countries.

The ban has been lifted, outside Germany at least, but the whole affair has not helped market the tablet.

Who will go out and buy an iPad rival if all they are hearing is that it’s a copy of the original, and no cheaper?

Well, quite. And here’s the thing: it more or less is a copy of the original, and no cheaper.

Whatever the merits of Apple’s case may be, patent and intellectual property disputes now appear to be harming the interests of consumers and innovators in the computing industry.

SCREEEEE! THUNK! And there’s Cellan-Jones, in the wall, with a crumpled bumper. I fail to see how Apple is harming the interests of consumers by blocking a device that wholeheartedly ripped it off, allegedly to the point of intentional confusion. As for harming the interests of innovators… really? Let’s take a look at that, courtesy of SockRolid at MacRumors:

Yeah, just feel the innovation. (Additional handy images: Daring Fireball’s shot of a pre-iPhone Android device, which didn’t at all look like a BlackBerry, and @Dooderoo’s ‘before and after’ of Samsung tablets.)

Steve Jobs and his company have enjoyed win after win over the last couple of years.

But many consumers – as well as rivals – may be hoping that on Thursday when the German court rules again on the copycat case, Apple suffers a rare defeat.

Not me. I’m sick of companies just riffing off other companies and it needs to stop. Microsoft of all companies has shown that you can innovate in the touchscreen space (although, sadly, Ballmer’s ‘Windows everywhere’ idiocy has stopped Windows Phone already appearing on tablet devices; instead, we’re told to wait for the Frankenstein’s monster that will be Windows 8—neither optimised touchscreen environment nor traditional desktop computing OS, despite trying to be both).

I don’t believe the Apple device designs were ‘obvious’, otherwise someone else would have got there around the same time, not many months later; and I also believe that if you’re going to copy rather than innovate, you’ve only yourself to blame if you, like Samsung, go as far as to rip off the bloody icons of your rival’s system.