Investigation Could See iPhone, Blackberry Ban

No more iPhones or Blackberrys? Say it ain't so!

Back in January, Kodak filed a complaint claiming Apple and Blackberry maker, RIM, were both infringing upon a patent owned by the camera company. Kodak alleged that Apple's iPhone and any Blackberry with a camera use a method for previewing color images and processing images that is covered in a Kodak patent. In its complaint, Kodak asked the FTC to block the importation into the U.S. of the allegedly infringing products.

Given that Kodak has filed similar suits against Samsung and LG in the past and currently licences out the technology to Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, it's a safe bet that there is at least some truth to Kodak's claims. All the more interesting, then, that the ITC is currently investigating the situation and could block the sale of iPhones and Blackberrys in the U.S.

The U.S. International Trade Commission announced on Wednesday what it would launch an investigation into whether or not Apple and RIM are infringing on the patent. The USITC reiterates Kodak's wish to issue an exclusion order and cease and desist orders but says it has not yet made any decisions on the merits of the case.

In January Kodak said it had warned both Apple and RIM about their infringements before filing the complaint.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsRKXfkTlC4

Google's been on somewhat of a spending spree as of late and this week, the company continues its shopping binge with the acquisition of reMail, a company responsible for an email search application for the iPhone.

For those of you who haven't heard of reMail, it's basically an iPhone app that downloads all your mail to your phone to provide offline search for mail. Though it sounds daunting, the reMail team can reportedly squish 100,000 emails into 500 megabytes, which is just a sliver of the space on your phone. A search through the iPhone's mail app might take 10 seconds but reMail can perform the same search in just two so you can imagine how useful it was for people who had ponied up the cash for it.

While financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, it looks like Google first and foremost wanted reMail removed from the App Store. reMail CEO Gabor Cselle blogged about the acquisition and informed users that he would be taking up residence as product manager on the Gmail team. Cselle detailed that he and the team at Google had "decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application." reMail is no longer available from the App Store.

So, who wants to bet we'll see reMail for Android in the very near future?

Hotmail Breached; Microsoft Now Investigating

Hotmail showed other people's inboxes.

Microsoft said that it is investigating a security snafu at its Hotmail property that occurred earlier this week. Some Hotmail users report that, upon logging into their account, they would see the inbox that belonged to someone else.

Microsoft quickly issued a statement: "Microsoft is investigating reports of a limited number of instances in which Windows Live customers may have access to other customers' accounts when accessing their account through mobile web browser. Microsoft takes customers' privacy seriously, and immediately upon learning of these reports, we started an investigation."

The company hasn't yet revealed what, if anything, it has discovered yet, but pledged to take appropriate action once it has completed the investigation.

Most Windows 7 PCs Max Out RAM, Choke

RAM, bam, thank you ma'am!

When I pay the money to drop at least 6GB of RAM into my system, I want it all to be put to use. Compared to Windows XP, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 make more active use of system memory. But according to Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet) CTO, Craig Barth, that sort of RAM management results in undesirable performance.

According to the Computerworld report, XPnet found that 40 percent of its Windows XP machines ran into low-memory situations, while 86 percent of its Windows 7 machines are regularly consuming 90 percent to 95 percent of their available RAM.

Barth said that the hungry RAM consumption of Windows 7 result in slow-downs. "The vast majority of Windows 7 machines over the last several months are very heavily-memory saturated," he said. "From a performance standpoint, that has an immediate impact on the machine."

"This is alarming," Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. "For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is."

Alarming findings aside, XPnet observed that Windows 7 PCs sport an average of 3.3GB of RAM, compared to 1.7GB for Windows XP and 2.7GB for Windows Vista machines.

We recall that the design of Windows Vista (and by extension, Windows 7) has it consuming more RAM for practical, useful purposes rather than letting it sit idle. Nevertheless, we have contacted Microsoft for an official answer to this memory issue. More to come.