While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.

The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006.

Wapple, which has been around since 2003, and incorporated in 2004 – well before the smartphone explosion – has long said that its name was wordplay on the WAP protocol, which was the main format for delivering mobile content before the rise of 3G networks and other protocols like HTML5.

The case went right up to the Intellectual Property Office in the UK, which today made the ruling in Wapple’s favor in three separate filings, numbers 95786, 95787 and 95890.

Wapple’s words on the decision are ironic, going as they do against as iconic and groundbreaking a company as Apple:

“The case is a victory for truth over tactics. Self-belief is always critical when establishing and growing any technology business and even more so when you are early to market as we were,” noted Anne Thomas, co-founder and COO of Wapple. “The action taken by Apple Inc. to oppose our trade mark [sic] has tested our resolve and we are delighted with this outcome.”

Wapple works with a number of third parties on mobile web services and its customers include two of Apple’s big competitors, Microsoft and Google. No one in Wapple’s experience, the company notes, has ever confused the two companies.

Although Apple has asserted intellectual property rights over some of the industry’s biggest players — including numerous lawsuits against Android-based developers Samsung, HTC and Motorola — it has also gone after much smaller companies, but not always with a successful effect. One case in Spain last year saw Apple losing a design patent suit against NT-K, a small Android tablet maker.

Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that on campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz’s technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet-connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

Nokia isn’t all that great with teasers. In August the company posted a teaser for the newest version of Symbian which just so happened to include the release date in it. Today, the teaser (at least) doesn’t give away the name of the product or anything huge like that, but it’s pretty clear what Nokia is hyping right here.

Obviously the big news here is some form of camera technology. We’re promised pure detail, pure depth, and pure definition — all in all, a pure view.

Nokia is clearly trying to play this up with the snowy magic and barely visible (but also totally visible) white text. The Finnish phone maker must have an imaging flagship ready to roll at MWC. Of course, we’ll be there with eyes peeled so stay tuned on what exactly Nokia has to offer that will give us a “pure view.”

The landgrab for music streaming customers is on, and Rdio — the U.S.-based startup from Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis — is joining that race in earnest.

The company today announced that it is now live in Spain and Portugal, just one month after it launched its first European service, in Germany. The total number of countries where Rdio now works is up to eight, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia and New Zealand — and hints that there will be more to come.

The market for music streaming services is getting increasingly crowded – we highlighted one of the more recent, from the music magazine Spin, just yesterday – and while some of these do not directly compete against each other for straight subscriptions, they are competing against each other for attention from consumers. And it’s not just limited to what is happening in the U.S., either. Rhapsody last month expanded its hitherto U.S.-only service to Europe.

For now it appears that Spotify is the one to beat. Last month, the company revealed that it has now racked up 3 million subscribers, up from 2.5 million in November 2011, and its conversion rates, taking free/trial users to paid services, is also on the rise.

Rdio has not released an updated subscriber figure — although we have reached out to the company to try to pin one down.

Unlike Spotify — which offers different service tiers including an ad-funded, free listening option in some markets — Rdio has taken a different approach, offering only paid services but guaranteeing no ads in the process.

(That might also have stemmed from a lesson learned by Zennström and Friis from their Skype days: that service, which is now getting acquired by Microsoft, to this day has not managed to convert most of its free users to enhanced, paying options.)

Here, users get access to 12 million songs, either for €4.99 for web-only access or €9.99 for web, mobile and other platform access. The latter can be used on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, as well as through the Sonos wireless audio system.

In addition to straight song search-and-play options, Rdio also offers users an offline listening mode, recommendations, and various of social features such as playlist sharing and collaboration.

While music streaming has had a lot of buzz in markets like the U.S. – due in part to the growth of services like Pandora and Rhapsody, but also because of the delayed and much-anticipated entry of Spotify last year – it will be interesting to see how services like Rdio gain traction in markets like Spain and Portugal. There could be a greenfield opportunity in any case: as TNW points out, Spotify only has a limited service in both markets at the moment.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.

The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

Bytemobile, using data it gathers from its tier-one carrier customers, found that the average mobile user spends around nine minutes per day each on Facebook and YouTube on mobile. YouTube, being a video service, generates 300 times more traffic on data networks. In both of those cases, it notes, neither service generates any mobile operator revenue.

There is a caveat, of course: carriers are still making money from people using their phones to use social networks: users are, after all, still buying 3G and 4G data plans; and many (but not all) carriers also roll public Wi-Fi connectivity into those plans.

It’s questionable, though, whether in the short term that incremental data revenues for tweets, status updates and check-ins, and the more substantial data usage from services like YouTube, are able to offset the loss from the more lucrative messaging services that operators built up and still count on for revenues.

Longer term, Ovum predicts that by 2016 mobile data will bring in $419 billion in revenues for operators, out of a total service revenues of $1,047 billion.

Putting aside forecasts, today, the amount of revenue lost from messaging to social media appears that the figure is growing: Ovum points out that a $13.9 billion loss works out to some nine percent of messaging revenues for carriers worldwide, a rise from the six percent of revenues lost in messaging revenue to social messaging in 2010, when carriers lost $8.7 billion in SMS revenues to social media messaging.

Ovum’s suggestion? For carriers to work more closely on making their messaging and other services more collaborative — that is, more partnerships with social networks so that they use the carrier infrastructure to underpin their own communication tools.

There is some of that happening already, particularly in developing countries. France Telecom-owned operator Orange last week announced that it would be launching a new way of accessing Facebook in developing markets, using USSD functionality on GSM devices. It is offering this as an extra paid service to users.

But by and large, operators have missed the boat in more developed markets, where smartphones and mobile apps are the order of the day.

There is still an opportunity in those advanced markets. Carriers, if they got the lead out, could act as mobile app developers and make their own clients to access those social networks, which link in better with the services they already have in place — say for messaging or billing services. That’s something that has been relatively untapped so far.

Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

That may be selling other apps short, but maybe not — while there are (say) blogging or drawing apps that work adequately on the iPad, those aren’t really the ideal tools for creating content. (Put another way: There’s a reason I’m writing this post on my laptop.) Yet when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad earlier this month, I was impressed by how it seemed perfectly suited for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below.

Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file their report. For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website.

Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing and oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPad rather than a laptop with only a few hours of battery life.

At the same time, the vision isn’t limited to journalists. The pair says Storify has also gotten a strong response from brands, and they see it as a “social typewriter” that can allow anyone to tell a story.

“We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,” says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.”

Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future.

Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures.

The addition of the iPad into the point of sale system or cash register isn’t a new trend. Many small businesses are swapping out traditional cash registers for iPads and credit card processors like Square. But large restaurant chains and other establishments still need a complete front-to-back-of-house (i.e. a system that can send receipts to the kitchen) solution. Revel Systems hopes to be the go-to iPad-powered, comprehensive POS platform for restaurants.

Launched in August 2011, Revel Systems’ iPad software, cash register, weighing machine, and receipt printer are all optimized for restaurant and retail establishments. Along with the iPad-friendly cash register, Revel Systems can be completely customized for payroll, inventory tracking, web ordering, email receipts and more.

Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel System, explains that the platform is going after chains and restaurants that have at least $500,000 in yearly revenue. Revel, which resells the hardware and has created its own software for the iPad, charges these customers upwards of $3,000 for the full system plus a software licensing fee. Falzone says this compares to traditional point of sale systems which costs at least $6,000.

Currently Revel is seeing around $80 million in processing business with major brands. Beautiful Brands International has just tapped the startup to power POS systems at its multiple franchised locations nationwide under the Beautiful Brands International umbrella, including Camille’s Sidewalk Café, Dixie Cream, FreshBerry Frozen Yogurt Cafe and Rex’s Chicken.

Revel has raised $3.7 million from DCM.

Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.

Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen.

[Update: Cut The Rope is now available on the Mac OS App Store]

Why Port?

“We see opportunity with the Mac App Store because it’s not as occupied as the mobile App Store. There are several quite nice games, but the competition is not as huge” said ZeptoLab’s twin brother founders Semyon and Efim Voinov. Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies are already available, but other staples like Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Where’s My Water are absent. Without these apps occupying the charts, there are places for other developers to swoop in and get discovered.

As expensive console and PC games like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic appear in the store as well, paid apps ported from mobile may be able to get away with charging higher prices. On a phone $5 may seem steep, but the bigger screen size and history of $50 disc-based games may make $5 appear cheap on the Mac App Store.

“We started quite a while ago doing this in-house. It took a bit longer than we expected, but from a technical standpoint the process of porting to Mac was pretty straightforward. The tools are pretty good. The majority of work was on the design and art side.”

From Touch To Trackpad

In Cut The Rope, users cut ropes attached to pieces of candy, working with gravity, momentum, and other forces to guide the sweets into the mouth of a hungry baby dinosaur named Om Nom.”It was challenging porting to Mac OS, because Cut The Rope was intended for touch controls” the Voinovs admit.

“It’s tricky to move from one point of the screen to another very quickly. It’s pretty natural with fingers, but different with the mouse.” When the game was ported to HTML5, some laptop users reported difficulty holding down the mouse click button while using another finger for precise movements.

To keep the original feel intact but give players an optimized control scheme for the track pad and mouse, the Voinovs added the option to hover near a rope to highlight it and click to cut it, rather than swiping. If it helps, users can leave it on, or disable it if they find it too different from the mobile version. During testing, the team noticed that levels where you had to make several quick cuts could leave users cursing the controls. To compensate, they made the physics of the Mac version work just a little slower.

Developers should determine which controls might be harder with a mouse and consider adding similar options, keyboard shortcuts, or on-screen buttons that make use of the extra real estate. If those aren’t enough, similar tweaks can be made to a game’s physics to reduce player frustration.

High Resolution Landscape Level Design

Meanwhile, many of Cut The Ropes levels were designed for a portrait orientation screen, while most Mac monitors stay fixed in the landscape position. The Voinovs took a methodical approach, playing each level of their mobile game and noting which were too tall and would need lay out adjustments. “We realized it was more half of the levels”, making level redesign a significant time-suck. Other devs should factor this into their decisions to port and release schedules.

Bigger screens also require higher resolution artwork. Rather than seeing this as busy work, ZeptoLab took the chance to differentiate the Mac OS experience. “We made sure it would look great, really crisp and sharp. It makes it special and give people who already played on mobile a reason [to buy the Mac OS version]. You can see all the little details of the graphics in the game.” Now as the team makes new level packs, they’re using the Mac OS resolution standards that are much easier to scale down than scale up.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

“This is our first experience releasing a Mac OS game. We believe it will develop into a bigger thing over time” Semyon told me. ZeptoLab will be closely watching the success of the game, but is simultaneously seeking other revenue sources. Last week it released Cut The Rope for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader. Apple TV and Siri are two other big platforms that developers should have on their radars.

At the New York Toy Fair, ZeptoLab announced licensing deals with Mattel, Hasbro, JAKKS Pacific, and Li & Fung to create Om Nom plush dolls, a board game, and clothing line based on Cut The Rope. “We’re trying to keep the balance. Merchandise is important, but there’s no merchandise without a good product” the brothers say. Merch has been huge for Rovio‘s Angry Birds, and now Zynga has struck licensing deals, legitimizing offline revenue streams.

Finally, while Cut The Rope is in 4th on the all-time App Store paid app chart, ZeptoLab is eager to invent new intellectual property, ”We have this creative urge to do cool new things.”

Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to porting existing games. The Mac OS gaming platform comes with unique characteristics like the trackpad to be designed for, rather than around. “Cut the ropes to your imagination” a some hack writer might say. I’ll just leave you with, “Go make people happy, that’s your art.”

For more game design coverage, check out:

How Evil Monkeys Chased Temple Run To App Store #1 – thoughts on freemium vs premium from the game’s developers

Things are beginning to look even dimmer for LightSquared. Just one day after satellite network operator Inmarsat announced that LightSquared had defaulted on a $56 million payment, new reports indicate that the company plans to slash its workforce by 45% in an effort to cut costs and keep fighting.

“This and other cost savings measures will allow LightSquared to continue to navigate the regulatory process as it works with the appropriate government agencies to find solutions to the GPS interference issue,” reads a statement issued to Reuters.

Let’s not forget that LightSquared isn’t that a big a company to start off with — the company only employs around 330 people. With their workforce poised to be cut nearly in half and regulatory woes bogging them down, I can’t imagine the morale in their particular corner of Virginia to be too high. The move also casts their non-payment to Inmarsat in a different light — while LightSquared claimed that they have “raised several matters that require resolution” before they make the payment, it now just looks like they couldn’t scrape the money together.

LightSquared declined to offer any further detail on the situation, and could not be reached for comment at time of writing.

Though things are looking grim for LightSquared right now, it’s unfair to say that the book has closed completely on their ambitious plans. From the sound of their release, LightSquared seems ready to streamline their operations and keep their head down for the time being. Anyone who’s followed the LightSquared situation though knows that keeping their head down is highly uncharacteristic for them. For nearly every drawback LightSquared has faced (and there have been a lot of them so far), the company was quick to respond with a sharp-tongued press release.

This time though, there doesn’t seem to be much more that LightSquared can do. They can’t proceed any further without the FCC’s go-ahead, and they’ll never get that unless they can prove that the interference risk their network poses to GPS is negligible. LightSquared has publicly taken issue with the testing process — they’ve gone as far as to accuse two government committees of wrongdoing — but only further testing can clear their name.

Even then, the ball isn’t in their court. Despite having given LightSquared a conditional approval [PDF] to build out their network in early 2011, the regulatory body changed their minds in a jiffy when NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling sent them a letter [PDF] last week stating that an interference-free network rollout wasn’t doable.

LightSquared clearly intends to continue fighting, but their spate of layoffs seems to signal that the company is hunkering down into survival mode. Unless the political or regulatory climates change soon, how long LightSquared can continue to keep at it is anyone’s guess.

Following its recent raise of $2 million in seed funding, the still invite-only mobile payments startup Zipmark is today announcing the launch of its developer program and API. The New York-based company, founded in 2010 by Citigroup alum Jay Bhattacharya and CTO Jake Howerton, leverages the existing check processing network to allow users to avoid credit card fees while also eliminating the risk of bounced checks.

The way Zipmark works is this:

Users connect their “real” checking account to the service, which they can then use to pay bills and invoices or send money to friends. Because the Zipmark works over the existing check processing infrastructure, Zipmark doesn’t need to hold onto the funds in the cloud for an extended period of time while the transactions are verified. Instead, the money clears a user’s account on the next business day. Merchants will also be able to offer Zipmark as a payment option by placing a QR code on their invoices, which customers can then scan and pay.

Because it uses the check processing network, Zipmark’s fees are low – just 1% of each transaction – and are capped at $5.00, regardless of the transaction amount. The system also uses secure, Check21 compliant digital checks, the goal being to “modernize the checkbook,” the company says.

With the new Zipmark Biller API, businesses and app developers will have access to a new payment system for both online and mobile transactions. At launch, several companies are also announcing their support for the system, including NY co-working space Sunshine Suites, bill payment solution provider Singular Payments, property management software company UnitConnect, and mobile invoicing provider InvoiceASAP.

In addition, Zipmark says it will also launch a consumer-facing iPhone app in time for SXSW, which will let users pay for items, fees and subscriptions directly from QR codes.

While the service competes with other mobile payment systems, like Dwolla or PayPal for example, Zipmark isn’t about building a new payment network, or even connecting you to credit card networks through a mobile interface. Instead, it’s about leveraging the existing check processing network in a new way – through your mobile phone.

Zipmark raised $2 million in December in a round led by Village Ventures and Contour Venture Partners, and supported by NYC Seed, High Peaks Venture Capital and the New York City Investment Fund.

Developers will be able to sign up starting tomorrow on the Zipmark homepage.

Though it may not always seem like it, big wireless carriers are still stuck on the concept of push-to-talk communication. It’s easy to see why — instantaneous communication between multiple people can be a huge benefit in certain lines of work, and and catering to those groups often leads to some hefty service contracts. To that end, AT&T has announced that they have launched a new charter program geared toward getting push-to-talk smartphones in front of business customers.

Now the idea of implementing push-to-talk on smartphones isn’t exactly new — there are a whole host of apps available for the major mobile platforms that allow users to send voice notes, messages and media over their data connections. The immensely popular Voxer app comes to mind — it boasts a pretty robust feature set, not to mention about 200,000 average daily downloads. So what’s different about AT&T’s approach?

Their ace in the hole here seems to be their use of partner Kodiak Networks’ InstaPoC technology. While the name may conjure images of a real stinker, InstaPoC reportedly allows for sub-second voice connections between compatible devices, as well as better voice quality than a standard phone call.

InstaPoC was created in compliance with the imaginatively-named PoC (Push to Talk over Cellular) 2.0 standard, which lays out in excruciating detail the criteria necessary for a reliable, business-grade push-to-talk system. Throw in the ability for developers to fold PTT support into other applications via an API, and all of a sudden we’re looking at a potential ecosystem centered around instant communication.

AT&T promises that entrants into their charter program will be able to test the PTT service on “powerful, state of the art smartphones,” though they don’t offer any specifics. Considering the types of phones that tend to get saddled with PTT functionality, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see users testing the service given something like the forthcoming Rugby Smart to mess around with.

Short Version

When I went to meet with Samsung to pick up the Galaxy Note, I was told something that I kept in mind throughout my last week or so with the phone. “People freak out and say it’s too big until they play with it — then they love it.” I was also told that the S-Pen is way more than just a stylus, and I generally felt excited to be playing with something different from your average Android phone. So what do I think now of the giant 5.3-inch S-Pen-packing Galaxy Note?

To put it plainly, I think they were wrong.

Features:

• 5.3-inch 1280×800 HD Super AMOLED display
• AT&T 4G LTE
• Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread
• 1.5GHz dual-core processor
• 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
• 2MP front camera (720p video capture)
• S-Pen
• MSRP: $299.99 on-contract

Pros:

• The display is downright gorgeous
• Thin and light
• Solid battery life

Cons:

• A bit laggy all around
• Doesn’t take prints well
• Way, way too big

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

Clearly the first thing we need to chat about here is size, and to be honest I think it may exclude quite a few people. It’s just too damn big. Now, many of you will cry foul because I’m a girl but here’s what I say to that: first, I have rather large hands for a girl, and secondly my male counterparts have confirmed that the Note is, in fact, too big to be comfortable.

Truth is, you just can’t perform one-handed actions with comfort and security. I felt like I was always slipping, almost dropping it, or simply working too hard to do what I needed to do. If you’re using the S-Pen that problem goes away a little bit, as you hold firmly with one hand and doodle with the other. But many of us only have one hand free to do what we need to on our phones, and that’s where the Note fails.

In terms of materials and build quality, I find this superphone quite handsome. It looks a lot like a Galaxy S II, and has this stitch-style texture on the battery door. It’s nice and light at at 6.28 ounces, and measures just .38 inches thick. The microUSB is square at the bottom of the phone with the S-Pen slot just to its right, while the volume rocker is on the upper left edge, and the lock button on the upper right.

I honestly don’t have much to complain about here except for the size. Everything feels solid, premium, and looks good too. I just can’t enjoy it because I don’t have XXL hands.

S-Pen:

I figured many of you would scroll to this section anyways, so I thought I’d save you some trouble and put it closer to the beginning. The S-Pen is great, but it’s not enough to justify the phone on its own.

It’s fun, sure. You have a paintbrush, marker, pencil and highlighter; complete control over color and thickness, and can add text. You can drop in photos, crop, take screen grabs, and share everything. Plus, the S-Pen is pressure-sensitive, so it can even pick up light and dark strokes. It’s also got a little button that helps you perform shortcut commands like taking a screen grab (hold button, hold tap screen) or opening the S-Memo app (hold button, double tap).

I had a fine time tooling around and doodling all over pictures of my bosses, but even after a week I couldn’t really integrate the S-Pen into my daily life in any useful way. Mind you, Siri sets at least five reminders for me a day and sends at least two or three texts.

It takes two hands to use it, which takes it out of the equation a large amount of the time, and it always seems like it takes longer to get it out and start using it than it does to just take care of it with touch.

Now, I’m not the most artistic person and I will say that my more creative friends have spent more dedicated time drawing than I have, and the products have been pretty impressive. However, the Wacom-style S-Pen can’t replace a real Wacom pen and/or tablet, or so says my graphic artist/animator friend.

So that really leaves it in a sort of middle ground: you can’t do real work with it, and you can’t make it useful in any other, daily-life kind of way. So basically it’s just for fun.

Software:

The Galaxy Note runs Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread under Samsung’s custom TouchWiz UI. The UI is tweaked a bit to make the most of the extra screen real estate, offering five virtual home buttons along the bottom and a 5×5 grid of apps/icons.

I’ve noticed with Samsung devices that both Android and TouchWiz slow things up. Samsung’s $50 Focus Flash runs like a champ on Windows Phone compared to this, and it has to come down to software. The good news is that TouchWiz actually adds some usability rather than just a heavy, custom look.

Resizeable widgets actually allow for a little differentiation which is nice, but TouchWiz has a lot more subtle features that make it a bit more intuitive than other overlays. For example, when you scroll down the letters along the right side of your address book, you can swipe a bit to the left to move on to the next letter in the name. So if you have two dozen J names in your contacts, you can narrow it down to ‘Jo’ or ‘Ja’ or whatever.

Another plus is that Samsung’s HD Super AMOLED display is basically off wherever it’s black. The UI just so happens to be mostly black in all the menus and most apps can be configured to display light text over a black background, so that tends to help on the battery front.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of pre-loaded apps like Amazon Kindle, Qik Lite, Crayon phsyics and How To Draw (clearly for the S-Pen), and a host of AT&T apps. When I went into the Android Market to try out some games and such, a Gameloft title (NFL Pro 2012) was “not compatible with my device.” Bummer. Precision apps, on the other hand, like Where’s My Water and Fruit Ninja are much easier with the S-Pen. After a few tries I was getting some of my highest scores ever on Fruit Ninja. Good times.

Camera:

The Note’s 8-megapixel camera takes great pictures, no doubt. And if you have two hands to take the picture with then you’re in great shape, but otherwise good luck. I seriously had the most difficult time trying to hold the Note in one hand to take a picture of something in the other hand… it was a joke.

And it doesn’t seem like there’s a physical shutter button anywhere either, which means you have to find a way to get that thumb free and tap the little soft shutter. The good news is that the pictures are great, with really nice color reproduction and light sensitivity. The shutter is really fast and snaps the picture upon release.

The video quality is also really great, though it does take some time to switch between low light settings and outdoor light. But I found that the Note does this gracefully, a slow transition but at least it doesn’t seem really obvious during playback — a steady shift.

If you have the hands (the size of catchers’ mits) to handle it, the Note camera will treat you really well.

Comparison shot between the Galaxy Note (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

You’ve got to hand it to Samsung. They know displays. This 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED is just about as good as it gets, except for the fact that I wish there was more of it. I wish it was a tablet, and the whole stylus thing could be seen as a great accessory (maybe for kids) and that no one would ever, ever have to hold one of these things up to their face ever again.

Watching movies was awesome, and everything from pictures to the clock widget looks crisp, bright and beautiful. But again, all this real estate makes for more than a few issues during any regular usage scenario. I’m going to type text messages way more often than I’m going to grab a bag of popcorn and watch Inception on this thing, and if I can’t send a simple “Hey, sorry… I just got this text now…” to one of my dearest friends then what’s the point?

Performance:

There’s not really much to complain about here when talking about performance. The Note is pretty snappy, even with TouchWiz along for the ride, and things should get ever better once ICS makes its way onto the device. The biggest beef I had with the Note was during web browsing. Every time I scrolled or zoomed in on some text, the Note took an extra half a second to do what I’d asked. This is pretty common on Android, but worth noting.

Benchmark testing went well for the Note, too. The superphone scored a 2703 on Quadrant, which tests everything with a focus on graphics. Browsermark, on the other hand, gave the Note a 48,610. As far as AT&T’s network goes, I was surprised with just how great call quality was.

In the data department I was seeing an average speed of 24Mbps down and .8Mbps up.

Battery:

If there’s one thing that really exceeded my expectations about the Note, it would be battery life. That massive HD Super AMOLED display and 4G LTE radio would lead you to believe that this thing wouldn’t make it past breakfast, but that wasn’t the case.

In real-world usage scenarios, the Note hung with me all day long. That’s not to say I could take it partying into the wee hours of the morning with me, but it’ll get you past dinner time. But I don’t know how you use your phone, so let me share with you some numbers.

When we did the official battery test, we found that the Note lasts a little under six hours. We test this by really pushing the phone, running a continuous image search within the browser. At any time, I can come in and play a game or check something else out for testing, and then continue running the program. But at no point, whatsoever, is the phone resting.

To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes.

Head-To-Head With The Galaxy Nexus And Streak 5:

Check out our thoughts on this match-up here.

Hands-On Video: Initial Impressions

Conclusion

Here’s the deal.

I applaud Samsung for thinking outside of the box on this one, but the issue with this type of exo-box-thinking is that I think it’s headed in the wrong direction. I understand that people are increasingly enjoying larger screens, as mobile video and gaming take over, but there has to be a line. Unfortunately, I think the Galaxy Note crosses it.

No matter how beautiful the display is or how fun (/useless) the S-Pen is, this thing is just too damn big to enjoy. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was doing even the simplest things like taking a picture, gaming, or even writing a text or search inquiry. And don’t even get me started on the kinds of looks I got holding this thing up to my face.

Perhaps if you have giant hands and can’t get enough doodle in your life, the Note might be right for you. But for anyone else, I’d recommend either waiting for the Galaxy S III (which is sure to be freaking awesome), or holding out for this rumored Galaxy Note 10.1 we’ve been hearing about. The Note makes much more sense as a cool tablet than it does a giant phone.

Check out all of our Galaxy Note review posts here.

Software and SaaS security company Cenzic is today launching a new security product for mobile application developers which will allow for the testing of mobile apps on any platform – iOS, Android, J2ME, and more. The product will be the first that can test products without requiring developers to submit the source code, as all the testing is done through the cloud, while the app is up-and-running.

The service will then be able to tell what sorts of security vulnerabilities an app has, what sensitive data it could leak, what other sorts of security threats it may be vulnerable to, and what to do about it.

The security risk inherent in using mobile applications was recently in the spotlight, when it was discovered that many of users’ favorite apps were uploading their address books to developers’ servers. But that kind of risk, while important, is not the sort of thing that Cenzic’s solution is interested in addressing.

Explains John Weinschenk, CEO of Cenzic, “there’s been a lot hype and a lot of focus on the device itself, but the device itself is not the risk. If I hack into your mobile device, I get your information. That’s not that interesting. But as a hacker, if I hack into the server itself, I can get millions of accounts, and millions of pieces of information,” he explains.

The problem Cenzic wants to help fix has to do with the fact that many companies’ backend systems were designed to be accessed by web applications, but are now being accessed by mobile apps.

With the new solution, the company looks at a mobile app’s backend and use of web services, and analyzes those for vulnerabilities. This is especially important for enterprise app makers, who need to ensure that their apps’ are protected against all the latest threats to protect sensitive customer data.

But how prevalent are these sorts of vulnerabilities? Weinschenk says that prior to today’s launch, the company tested over 30 applications for four (unnamed) beta customers, which included companies that have over a billion dollars in sales operating in the financial services space, in e-commerce and in manufacturing. During the testing period, Cenzic found that 60% of the vulnerabilities were input validation issues, while 40% were authentication issues. “What this means,” explains Weinschenk, “is that programmers writing mobile applications don’t really understand how to manage the authentication of that device communicating up to the server.”

In Cenzic’s solution, the platform will provide info on how to fix the vulnerability and how to make code changes, but, as it doesn’t have access to the source code itself, will not make the changes, only point to the affected part of the code. In addition, the library of vulnerabilities is updated every week, similar to anti-virus systems, so developers can continually test for new threats to their mobile apps’ backends.

The new mobile solution will also be wrapped into Cenzic’s other products, in the form of software, managed services and cloud offerings. Pricing starts at $7,000 per app per year.

The company today secures more than 500,000 online applications for Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, universities, security companies, SMB’s and others. More information about the mobile product is now available on the Cenzic homepage here.

Like the original Galaxy S before it, Samsung’s Galaxy S II sure knows how to get around. After having touched down on Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T (twice even), the Korean giant’s one-time flagship handset is now being embraced by the folks at U.S. Cellular.

Customers who have pledged their allegiance to the nation’s sixth-largest wireless carrier are probably celebrating the news, considering the last big Android handset to grace their shelves was the Motorola Electrify, a non-WiMax version of the Photon 4G.

As far as specs go, U.S. Cellular’s GSII variant plays it straight — it sports the same 1.2GHz Exynos C210 processor that most of the U.S. models do, as well as the bog-standard 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 8-megapixel camera, and 16GB of onboard storage. Oh, and expect it to feature the now-classic Gingerbread/TouchWiz combo we’ve come to know and tolerate.

Sure, the Galaxy S II may seem passe these days (especially with MWC right around the corner), but good hardware is still good hardware. Sadly, U.S. Cellular’s version of the Galaxy S II is 3G-only, so anyone looking to pick it up won’t be able to jump on their LTE network when it lights up later this year. It’s not as though the hardware doesn’t exist — AT&T’s Skyrocket features an LTE radio — but for now it seems like U.S. Cellular customers will have to make do with a revamped Galaxy S if they want their mobile LTE fix.

U.S. Cellular’s is keeping mum on the Galaxy S II’s release, but that should give customers a little time to either weigh their options or scrimp together $230.

Social game-maker OMGPOP says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.

Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.

Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. The main driver of that growth? Porter says it’s Twitter and Instagram, where users post their drawings and look for other people to play.

And he says the game is already seeing five figures in revenue per day. OMGPOP runs ads in the free version of the game, and Porter says the biggest source of revenue is actually users upgrading from free to the ad-free, paid version. The game also makes money through virtual goods, like bombs, which help with guesses and also give players better words to draw.

The game is available on both on iOS and Android, but iOS supposedly accounts for 85 percent of installs and 90 percent of revenue.

There have been some mistakes too. Porter says OMGPOP had to remove its original cap of 100 turns per game, when it realized that games were going for longer than that. It’s also a challenge to store the rapidly growing number of drawings, he says.

The success of Draw Something also confirms a broader shift in OMGPOP’s strategy. We covered the company’s first mobile game Puppy World in August 2011, and now Porter says he’s fully committed to mobile.

“When we started in 2008, we focused on socializing traditional arcade style games on the web,” he says. “As Facebook grew as a game platform we moved to Facebook and we did OK. Now though that we have reoriented to creating truly social game experiences on mobile – iOS and Android – we have locked down our strategy, socializing mobile games, and we are having monster success with it. We want to be the #1 competitor to Zynga with Friends and eventually pass them.”

Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal who led the company to a 233% increase in ad revenue this year is leaving to become COO of Kiip, which lets brands reward gamers with real world prizes. Anekal is a monetization rockstar who pioneered social game brand integrations, helping companies like McDonald’s offer FarmVille players in-game powerups.

But now he’s moving to Kiip’s greener pastures seeking a bigger impact with a startup that’s aiding developers and redefining brand advertising for the next big opportunity: mobile

Kiip’s 20-year old co-founder and CEO Brian Wong calls Anekal “a triple massive win” for his company, pun perhaps intended. See, during Anekal’s 10 years of experience in the space he was the brand integration manager of Massive, one of the first in-game ad networks. Next he became the Global Director of Ad Ops for Electronic Arts before joining Zynga and growing its ad revenue to $74.5 million. Business Insider heard rumors about Manny’s move to Kiip last week, but now the news is confirmed.

Anekal popularized the concept of a reciprocal value exchange between advertisers and gamers, where brands give players something of in-game value in return for their attention, rather than just being obtrusive and annoying. For example, Anekal closed a deal with Farmer’s Insurance to protect FarmVille players from crop wither if they displayed the brand’s blimp on their property.

However, since the 3000-employee Zynga mostly relies on in-game purchases and not ad revenue, Wong says Anekal wasn’t making as big of a dent as he wanted to. Now he’s the 21st employee of a hot new startup with $4.3 million in funding and a disruptive model for making mobile game developers money without traditional display ads.

When a Kiip-powered game player levels up or gets a high score, they’re rewarded with Popchips snack samples mailed to their door, Amazon gift cards, or entry into tournaments where they can win home theater systems. Brands get exposure, developers earn money, and gamers are rewarded rather than bombarded with ads.

With copycats targeting Kiip’s model there’s no time to waste, so Anekal will start immediately. His brand relationships and expertise could get top-tier advertisers offering rewards in Kiip, which is already working with Disney and 1-800-Flowers to rack up millions of interactions from gamers.

As for compensation, Wong hinted that Anekal was tempted with substantial Kiip equity, saying “We’re doing what’s responsible to to keep talent like him on board.”

Watch as Kiip’s young co-founder Brian Wong maps out the road to disruption in this interview with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis.

Pricelock is all about making the buying and selling of energy more efficient. It was true when the company launched the Marketplace, a customized online energy auction platform for utilities companies, power plants and other government and/or commercial entities to buy and sell natural gas, motor fuels and coal. But today, Pricelock is taking things one step further with the launch of a mobile app.

The Pricelock Mobile app extends the auction into the pocket of the buyer or seller, which is meant to improve the speed and efficiency of how energy is purchased. The app notifies suppliers of upcoming auctions and lets them watch how their bids are doing in real-time.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the app only offers view-only access, rather than the ability to place a new bid. But theoretically, the app would make it easier for a supervisor or monitor to keep up with what’s happening at the auction (where there’s supposedly a proxy) without getting behind in day-to-day work.

The Pricelock Mobile app is available now for free in the Apple App Store, Android Market, and BlackBerry App World.

MHL had a huge 2011. The mobile high-definition connectivity standard went from a relativity unknown port to making its way onto more than 50 million devices. More than 90 licensees are on board with MHL and the connectivity option is nearly standard on tablets, smartphones, HDTVs, and is now making inroads on the digital media streamer market with the tiny Roku LT.

“Since the release of our specification in 2010, MHL Consortium membership has grown five-fold, with OEMs designing and releasing new products at a steady pace,” said Tim Wong, president of MHL, LLC stated in today’s announcement. “In 2012, it’s my expectation that consumers will see even more exciting and innovative products that we hope will enrich their lives.”

The MHL Consortium was founded by Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony and Toshiba in 2010 after several years of testing and public demos. MHL brings together the high definition standards of HDMI with similar power management tools found in USB. Devices like the Roku LT are directly powered by the connection. MHL-enabled HDTVs and displays can even charge a connected cell phone, ensuring that the media stream isn’t cut off during playback.

MHL should see even larger numbers in 2012. The port is nearly standard on mobile devices and adoption seems to be increasing on HDTVs. Pretty soon it should be as ubiquitous as USB — hopefully.

By most accounts there aren’t very many people out there in the world using PlayBooks, but for those that are, or are considering the purchase of one, comes some good news: RIM has finally updated the OS to include two services that have been long discussed and much anticipated: integrated email support and Android app availability.

The OS could serve to give the device a boost in the market, after many people slammed RIM for shipping the tablet too early when it debuted last year without these and other features.

PlayBook OS 2.0 will be available as a free download for existing users and will automatically update on new devices. Some details:

The new email client — at long last integrated with the tablet and no longer requiring the user to own a BlackBerry to use email on the tablet — was perhaps the most obvious feature that RIM needed to fix in this update.

But what RIM has done is effectively bring the PlayBook up to speed with what other device makers have already been doing on other platforms like Android. Now users can access both personal and work email via the device, and the unified inbox can also be used for incoming messages from social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Not clear if others, like Google+, can be added as well at the moment. Similarly, social features are also being integrated with RIM’s calendar and contact apps.

The other big area that has become crucial for tablet and smartphone makers is apps and content in general. The PlayBook has not been a standout in this area up to now, but RIM again is hoping to make up for that by not only beefing up its own catalog of apps but also giving access to a select number of Android apps:

During RIM’s developer conference earlier this month, the company said it had 60,000 apps on App World. Today, RIM tells us that it is adding “thousands” of PlayBook apps, with the addition of “a range” (again, no specific numbers) of Android apps also to be used on the tablet.

It is also finally adding its video store — first discussed last year — which will feature some 10,000 films and TV shows to rent to buy. RIM says will only be available initially in the U.S., with further countries to be added later.

One nice hardware development: those who do own BlackBerry smartphones will be able to link them up to the PlayBook to use their keyboards to input text on the tablet.

And in a nod to enterprise users — still very much part of RIM’s heartland, despite its many moves to bring consumers into the fold — there are also more productivity features added to the new OS, to print documents and manage files on corporate networks. With a number of third-party players getting involved in this space on other platforms, it will be interesting to see if these features drive more enterprise takeup of PlayBooks.

What’s interesting is that many had thought that RIM would wait until Mobile World Congress next week to announce the PlayBook update. Will that mean that there is other news up its sleeve for next week?

Apple may have seen $13 billion in sales in China last year, but apparently those numbers could have been higher if they’d had a bit more faith. The iPhone sold in huge quantities in the markets served by China Unicom, which since October of 2009 has been the only carrier over there to offer it.

Adding a second major carrier to the mix should expand the market and the sales, as it has here in the US, and China Telecom has stepped up to bat. It’s the third-largest carrier after China Mobile and China Unicom, though the situation over there is rather different owing to fact that much of the industry is state-owned. Regardless, it represents a major opportunity for everyone involved.

According to a statement by China Telecom, subscribers will be able to get a free 16 GB iPhone 4S with a two-year contract at 389 yuan per month — around $62. Opting for a three year contract brings that monthly cost down to 289 yuan (~$46). Sounds reasonable, but don’t forget that the average income is much lower, though in the urban areas covered by high-speed data services, things are more comparable.

China Telecom has nearly 40 million subscribers getting 3G data, and the intense interest shown by China Unicom’s subscribers suggests that many of those 40 million will want to make the switch — though they too are likely unsure whether they should wait for summer and the perennially forthcoming next model.

Availability is set for March 9th, just after the rumored March 7th announcement date for the iPad 3. It could be seen as either a coincidence or corroboration of those reports.