Apple may face damages of $25.5 million in Korean suit

Earlier today we reported that Apple and Samsung were tangled in a legal battle in Australia where Cupertino had prevented the Korean company from releasing their Galaxy Tab 10.1 in that country. In an unrelated story, the tides have turned on Apple as they are facing damages of $25.5 million in a Korean class action lawsuit.
The suit, handed by the Miraelaw law firm, contests that Apple’s iPhone violated domestic laws on privacy. The complaint stems from accusations earlier this year that Apple had been tracking user’s locations in iOS 4 without consent.
Apple released a statement a few days later explaining that they were not tracking the location of devices but rather “maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location” to help devices calculate their location when requested.
As of July 31, nearly 28,000 iPhone customers had signed up as plaintiffs in the class action suit. According to the Korean Herald, when the lawsuit was first announced, Korean iPhone users overloaded and crashed the server hosting the sign-up website.
If successful, the lawsuit would require Apple to shell out 27 billion won ($25.5 million), resulting in 1 million won ($949 based on today’s conversion rates) per plaintiff named in the suit. There are over 3 million iPhone users in the country according to the Korean Herald story. Currently, nearly 1 percent of Korean Apple mobile phone owners are participating in the lawsuit.
Miraelaw is planning to file the lawsuit against Apple Korea by the middle of August.

Android conquers almost 50 percent of smartphone

A new study by researcher Canalys indicates that Google’s Android platform has reached nearly 50 percent of the global smartphone market.
Canalys’ Q2 2011 smartphone market estimates show that globally, the industry grew by 73 percent year-on-year with over 100 million devices shipped in Q2 2011. This seems to align with a study from IMS Research that claims smartphones will account for 28 percent of handsets sold this year.
Android ranked number one in 35 of the 56 countries that Canalys polled in the market estimate. Shipments of devices running Google’s operating system were up 379 percent from this time last year.
Apple’s iOS platform took the number two spot with a share of 19 percent globally, trumping Nokia’s Symbian which previously held the second position.
In what Google has called their best deal ever, the company acquired the 22-month-old mobile phone software startup Android in August 2005 for an undisclosed sum (estimated to be around $50 million). Development on the mobile OS was put into overdrive and in September 2008, T-mobile unveiled the first “Google phone”, the HTC-developed G1.
Since that time, Android has steadily climbed the proverbial mobile OS ladder, overtaking Apple’s popular iPhone in the US this past January and surpassing RIM’s BlackBerry devices in April.
Key to Google’s overwhelming success is the fact that Android is open-source software and has been licensed for use on multiple manufacturers’ devices.