Apple and Qualcomm announce surprise settlement

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In an unexpected move, Apple and Qualcomm have reached a settlement and agreed to drop all ongoing lawsuits, which have spanned the globe and started at least a couple years back. Apple will also pay Qualcomm an undisclosed amount and the two have reached a six-year global patent licensing deal that extends for another two years. Qualcomm will also supply parts to Apple for multiple years, which as The Verge suggests could mean we'll see Qualcomm modems in the iPhone again. 

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Apple claims Qualcomm didn’t want to sell its chips for the current iPhones

According to Apple, the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max couldn't get Qualcomm chips because the chip maker wouldn't sell it to them

Qualcomm is currently on trial against the US Federal Trade Commission in California with the former facing charges that accuse them of engaging in monopolistic practices. At the trial, it’s being brought to light what happened between the chip maker and Apple. Apple’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams said in a testimony to the US Federal Trade Commission that Qualcomm refused to sell them chips after Apple sued them over its licensing practices. At first glance, it seems Apple switched exclusively to Intel modems for competitive reasons—or even out of spite—but according to Williams’ testimony, there were plans to use both Qualcomm and Intel chips, but the former refused to sell to them. And we heard about how much Apple had to pay Qualcomm for its modems. According to Williams, it was US$7.50 per device, which is five times more than the $1.50 it wanted to pay. But Williams said they paid because they needed the chips and they “didn’t have a lot of options.”

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Louis Vuitton’s newest smartwatch packs in the latest Snapdragon Wear processor

Louis Vuitton updates its premium smartwatch with new internals. The new LV Tambour Horizon packs in the newest Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor, which Qualcomm developed with Google for Wear OS. One of the major things this brings to the smartwatch is better battery life, giving users one full day and up to five more days if they’re just displaying time. It also has a better display and a new 24-hour ring with a day/night indicator across the ring. Its rich ambient mode can display things like time and information such as heart rate or step count while making sure it uses less power than the watch would if it was fully active. The LV Tambour Horizon also has a new white ceramic option. No word on pricing or availability just yet but with the old version going for US$2,490, you can expect this to come with an exorbitant price tag.

Source: Engadget

Qualcomm, Mozilla working on native Firefox browser for Windows on ARM

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Qualcomm and Mozilla recently announced it’s working on a 64-bit version of the Firefox browser for Qualcomm-powered Windows machines that run on ARM. Having a native version of the app promises better performance for the browser. The browser tab will run on individual cores in the CPU and Qualcomm says there are plenty of cores to spare. Mozilla writes in a blog post about the collaboration saying, “Mozilla is excited to be collaborating with Qualcomm and optimizing Firefox. We can’t wait to see Firefox delivering blazing fast experiences for the always on, always connected, multi-core Snapdragon compute platform with Windows 10.”

Source: The Verge