Late Steve Jobs Honored on Birthday; 13 New Apple Patents Published

Every week,  makes news with technology developments, business deals and, more often than not, controversies.

That’s where our weekly "Core Bytes" column on Apple comes in. We’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our favorite backyard tech giant.

Controversies

• A Chinese company is suing Apple in its own turf for a copyright infringement. A unit of Proview International Holdings filed a lawsuit against Apple this week in the Santa Clara County Court, claiming that it holds the iPad trademark in China. While Proview has been successful in stopping the sales of iPads in smaller Chinese cities, lawyers say Apple will have more of a “homegrown advantage” in the U.S. 

• Protests against Apple’s Chinese factories have sprouted up across the globe—and Apple’s backyard is no exception. On Thursday morning, sign-toting protesters stood in front of Apple headquarters, aiming to make a statement against Foxconn. The company has been chastised recently for poor working conditions such as extremely long hours and low pay, which some say have led to several suicides. 

• Apple has disabled its “push email”, which automatically sends messages to devices the moment they are received, in Germany due to a patent dispute with Motorola. The change will only affect users of the MobileMe and iCloud email, who can still receive their email using other settings. 

New Products

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a whopping 13 patents from Apple this week. Products soon coming to a desktop near you include a multi-touch positional stand for the iPad and a photobooth application, which would produce goofy mini-photos that can be manipulated in many ways. 

• This week, Apple acquired Chomp, a San Francisco-based startup designed to discover apps for the Android, iPhone and iPad. The company, which was founded in 2009 and has raised $2.5 million of funding, aims to make it easier for Apple users to sort through the 55,000 apps now available. 

Business Deals and Developments

• Fri., Feb. 24 would have marked the 57th birthday of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and many fans are honoring him on this day on sites such as Twitter. A popular tweet has been "3 Apples changed the world: Adam and Eve's forbidden apple, Newton's apple and finally Steve Jobs's Apple. Happy Birthday Steve Jobs."

• On average, Android apps are 2.5 times more expensive than iPad or iPod ones, but that doesn’t stop users in countries such as Russia, the U.K., and Germany from downloading more of them. Analysts are predicting that these Google app downloads will dominate the U.S. market by March or April.