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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in South Texas, where all the whopping patent judgements are handed-down, not in Seattle.

Suing in Seattle is bad trollmanship.

What we have here is a guy who may be the 37th richest person in the world, but he used to be the second-richest. He’s pledged to give away his fortune and maybe wants more to give. In short, I don’t see a problem with these legal actions.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Allen will prevail. The odds are against him. While Interval developed upwards of 300 patents, that isn’t like the thousands of patents now controlled by Nathan Myrhvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold has acquired baskets of patents creating a strategic mass of IP and an associated legal team he can use to bludgeon almost any company into cross-licensing. Allen has no such depth (or power).

He’s just trying to turn lemons from lemonade.

Readers are reporting they can no longer buy an iPhone 4. Supplies are sold-out, but even more telling the Apple stores can’t even predict when they’ll have product to sell. This strongly suggests Apple has halted production and is going for a hardware fix. Not surprisingly, this unavailability hasn’t been noted yet in the press but I’d expect it to be a major issue at today’s press conference in Cupertino as Steve Jobs attempts to explain his way out of the current PR fiasco.

Update — The Apple event is over and all iPhone 4 users are getting free bumpers.  But I stand by my story.  Mrs. Cringely has a bumper and still finds her iPhone 4 almost unusable.  Apple must be working on a true solution to these problems for future production.

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Dave Miller, a very smart electrical engineer from New Zealand who is lucky enough to spend his days doing private research on gravity, has a theory about how Apple is handling the antenna problems on its iPhone 4 that have been getting so much attention in the blogosphere and even in the general press. You can read Dave’s thoughts here. For those who don’t want to go all the way to New Zealand, the gist of Dave’s argument is that Apple has a serious problem that it will try to allay by adopting AT&T’s recommended algorithm for assigning numbers of signal bars on the phone display, which Apple admits not having used to date.

Neither Dave nor I know anything about this AT&T algorithm but he supposes it might change the game a bit by representing absolute signal strength instead of Apple’s present algorithm, which appears to represent the strength of a signal within a Reality Distortion Field.

By going back to basics Dave thinks Apple can regain the upper hand in this public relations tussle.

It’s a well-reasoned argument, but the problem I see with it is that Dave is in New Zealand and AT&T isn’t. Dave thinks AT&T is a phone company, while I think it is a marketer of voice and data services with the emphasis on marketer.

As a marketer, AT&T’s longtime slogan was “more bars in more places,” which seems to me would work equally well (perhaps even better) for Hooters, but that’s for another column.

How do they get those “more bars in more places?” Did AT&T spend more than Verizon did building their wireless network? No. Do their cell towers transmit at higher power than those of other companies? No. Or do they simply make their phones — with the exception of the iPhone, the same phones used by the other networks — show more bars for the same signal?

Bingo.

I’ve been told by a couple of mobile phone manufacturers that AT&T is guilty of a little bar inflation, so to speak. It’s the most reliable way to get “more bars in more places.”

Now this is just something I’ve been told. I haven’t bought or borrowed a mess of comparable mobile phones and measured it myself. But these people had no reason to lie to me, either. So I’ll just throw this out as an idea why Apple adopting AT&T’s signal bar algorithm to somehow effectively reduce the number of bars might not be such a plausible idea.

As for Apple’s antenna problem, maybe that’s why my wife’s iPhone 4 sounds so tinny and why it drops so many calls. It’s a stunning handheld computer, but not a good phone.

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Apple has been criticizing Adobe Systems lately for what Cupertino perceives as poor performance and design deficiencies in Adobe’s Flash web media technology, which it darned well wants to keep off the iPhone and iPad. Adobe, in turn, has been defending Flash, however gently, citing it as a great enabling technology that has got the web in large part to where it is today. Both companies are correct, and that’s the point that seems to be missed by most of the pundits standing around pointing at the fight. Flash has been vital to the success of the web, but Flash is old.

Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the web.

Web browsers have swallowed up most every app you used to have to install on your PC. Something like TurboTax needs forms to input data, display tables of numbers, and store your returns on their server. But if you want to have forms smart enough to know what’s a date and what’s a dollar; to draw piecharts; or store your W-2 on your laptop, then you need a new browser.

Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen. Now, for the first time, a cluster of technologies known as HTML5 allow a standards-based pathway to busting those barriers with canvas graphics, drawing video onscreen, smarter forms, and local storage for private data. So who needs Flash?

John Gruber is right: Flash is responsible for most of the crashes of my Mac. I can hardly blame Adobe for defending its very successful Flash franchise, though it feels strange coming from that nerdiest of nerdy companies. And I admit there are still a few things that Flash can do but HTML5 can’t, but the evolutionary path here is clear.

Where Flash a decade ago enabled browsers to do more, I can see a time coming soon when Flash will force browsers to do less than they might.

It’s time for a change.

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From a beta tester:

Apple tablet is OLED + back has solar pad for recharging, but (the charger) really doesn’t work quickly. More a gimmick. Verizon+att, wifi yes!

Apple Tablet has thumbpads on each side for mouse gestures, reads fingerprint for security. Up to 5 profiles by fingerprint for family.

Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of you.

I can tell u the battery life is great in ebook reading mode but not great when on wifi or playing games. 2-3hrs.

Yes, the apple tablet is running an iphone os flavor with ability to have multiple apps running at same time (ie pandora, browser).

The price will be $599, $699 and $799 depending on size and memory in apple tablet. Also, wireless keyboard + monitor connection for TV.

Also, the apple tablet is really amazing for newspapers. Video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new.

The best part of the apple tablet as beta user has been the built in HDTV tuner and pvr, and the chess game.

Yes, it’s true… I’ve been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks and it’s amazing!

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Tomorrow we’ll finally see Apple’s tablet computer, whatever it is finally called. I’ll write another column then attempting to explain where I think this thing is likely to succeed or fail for Apple. But right now I don’t see much point in speculating about something we’ll know for sure within 24 hours. It’s much more useful, I think, to look instead at the Big Media companies Apple is targeting with this device, why they might be attracted and whether the iPad/iSlate/iWhatever is likely to deliver what they think they need.

It won’t.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn’t fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn’t, and that’s the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars — many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn’t a company that rhymes with “The New York Times” but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my WordPress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I’m getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I’ve made my point: a good Internet media product doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that’s putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins — 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren’t the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” Those outfits have overhead I don’t. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can’t even imagine. They can’t just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can’t support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York’s 21 Club, if you hadn’t already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn’t work out that way because Internet users won’t generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks.  And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I’ve heard so far I’m guessing the new Apple product will be — like the Apple TV — a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It’s in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

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Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

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Back to my 2010 predictions, this time mainly about Apple, the PC company that fared best in 2009 and is likely to fare best in 2010, too. Though I also wonder at what point we take Apple’s hint and stop thinking of them so much as a computer company?

Over the past years Apple has brought out successively better and ever more solid versions of OS X. They’ve completed a transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that could have killed a lesser company. They’ve built a dominant line of professional apps and a competitive line of productivity apps, pricing them reasonably compared to Microsoft. They re-invented the media player and the smart phone. They revolutionized the record business. And having once vilified the very idea of Apple stores, they changed their minds and showed the world how stores ought to be run. The company is absolutely at the top of its game despite a CEO who was absent for months near death. How do you top that?

In 2010 you do so by entering new markets and turning on old friends, sometimes simultaneously. That’s likely to be the case with the coming iSlate tablet, or whatever it will be called, which definitely won’t be running exclusively on AT&T. You can see that from AT&T’s sudden embrace of Android, which never would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn’t first made a preemptive move of his own for the iSlate, probably to Verizon.  The Apple/AT&T marriage is now one of convenience only.

The iSlate (or whatever) will be Steve’s idea of a new category of computing, or at least that’s the way he’ll spin it. Not an ebook reader, not a tablet computer, not a pen computer, not a handheld, not a smart phone, the iSlate will be something else and I’d say that something will depend on: a) the content deals Apple can announce, and; b) whatever Steve decides to claim for the product, whether actually true or not.

So expect lots of print deals for newspapers, magazines, and books. Expect, too, audio and video deals for the iSlate. Expect some major UI gimmick too, because that’s always at the heart of one of these advances. “It isn’t an MP3 player! It’s an AAC player with this tuning wheel thingee!! ” See what I mean?

Apple will under-promise and over-deliver for the iSlate. And if for some reason they don’t, then they’ll just declare it to be a hobby, like the AppleTV.

Apple as a content company will move into subscription music based on its recent Lala Media acquisition, but don’t think this embracing of streaming means Apple will be abandoning downloads, no sirree. Remember that while Hulu, for example, has been making a lot of news delivering streamed TV and movies, Apple has been making a lot of profit downloading both for sale and rental.

The downloading-streaming-downloading pendulum is about to turn direction, I think, with the advent of true 1080p video on the net. Years ago no network was fast enough for high fidelity streaming audio, much less streaming video, so everything was downloaded. Then networks got faster and people streamed. Then video came along (and Bit Torrent) and people downloaded again. That’s when iTunes rose to power for those of us who actually pay our bills. Then YouTube made streaming again popular. But now 1080p files are just so darned big that downloading is, again, where it’s at.

So what does that say about Apple’s vaunted rejection of Blu-Ray disks? I’ve maintained in the past that Apple refused to offer Blu-Ray as part of its agenda to take control of downloadable HD video standards. and I think I was right. But here’s news: Apple’s new line of iMacs were supposed to ship with Blu-Ray drives, but didn’t. What gives with that? Maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe a last minute pricing problem, maybe Steve didn’t get enough blood or flesh from some corporate partner (Sony). But I think it means that the fight over HD was won by Apple to the extent that they feel they can start listening again to their professional customers from the video industry who have been screaming for Blu-Ray.

So look for Blu-Ray drives to start appearing, shortly, in Apple computers along with Blu-Ray support in all of Apple’s professional applications. Look also for Apple to offer some higher level of HD download, probably with expanded device portability courtesy of Disney’s new KeyChest technology, which I am sure came from Apple.

And then there’s the iPhone. The iSlate will be a bigger iPhone, but in 2010 we’ll surely see at least two next-gen iPhones, too — a smaller form factor in the Nano tradition and a 1 GHz processor on something like the current model. Apple will remain atop the smart phone market, where Android may eventually threaten, but not yet.  As we see from the first Nexus One reviews, Google has a lot to learn.

More about Google and the Nexus One tomorrow, as well as an interesting theory about Apple and Nokia.

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Dag nabbit I had hoped to get away without having to write a predictions column this year, but no such luck. Look for that one tomorrow. Tonight, of course, there’s Google’s Nexus One smart phone to write about. Is it an iPhone killer? Hardly. And that’s not even the point.

Google’s Nexus One is a very nice smart phone as far as I can tell. I only read what you read and I haven’t yet played with one, but a couple nice folks who were on TWiT with me this week have tried it and liked it a lot, especially the screen. Yet many of the stories I’ve read today have presented this product introduction as a seminal break between Apple and Google with one trying to kill the other. Not even close.

Apple is very happy with its iPhone sales, thanks, and those are unlikely to be hurt much, if at all, by the Nexus One. Not that the Nexus One can’t be a huge success for Google. But here are the points everyone seems to be missing: 1) there is plenty of room in the mobile market for both Apple and Google, and; 2) this product introduction really marks the ultimate decline and fall of so-called “feature phones” and the rise to dominance of smart phones. Within two years there will be no more feature phones, at least not in the U.S.

The real losers today, then, are makers of feature phones and, maybe, Microsoft, which has the most vulnerable smart phone platform in Windows Phone.

The Nexus One introduction, coming on top of the iPhone, marks the true ascendence of smart phones as an alternative platform to desktops and notebooks. No, you can’t survive on a smart phone alone, the days of one computing device per person ended long ago.

But this does mark the beginning of the smart phone shakeout, when the industry matures and inevitably drops to no more than three viably competitive smart phone platforms. So just as you have Windows, Mac, and some form of ‘nix fighting it out for desktops and notebooks, so too we’ll shortly have three major mobile platforms to choose from.

iPhone and Android will be here for the long haul with the question being which of Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry will die?

What’s your guess? My guess is that Blackberry will be the third standard, Nokia will eventually leave Symbian for Android, and Microsoft will buy Palm but then screw it up, losing its position almost entirely in the mobile client space where smart phones will soon dominate, selling up to a billion units per year.

Hey this did turn out to be a predictions column after all!

More predictions tomorrow.

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Last weekend a story in the New York Times blamed the bad reputation of AT&T’s wireless network on iPhone technical problems, not the AT&T network at all. Going further, Global Wireless Solutions, a network testing company, said the AT&T network is actually faster than Verizon’s, backing to a certain extent AT&T’s now-aborted legal effort to silence Verizon Wireless commercials that said otherwise. I doubt this is actually the case. Last summer as my family and I wandered across the United States in our old Winnebago motor home equipped with two iPhones from AT&T but also cellular data from Verizon, I can say with some certainty that Verizon coverage was consistently better, no matter what the Times has to say.

But the real issue here, it seems to me, is the obvious gag order successfully imposed on giant AT&T by Apple. Now that part I believe.

Apple and Steve Jobs (they are one and the same) feel a tremendous need to control stories about them. No other computer company I know of has sued its own customers to silence them, yet Apple did just that a couple years ago. Steve Jobs now reportedly controls most of the copyrighted photos ever taken of him, which is why editors and TV producers keep using the same few shots over and over again. The company, too, imposes on its commercial partners a virtual gag order. That’s the case here with AT&T, which apparently isn’t allowed to refute Verizon’s network performance claims even if AT&T has contrary data.

I’ve seen this before. PortalPlayer (now part of nVIDIA) was under a similar gag order when I went there in 2006 to shoot a NerdTV interview. PortalPlayer designed the innards of all early iPods, yet the people I spoke with at the company weren’t even allowed to acknowledge that Apple was a customer, much less that it represented 85 percent of their business. “We aren’t allowed to say their name in any context,” my interview subject told me. “They want the world to believe that all iPod technology was invented in Cupertino.”

And so it is with AT&T where the wireless carrier reportedly could respond to Verizon’s claims but generally doesn’t because doing so might piss-off Steve Jobs.

That must be very frustrating for AT&T (unless of course, as I suspect, Verizon is correct in its claim to have the better network). But the kind of inferiority complex it implies — one that would have the company accepting such a galling deal from Apple — shows up near the end of a long history of bonehead moves by AT&T or by its earlier incarnation SBC — Southwestern Bell Communications — one of the original Regional Bell Operating Companies.

Consider, for example, SBC’s onetime ignorance of Moore’s Law, as described to me recently by a friend who used to work there:

“Do you remember Americast? It was a cable TV joint venture between SBC and Ameritech. I was involved in evaluating set top boxes for that mess. They finally settled on a box and in the telco tradition signed a contract requiring the manufacturer to make ‘the same box at the same price’ for 10 years. The execs who cut the deal thought they had really won big because (they were convinced) the cost of the box had to increase over the next ten years. But, they really signed a contract requiring the company to build a box that looked the same, had the same connectors and the same functionality for the next 10 years. Then I asked if they had figured-in Moore’s Law?

“They, being Telco Executives, had never heard of Moore’s Law. When I pointed out that the cost of the electronics in the box should drop by a factor of between 8 and 16 over that ten years, they denied that there could be such a thing as Moore’s Law or it would have shown up in all their other purchasing. About a week later my boss asked me to write a memo on Moore’s Law and hand deliver it — paper only — to the President of TRI, later known as SBC Labs, now a tiny part of what is left of AT&T Bell labs. I was later told that paper copies of that memo circulated widely among executives at SBC.

“SBC had a corporate purchasing culture based on the idea that everything gets more expensive over time. I guess that is an example of people who should know better investing in things they didn’t understand. In this case they had an entire building full of people who did understand the technology but were either not consulted or were ignored.

“The SBC executives didn’t believe they needed help because they were experts. I mean they had to be experts to become executives, right? ”

Right.