Ever wonder why there never is enough space on your iPhone or iPad? A lawsuit filed this week against Apple Inc. alleges that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system are to blame, and that the company has misled customers about it.

They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices.

“In addition to making material misrepresentations and omissions to prospective purchasers of Devices with iOS 8 pre-installed, Apple also makes misrepresentations and omissions to owners of Devices with predecessor operating systems,” according to the complaint, which seeks class-action status for others who purchased 16GB devices.

“These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to ‘upgrade’ their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8,” it said. “Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space – a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.”

The situation between allegedly independent manufacturer OnePlus and its former software supplier Cyanogen Inc. is… strained. After the software company signed an exclusive deal with Indian manufacturer Micromax, the company refused to supply its CyanogenMod ROM for the OnePlus One in India, then Micromax attempted to block sales of the One in that country, a situation that still hasn’t been resolved. OnePlus has formed its own team of software engineers, and is now making its own phone ROMs independently. The first one, an alpha build of Lollipop that’s very close to “stock” AOSP, is available now.

Taiwanese regulators cleared on Tuesday China’s Xiaomi Inc [XTC.UL] and other smartphone brands of breaching local data protection laws after national security concerns triggered the government to launch a probe in September.

The National Communications Commission, in a report concluding the investigation, said all the 12 brands it had tested, which include handsets sold by Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, LG Electronics Inc and Sony Corp, did not violate the laws.

Palm, the legendary smartphone and PDA company, might seem dead and gone, but it’s now looking like the name “Palm” will rise again as a zombie brand. For a quick refresher: HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010. HP killed the Palm brand after about a year of ownership and stopped making WebOS devices entirely about a year-and-a-half after the acquisition. Since then, Palm has been pretty dead.

Lately, though, the brand has started to stir. The diehards over at WebOS Nation have been keeping a close eye on Palm.com, which recently stopped redirecting nostalgic visitors to hpwebos.com and started sending people to mynewpalm.com. The page shows a looping video of a Palm logo along with the text “Coming Soon” and “Smart Move.”

In a rash of annual predictions, T- Mobile big cheese John Legere claims that “Wearables and phablets will be the big device stories of 2015”.

He goes on to look at exercise and fashion products as being in the same space: “I love what Jawbone, Fitbit, Samsung, LG, Microsoft and others are doing in the wearables space. But we haven’t begun to see the potential of this category. It’s going to go from $1 to $20 billion in the next few years.”

Read more at http://hothardware.com/reviews/security-research-at-the-hague-the-mobile-malware-threat?page=2#tqAoDykrQ2UrV3Sj.99

Apple’s attempt to launch its NFC payment solution in the UK could be thwarted by some financial institutions’ concerns over privacy and security issues surrounding Cupertino’s “invasion” of the banking industry.

The system, which has been developed with the credit card companies, has been tried by two million iPhone 6 users in the US.

However, The Telegraph reports that UK adoption has been slowed by banks concerns over privacy, saying “some executives fear Apple Pay and the data it delivers to Apple could serve as a beachhead for an invasion of the banking industry”.

Maybe they have looked at what Apple has done to the music and mobile phone industries and drawn conclusions from that. A battle between banks and Apple would certainly be interesting to watch.

Airing concerns about security, money laundering and financing of terrorism is a standard tactic employed by the banks when they want to slow the adoption of a new technology.

An obscure court case in India appears to have dented hopes of the mobile industry weaning itself off Google dependency – and has raised questions about the goals of Cyanogen and its backer, a Silicon Valley VC firm with close ties to Google.

In the cosy world of Menlo Park VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz (or “A16Z”) is as close to Google as anyone.

Last year a number of investors poured money into Cyanogen, a company which hoped to do for Android what Red Hat had done for Linux. CyanogenMod is one of a dozen popular community-developed variants of the open source Android code base (AOSP).

It works like this.

Anyone can take the AOSP source code and use it to make an Android phone – Amazon and Nokia did just that – but it takes significant in-house investment to maintain the code base. Cyanogen promised to rmove some of the risk from the proposition by creating a service business around AOSP, stimulating the market for devices that wouldn’t be strictly defined by Google.

Higher up the software stack, Google imposes strict secret conditions to ensure that phone makers who desire Google-flavoured Android compatibility must pass a series of tests. This effectively means phone makers then market phones with Google’s “binary blob” of services – and they must take them all. These secret contracts are currently being probed by the European Commission.

So far, not one phone maker has tried to hedge their bets and make both Google-certified Androids, and experiment with marketing less-Googley mod-based phones.

Google, which each year increases its control over Android, was therefore faced with a problem. It had reportedly tried to buy Cyanogen, but had been rebuffed.

One of the first to sign up to Cyanogen was Oppo Electronics, part of the large Chinese BBK Electronics group. And Oppo did something very interesting.

Rather than market Cyanogen phones alongside Oppo’s Google-approved phones, it spawned a wholly owned “startup” it called OnePlus. OnePlus is headed by an Oppo VP and used an Oppo design as its first device, the OnePlus One

The unusual corporate architecture could conceivably have allowed Oppo to continue to sell phones that meet Google’s strict compatibility conditions – but also test the market via OnePlus, with CyanogenMod flavoured devices. In the end, when the OnePlus One appeared, it was Google-compatible.

Rather than licensing CyanogenMod to all comers, which is the tried and tested way of getting your platform adopted, Cyanogen insisted on exclusive territoriality agreements.

The Judge ruled that Cyanogen had behaved badly: as the Times of India notes:

“During the proceedings, the bench observed Cyanogen has not been fair to both Shenzhen as well as Micromax as the US-based firm entered into an exclusive use agreement with the Indian company when it already had an arrangement with the Chinese phone-maker.”