Phone Scoop

The current Arm lawsuit against Qualcomm over its newest CPU designs has ended with a jury finding partly in favor Qualcomm. This means Qualcomm can continue selling the Snapdragon 8 Elite and other chips that use the new Oryon CPU architecture, the fruit of its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Arm alleged that Qualcomm improperly transferred CPU design licenses when it acquired Nuvia. The jury found that Qualcomm did not breach its license with Arm and that Qualcomm's current chips are properly licensed. However the jury could not agree on whether Nuvia breached its license with Arm. This opens the door for another lawsuit, which Arms claims it will pursue.

A federal judge in California has declared that Israel-based NSO Group violated the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act when it designed its Pegasus phone spyware to leverage Meta's WhatsApp servers. NSO sells Pegasus to governments and law enforcement around the world. One of the ways Pegasus spyware can be installed on a victim's phone is via a modified WhatsApp client that uses WhatsApp servers. The spyware is installed remotely and silently, without user interaction. Meta claims that happened to more than a thousand targeted phones. The case will continue, to determine the civil damages owed by NSO. The case could be appealed.

The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) provided a status update on the Qi2 wireless charging standard

AT&T has announced a new policy of automatically crediting customers a full day of service when the company is at fault for wireless outages of an hour or more. The new "AT&T Guarantee" is similar to the company's ad hoc response to a major outage

Opensignal has put out its January 2025 mobile network rankings based on its widely-crowdsourced performance data. In many categories, the big three US carrier networks performed similarly, with scores differing by just a few percentage points. But in several key categories, T-Mobile pulled far ahead, while Verizon performed notably better in one key category. In "Overall Experience" (including 4G and 5G), T-Mobile scored almost triple the other networks in download speed, and around double in upload speed. Focusing on just 5G, T-Mobile performed around 65% better on download speed, while for upload speed, Verizon performed 11% better than T-Mobile and 48% better than AT&T. On coverage, all three carriers were a near-tie when considering both 4G and 5G. But looking at just 5G, T-Mobile had a commanding lead in both "Coverage Experience" and "Availability". Opensignal found that T-Mobile customers with a 5G plan were able to connect to the 5G network about 72% of the time, while AT&T customers connected to 5G around 15% of the time, and for Verizon it was just under 11%. Opensignal collects its data from the phones of people who have the Opensignal app installed on their phone.

Apple is tweaking and pulling back on its AI Notification Summaries feature after multiple news outlets complained that it completely changed the meaning of some news headlines. In the new developer beta version of iOS 18.3, the feature is, for now, completely disabled for apps in the News & Entertainment category. Apple is also making it easier to disable the feature for additional specific apps, making it clearer that the feature is still in beta testing, and further distinguishing AI-generated summary text by putting it in italics.

Straight Talk Wireless — a Verizon prepaid brand sold exclusively by Walmart — has upgraded its premium "Gold" and "Platinum" mobile service plans to offer more value for the same monthly price. Both plans

As previously announced by Verizon, the new Samsung Galaxy S25 series will support NTN satellite SOS service in remote areas of the US without land-based cellular service. The service works similarly to Apple's "Emergency SOS via satellite" feature. Verizon notes that the service "might not work in parts of Alaska". Verizon has partnered with Skylo to offer this service. Google's Pixel 9 series of phones also supports this technology and Verizon will provide it for those phones as well, bringing its flagship Android phones up to par with iPhones in this aspect. Unlike Google, Samsung has not announced plans to enable this service for non-Verizon customers. Verizon is also working with AST SpaceMobile to being satellite connectivity to all existing phones, but AST's service may not be fully operational until the end of 2026. Therefore this service from Verizon brings similar functionality to at least some of its Android phones now.