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Pager service in Japan is finally coming to an end
After nearly five decades, Japan is finally ending pagers for good. The last service provider in the country, Tokyo Telemessage, announced that it will terminate its service in September 2019, according to SoraNews24. The company said about 1,500 people still use pagers in its service area, which covers Tokyo and several neighboring regions.
UK watchdog accidentally creates pager monopoly it was hoping to avoid
True story: Vodafone still runs a pager service, decades after the old-school equivalent of pop-up notifications fell out of fashion. And it's not even the only the company supporting this ancient tech, which is still used by a few businesses, doctors, emergency services and bird watchers, apparently. Capita also maintains a pager service and agreed to buy Vodafone's division and its roughly 1,000 customers in February. However, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today that it has decided to investigate the merger, leading Vodafone to immediately abandon the sale and close down this part of its business altogether.
Apple loses a patent battle over Skytel's two-way pager tech
The greatest patent battle Apple ever waged... was with Samsung. The funniest, probably, is with Skytel, a company, kids, that made makes pagers. A jury has found that the iPhone and other Apple devices used Skytel technology without permission. Mobile Telecommunication Technologies, which owns the patents (and the most insipid name in tech), only got a tenth of what it hoped to get out of Apple. However, the patents in this case were issued in the middle to late-90s, meaning they either recently expired or will do soon. As Bloomberg puts it, SkyTel's 2-Way pager was "the smartphone of its day." Apple denied infringing the patents, adding that MTel was looking trying to take credit for emoji and calendar invites. Apple's lawyer, Brian Ferguson, told the jury that its opponent was entitled to $1 million, at most. [Image credit: Marty Katz via Getty Images]
