A company has sued Apple and a number of other technology firms, alleging their smartphones and other touch-screen devices violate a patent covering “double-click input.” Apple’s iPad and iPhone were specifically mentioned because the handset and tablet allow users to “double click or double tap a visual element representing content and interact with a second version of the interactive content.”

The lawsuit by Hopewell Culture and Design asks an Eastern Texas District Court to award “adequate damages” for the supposed violations. The U.S. Patent No. 7,171,625 was first filed in 2002. Also named in the lawsuit are Adobe, HTC, Nokia, LG Electronics, Motorola, Opera, Palm, Samsung and Quickoffice.

Just six months have passed since the iPhone 4 launch, so it may seems a little premature to be speculating about its successor. But given the long lead times involved, you can bet that Steve Jobs’ A-team is already hard at it, toiling away in a maximum security lab, under his close personal supervision.

But where next for the iPhone? What can you add to the smartphone that has everything? With the growing competitive threat from Android, I think that Apple’s roadmap for iPhone in 2011 will switch from adding new features to product diversification, targeting multiple consumer segments and price points.

Instead of the iPhone 5, Apple will launch the iPhone Play and the iPhone Air. Here’s why…

This is a guest post by the author of the controversial CrApple Store blog, written by a former Apple Genius. [More on the CrApple Store here]

If you can cast your minds back 10 years, you might remember the slight excitement of getting a new mobile phone.

Features like a colour screen, customisable ringtones, a camera and games were all part of the learning experience that came along with obtaining a new handset year after year.

In recent years I’ve found this geek factor to be missing from the yearly iOS update (same phone, same-ish software and settings), and with the signal/bumper fiasco with this year’s iPhone, I decided that having to have a case on a phone I just paid £500 was not acceptable.

Along with Apple’s childish behaviour of putting up videos of other manufacturers’ handsets supposedly doing a similar thing, I thought enough was enough and decided to return my iPhone 4 for a full refund. Also not happy with paying hundreds of pounds for last year’s 3GS model, I thought what better opportunity than to dip my toe into the Android platform, and see what, at least some of the fuss was about.

Now, every day I regret the purchase of an Android handset.

Verizon may be getting a late Christmas present, if a new report proves correct. Apple is planning to ship between 20 million and 21 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011 – 5 to 6 million of those CDMA-based. (Another 14 million to 15 million of the Apple handsets will reportedly be GSM.)

According to a Taiwan-based industry publication, citing unnamed suppliers, Asia will also get the CDMA phones. However, this latest talk of CDMA iPhones could bolster the already red-hot speculation Verizon will launch an iPhone early next year. The move would break the exclusive stranglehold AT&T has held ever since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

The upcoming Jack Black comedy, Gulliver’s Travels, which opens Christmas Day, will be one giant Apple ad.

When Gulliver travels to Lilliput, he brings his iPhone, which when used by the Lilliputians appears gigantic.

The movie has multiple MacBooks and other Apple products, and Apple logos galore.

Apple is easily the most successful company ever in getting its products into movies and TV shows. Some 41% of the movies that hit number-one at the box office featured Apple products.

Part of the reason for this success is that Hollywood is Apple-obsessed. Another is that Apple works at it. The company proudly boasts that it never pays for product placement. But it’s likely that there is some string pulling, proactive offers of devices to use and other actions that are kept secret by the company.

Whatever Apple is doing, it’s working.

Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.

Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?

The old saying about a rising tide lifts all boats seems pertinent even to smartphones. A dramatic rise in demand for smartphones has allowed Android to enter the market yet hasn’t caused Apple to cut its price for the iPhone, writes one analyst Monday.

With demand for smartphones growing at 90 percent per year, the question isn’t how Android will hurt Apple. “The more smartphones you build, the more price you can charge. This is regardless of platform,” according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu.

Sure, this is a pretty big gimmick, but we’re impressed none the less: behold an 11-inch MacBook Air driving four displays at once. From right to left, the MacBook Air is driving a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display through the Mini DisplayPort a 7-inch Mimo 720-S display through USB, its own internal display and an Apple IIc running a terminal session through a serial cable, presumably through another USB adapter. This, my friends, is the most lurid Mac porn you’ll see all day,

We’ve already reported how Apple is working on a remote computing system that will be enabled by the iPhone 5.

Equipped with a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip, the iPhone 5 may allow user to load their Home folders on guest Macs when they travel, or log in at school or work. All the user would have to do is tap their iPhone 5 on a NFC-equipped Mac, and the machine would load their Home folder files, settings and preferences.

But if Apple equipped all of its products with NFC chips, which are used for short-range authentication, the technology could be used for super-easy set-up of a new Apple gear, or for easily transferring files and media between different Apple devices.

For example, users could easily connect a new iPad to their home Wi-Fi network, say, just by bringing the tablet within four inches of a NFC-equipped AirPort base station.

“Imagine you touch an AirPort with a new iPad and the Wi-Fi is connected — with full security — in less than a second,” said Gerald Madlmayr, a NFC expert based in Vienna. “No configuration is necessary any more. This makes this technology pretty useful.”

The storied Verizon iPhone remains as questionably and rumorous as a cryptozoological specimen: no matter how many times it is reported as a soon-to-be-imminent reality, it never quite seems to come about, no matter how assertive the Wall Street Journal or New York Times seem to be about the matter.

Still, even if it hasn’t come about yet, Apple’s clearly interested in the possibility of bringing the iPhone to Verizon when their exclusivity deal with AT&T ends, as evidenced by this most recent job posting looking to hire a new staff member who is experienced with Verizon’s CDMA network.