Apple and Samsung haven't just been fighting each other for customers these past few years – since April 2011 the two tech giants have been at loggerheads in the courtroom too, in dispute over patents.

The battle took a dramatic turn last year when a US court ordered Samsung to pay Apple an astonishing $1.049bn over claims that Samsung stole Apple's patents.

As you might imagine, Samsung put up a fight, and Foss Patents now reports that Samsung has managed to talk the judge down to a still-whopping $548m.

That's enough cash to buy over 844,000 iPhone 6Ss.

Samsung has apparently agreed to pay the cash, and instead now the legal dispute has descended into haggling over payment terms. For example, Samsung wants guarantees that if the courts changes its mind it can get a refund on the payment.

Beginning of the end?

So could this mean an end to the long-running dispute? It seems the companies are slowly getting there, as also last year the two agreed to drop all their patent lawsuits against each other that were being contested outside the US.

The payment will reportedly have to be made before December 14. We've no indication of how Samsung will transfer the cash to Apple, but we're guessing it won't be using Apple Pay.

The reason patents are so hotly contested is because it theoretically gives companies an exclusive right to pursue whatever ideas they've come up with. This is why companies will often patent the most absurdly obvious (such as "pull to refresh" on an email list) or weird (like this) thing.

This means that if someone else later produces products that use the patented technology, the company that filed the patent can take them to court and get a nice big fat payout – even if they themselves haven't made the product.

• We're still waiting for this patent to pay off.

Microsoft should be working on making Windows Phone run Android apps, according to the company's former chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Ballmer, who handed over the reins to Satya Nadella last year, and who is now owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, weighed in on his former company while speaking to Bloomberg.

When asked about Nadella's focus on building Windows 10's 'Universal Apps' platform, which makes it easier for developers to make apps that work across Windows on mobile, tablet and desktop, Ballmer simply said "That won't work", and argued for Android app support instead.

Lack of apps has been a perennial problem for Windows on mobile, and the chicken/egg problem of needing more apps to attract users while needing more users to attract app developers is one of the reasons why Microsoft's mobile platform ambitions have remained stalled.

If Android apps could be run on Windows, that could be an effective means of getting around the problem, as developers wouldn't have to rebuild from the ground up.

The company had in fact been previously working on this Android support, in a project that was codenamed 'Astoria', but this was dropped as a priority in favour of focusing on Universal Apps.

As the Verge notes, the comments are perhaps a little surprising, given that it was on Ballmer's watch that Microsoft largely rejected working with other platforms. It's only since Nadella took over that the company has made a big push into growing its presence on iOS and Android.

Cloud Criticisms

Interestingly too, in the same interview Ballmer blasted the current Microsoft administration's approach to reporting its earnings, arguing that the company should report earnings in full from Microsoft's cloud business, not just the "run rate", which annualised revenue collected in a shorter period of time. He called it "bullshit".

When asked by Bloomberg about Ballmer's comments, Microsoft's investor relations manager Chris Suh said (presumably through gritted teeth):

"We enjoy a regular dialogue with Steve, and welcome his input and feedback, as we do from our other investors."

We look forward to Ballmer lobbing more grenades in the future.

• Here's our review of Microsoft's latest flagship phone, the Lumia 950.

British researchers used mobile phone signals to track people and better coordinate the distribution of humanitarian aid following the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal on April 25th this year.

The IET reports that, coincidentally, a team from a company called Flowminder had been set up in Nepal since last December. The idea behind the company's technology is that it can track (anonymised) mobile phone users as their phones switch between masts, and that, taken in aggregate, conclusions can be drawn about the movement of people.

When the earthquake hit though, the team was able to help out in a "live" scenario, analysing data being returned from the different transmitters to paint a picture of where displaced people were moving, and where they were heading to following the quake. This meant that working with the UN, emergency aid could be directed to where it would be most effective.

To get access to the data and to make assessments, the company worked with Nepal's largest phone network, Ncell, to track 12m mobile phones. After the quake hit, half a million people left Kathmandu Valley. Overall, it is estimated that 1.2m people were displaced from their home district.

The project appears to be a good example of how big data can change the world - with better targeted aid, more people can be helped in the critical hours and days after a disaster, and they can be helped more efficiently too, with less going to waste. It'll be interesting to see if the technology is deployed more widely.

• Here's everything that New Horizons has discovered about Pluto so far

The HTC One A9 has only just hit shelves, but already it appears that the company is hard at work on two more handsets that will be variations on the new device.

A device called the HTC One A9w (yes, with a lowercase "w") has appeared on the website of the Chinese telecommunications regulator TENAA. Spec-wise, it is almost identical to the A9 in that it sports a 5 inch AMOLED full-HD display, 13MP camera on the rear (with optical image stabilisation) and 4MP camera on the front. The 1.5GHz CPU also aligns with the Snapdragon 617 found in the A9.

As followers of the phone industry will note, the A9 came in two different variants: One with 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM for the American market, and one with 16GB of storage and 2GB RAM for Europe (yep, we lost out there). Interestingly, the supposed A9w matches the latter - with 16GB storage and 2GB RAM.

Spot the difference

The exact purpose of the phone remains unclear - the only real difference the A9 and A9w appears to be in the size of Micro-SD card the phone can take to expand storage. So what exactly this new device will be for remains to be seen: it could be something as simple as the same phone but built for the Chinese market, or (cue wild speculation), perhaps it will be the same hardware but running Windows Phone instead of Android? (Hence the "w")

The news coincides with PocketNow reporting on what appears to be an improved A9. The purported HTC One X9 (that's an "X" not an "A") turbocharges the specs a little, upgrading to a 2K screen, a Snapdragon 820 processor and a 23MP camera on the rear. The battery too will be upgraded - to 3500mAh, and storage will get a boost to 128GB.

If the rumours, which first emerged on Chinese social network Weibo, turn out to be true, it seems that the X9 could potentially be the new high-end flagship device we all expected the A9 to be.

We'll keep you posted.

Filings with the US Federal Communications Commission have revealed that smartphone maker OnePlus is busy readying a new phone - but what exactly will it be?

According to TrustedReviews, the phone is not expected to be a direct update to the OnePlus 2, its current flagship handset which was only just released back in August - so those hoping for a OnePlus Three will have to hold on for a little longer.

The new phone though is tipped to be similar with a 5.5-inch display and a 1.9GHz processor. Interestingly though, the camera is being repositioned into the top corner of the device (like an iPhone) rather than being kept in the centre. Similarly, the rest of the body does appear to be reminiscent of the flat, rounded design of the iPhone 4 and 5.

What are you?

The large screen on the device suggests that it is definitely not going to be the much-rumoured OnePlus Mini too - so this is an entirely new device.

Since launching the OnePlus One last year, the Chinese firm has made waves in the phone industry. Rather than selling its devices through normal shops, it has instead retailed handsets directly using an invitation system, and it is through this strategy that it has managed to offer surprisingly high-spec devices and lower costs than competitors.

Apparently the company has scheduled a media event for later today, where we could conceivably find out more about the device, so check back later to see if the company has said anything official.

• Find out what we made of the OnePlus 2