Apple’s lawsuit against HTC generates chilling of smartphone development

18th March, 2010 by adina
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Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner is claiming that the lawsuit against HTC continues a long series of threats against its competitors and is the culmination of these threats. Industry checks reveal that beginning this year in January, Apple had a lot of talks with cell phone makers and expressed an intense displeasure of what it considers to be a violation of iPhone concepts and although the meetings were held in private, they were considered dull in nature.

Rivals have avoided doing anything to anger Apple, according to Reiner. A statement of the Apple COO Tim Cook, made in January 2009, warned that the company would use any weapons at its disposal to fight patent violation. Multi-touch phones have almost been absent lately from the market with a single notable exception, the Palm Pre, that Reiner claims not being a challenge to Apple. But things have changed when two Android devices were released, the HTC Eris and the Motorola Droid, both of them prominently multi-touch phones.

According to Reiner, top handset makers have continued to avoid multi-touch implementation, but Apple could assume they were trailing to judge the company’s response to HTC and Motorola. If there had been no answer, the manufacturers would take the silence as a reason to continue, following Google which moved towards multi-touch on the Nexus One handset.

Speculations are that HTC, which has to face a lawsuit, is not the real target, which has to be Google, Android’s creator. Reiner believes that this case has frozen the development of smartphones, as companies look for hardware and software workarounds and have to prepare defensive and offensive legal strategies. Some of them have even been probably frightened into shifting from Android to Windows Phone 7.

Attentively observing this cold war between Apple and other multi-touch phone makers, Microsoft seems to have realized the new attractive opportunity and has started to aggressively promote its own IP portfolio and also the willingness to join the side of the customers being under IP attack. Google has already expressed its support for HTC in its fight against Apple. This could put Google in an inconvenient position, because it still has deals with Apple for Maps and search on the iPhone.


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Readers Comments

  1. smartphone-guy says:
    March 18, 2010 at 9:08 am

    I’m so mad about this. Having a patent on a “multi-touch” screen? Come on! That’s like having a patent on a two-handed keyboard. Some dummy in the patent office should have never granted Apple a patent on multi-touch screens in the first place.