Nokia VS Apple: The Battle over Patent

Written by AndroidRed Sunday, 09 May 2010 00:39

Nokia and Apple are in really hot battle today. Nokia has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Apple Inc. over the technology used in iPhone and iPad. The previous lawsuit which is about the fifth patent complaint between Apple and Nokia over smartphone technology now had widened into the fight that include the latest Apple’s iPad touch-screen computer tablet.

Nokia had been starting the technology improvement from phones to the internet since over 10 years ago by manufacturing the keyboard-based Communicator. But Nokia was slow in the development to the touchscreen feature compared to Apple’s iPhone and iPad. However, its general manager of patent licensing stated that Nokia has been the leading developer of many keys technologies over the mobile devices.

Nokia accuses Apple of infringing 10 patents and it demands royalties of more than 51 million iPhone sold since 2007.

Accordingly, the newest complaints Nokia filed regarding the five patents about the enhanced speech and data transmission and antenna configurations that improve performance and save space. Nokia admitted that the patents are not the same ones at issue in cases in a federal court in Delaware. In addition, Nokia is said to bring everything to the court including the user interface, power consumption, camera, and speaker. The complaints about patent litigation are considered the broadest case in the sector of patent over the past 10 years.

Whereas according to Apple’s spokesman, Nokia focused only on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interface in the December filing. On the other hand, Apple has become the long leader in computer technology that foresees the significance of mobile device to be more user-friendly.

Learning the rapid development of touchscree devices, Nokia is still working on to enhance a touch-optimized version of the Symbian operating system to be a user-friendly just like the Apple’s devices. Nokia argued that Apple’s wireless communication devices take benefit of the investment Nokia has been carrying out for decades to improve the cellular communications and to differentiate Nokia’s handsets from what have been offered by competitors.

On the other hand, Apple commented that Nokia was only trying to strong-arm Apple to give access over the proprietary technology that distinguishes iPhone from other smarthphones. In addition, Apple is not going to license its iPhone-related patents to competitors.

Apple added that Nokia is persistently withholding the information about patent holding when helping to establish an industry standard and then asking for unreasonable royalties over Wi-Fi and wireless transmission technology.