Nokia sues HTC, RIM and ViewSonic for allegedly infringing upon 45 of its patents

By Tyler Lee on 05/02/2012, filed in Home > CellPhones

Yikes, it looks like Nokia has launched a pretty large lawsuit against HTC, RIM and ViewSonic for allegedly infringing upon their patents. Nokia claims that the amount of patents allegedly infringed upon totals to 45, claiming that the patents are proprietary as opposed to being industry standards, unlike the patents in their lawsuit against Apple. The patents range from hardware such as “dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios” and software features such as “application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of email attachments on a mobile device.” No word on what Nokia wants from these companies although if we had to guess based on previous patent lawsuits, injunctions, licensing agreements, damages and royalties will most likely come into play. In any case we will be keeping our eyes peeled so check back with us for updates. [Press release]

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HTC: High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) is a Taiwanese manufacturer of smartphones and tablets. The company started as an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) that was building devices for others, but went on making HTC-branded smartphones based mostly on Microsoft's Windows operating system (OS) for mobile. In 2009, it began to shift its core focus away from Windows mobile devices to Android-based ones. In 2010 the company went back to the Windows Phone eco-system.

Nokia: Nokia is a Finnish communications company that was the largest phone vendor (per unit) between 1988 to 2012. The company's history go back to 1871 but the Nokia that we know today (the Nokia corporation) was founded in 1967 by the merger of three Finnish companies. It is then that Nokia worked on networking equipment and was ultimately involved in the launch of the first cellular network in 1981 (Mobira Oy). Nokia because a key developer of GSM, the standard that we all know today. Although Nokia still produces a range of phones that includes entry-level handsets and Symbian smartphones, the company is counting on the Windows Phone OS to regain the share that it once had. The current flagship Windows Phone device from Nokia is the Lumia 920.

RIM: RIM is the acronym for Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry brand. RIM was founded in the mid 90s by Mike Lazaridis and with Jim Balsillie and went IPO (Initial Public Offering) in 1998. Its claim to fame was to make mobile email really effective and enterprises quickly adopted its devices and associated software and services which were highly lucrative. With the rise of iOS and Android devices, the BlackBerry franchise bumped into trouble and its decline prompted RIM to take a radical step by overhauling its BlackBerry operating system (OS) completely with QNX. The first version of the QNX BlackBerry OS is BlackBerry 10 or BB10.

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