HTC testing new models after patent case; shares jump (Apple disappointed)

Speaking to media at the company's Taiwan headquarters on Wednesday alongside Google Inc's senior vice president of mobile, Andy Rubin, CEO Peter Chou said that the company would be working with Google to protect itself from "unfair" means to stop innovation.

"This industry should not allow one company use its powerful weapon to stop other innovation and take it all...this is not fair," Chou said, declining to elaborate on how the company would protect itself.

The patent suit between HTC and Apple was widely seen as a proxy for a larger fight between Google's Android operating system and Apple's iOS. Android phones dominate Apple in the Asia-Pacific region.

There are not a lot of details in the article about the one infringement that Apple “won”. To me it seems to be just another example of our legal system being further corrupted by lawyers and politics.

My understanding is that the infringement involves when you are viewing a text, an email, or web page and you click on a phone number and your phone automatically dials that number. Apple feels that they own that idea. If to you it sounds a little more like basic html than a patentable idea... you are not alone.

Apple has had a team of lawyers filing patent infringement lawsuits against other companies for years now. It wouldn't be so disgusting if it was something more than one of their basic business as usual tactics. Because of the impressive job that Apple's PR people have done they have a reputation for being innovators. However if you are someone who is a techno-geek you no doubt realize that most of their products are actually a year or more behind the true leaders.

What Apple is really good at is... recognizing the potential of the innovative features other companies have introduced... polishing them up and adding them to their products and then doing an impressive job marketing and educating people about how to use the product.

Then when the true innovators further polish their products, Apple attacks them with their teams of lawyers to stifle the competition. For the most part Apple is much less about innovation than it is about marketing and also stifling the competition with legal actions.

I am not arguing that they don't come up with some innovative stuff; however all of these lawsuits just seem more than a little hypocritical when 90% of the innovation they use was pioneered by others. I was using a PPC-6700 which was made by HTC over six years ago and you could get it to do almost everything that people now do with their I-phones. It had a decent camera for it's time. It played video and music. It had a high speed Internet connection. You choose from thousands of apps. It used Mini-SD cards. It was an amazing device. I still have it on my Sprint account for a backup phone.

So we now have Apple suing HTC who was making computer phone long before Apple even considered breaking into the market. And we have some judge ruling in their favor on something that even to an electronics layperson sounds stupid. It seems backwards to me. It reminds me of how Obama managed to win all of his elections prior to the presidency... knock out the competition by using the judicial system. It does not seem right to me.

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Reuters) - HTC Corp has begun testing new phone models that work around technology cited in a patent lawsuit won by arch-rival Apple Inc, and HTC's chief executive voiced optimism over the company's ability to meet challenging market conditions.