ST Microelectronics, a company that provides hardware components, has recently been found to have supplied HTC with microphone components for their upcoming flagship, the HTC One, that were supposed to be exclusively for Nokia.

A district court in Amsterdam has agreed that The One might be using Nokia-exclusive microphone technology, and has granted Nokia a preliminary injunction. Apparently, the dual membrane microphone setup seen in the One was manufactured using technology solely meant for Nokia phones. This implies a direct breach of an NDA signed by ST  between Nokia and themselves.

This can only spell disaster for HTC. The already delayed One may face further sales problems if this is found to be true. A recent profits analysis shows …

I may just be unreasonably hungry right now, but gobbling up all of Kodak’s patents in one fell swoop does sound mighty scrumptious. Being one of the biggest players in the photography game and having picked up a nice patent portfolio, Kodak hold a large number (1,100) of the patents for digital imaging.

Anyway, these patents supposedly hold a whole lot of substance and whoever is able to add them to their own portfolio at the end of the day. It had earlier looked like the tech giants of the world would start bidding against one another for these patents, but it looks like Apple and Google may be teaming up to purchase them for a lump sum for $500 …

In the latest  instalment of the Samsung-Apple court case saga, Judge Lucy Koh has granted Samsung’s lawyers permission to view an unredacted version of the recent HTC-Apple cross-licensing agreement.

The reasoning used by Samsung’s lawyers to get Judge Koh on-side was to argue that the HTC-Apple agreement is relevant to its arguments against Apple’s permanent injunction motion, as well as to determine what a reasonable fee would be should Apple prevail.

Even more interesting is that The Guardian reports that FOSS Patent blogger Florian Mueller was able to get his hands on a redacted version of the cross-licensing agreement with a few interesting details:

• any change of ownership of either company, unless otherwise agreed, results in the …

Big news: according to The Verge, HTC and Apple have agreed to end all outstanding patent litigation against each other worldwide, and have signed a ten-year license agreement covering existing and future patents. A short joint press release from HTC and Apple has announced the “global settlement”, of which the specific terms of the settlement are confidential. HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou, said that the company “was pleased to have resolved its dispute with Apple, so HTC can focus on innovation instead of litigation”.

While the details of the agreement are confidential, an HTC representative told The Verge that they did not expect the agreement to “have any adverse material impact on the financials of the company”.

While we’re glad …

Remember that slide-to-unlock patent that Apple has had for a while? It’s the one that forced Android OEMs & Google to change the way they their devices are unlocked. Instead of sliding along a predefined line (which Apple had patented), OEMs were forced to innovate and change the way their devices were locked – otherwise, in some circumstances, they’d be banned.

In the end, things changed and devices went for more of a circle-style unlock than along a line. However, with Apple’s new patent there have been a few major changes. The new claims says that Apple owns the rights to a path of “continuously moving the unlock image on the touch-sensitive display in accordance with movement of the detected …

The popular news firm, Bloomberg, recently had quite an interesting interview with the man himself – Steve Wozniak. As we’ve come to expect, Woz often speaks his mind and doesn’t hold anything back, no matter who he will offend. As this CNET report states, we are very often thinking – “WWWD” – which loosely translates to ‘What would Woz do?’

Well, what would Woz do? Or more interestingly – what does Woz think about the recent Apple vs Samsung travesty in the US courts? You know, the one where Samsung was ordered to pay Apple nothing short of $1.05 billion for damages. In short, he’s not a fan.

What we’re seeing today is Google’s first real response to the Apple vs. Samsung case, which resulted in huge losses for the latter. El Goog has come out today saying that they simply just didn’t that highly of tech patents. Google never really thought that these patents could be so imperative in the current scene and be used with such force and power.

What did Google not see coming most, though? The fact that a company could patent something so simple as a rectangle with rounded corners. Pretty absurd in my books if you ask me, too.

Googl’es David Lawee has said:

We actually didn’t invest in the patent ecosystem … We weren’t patenting things as aggressively as we should

…

Well, it looks like Apple are taking a bigger stab at Samsung than we had thought. After we heard that Apple had won the US court-case against one of our favourite OEMs (which resulted in a $1.05 billion fine), we heard that Apple were taking things a bit further. At first, this was an injunction for the ban of eight Samsung devices from the US. Most of these had stopped being sold or were no longer as popular as newer models – namely, the Galaxy S II variants and a couple Galaxy S variants. Yeah, not the biggest deal in the world with the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note out there in the wild.

However, news has come in …

Well, this is quite interesting. Reuters has reported that ‘people familiar with the matter’ have stated that Google CEO, Larry Page, and Apple CEO, Tim Cook, have been having phone conversations to settle the patent disputes. There was one last week, a scheduled on for today (that got cancelled) and another scheduled for next week apparently.

While we have no idea what the talks could be about right now, it is quite clear that it is about current patent disputes. Apple has a lot of hang-ups about Android, dating back to Steve Jobs desire to go “thermonuclear war” on Android and “destroy” it. Well, let’s hope that Tim Cook is a bit more open-minded to our little green buddy and …

After the news arose about Samsung’s loss to Apple in the United States, the tech world was a bit shaken. If you haven’t heard, Samsung has been ordered to pay Apple 1.049 billion USD for ‘copying’ the design of the iPhone – but it doesn’t end there. Apple has also requested a ban on eight Samsung products (in the United States), being all the Galaxy S II variants in the United States and a couple Galaxy S models. This includes the:

• Galaxy S 4G
• Galaxy S II AT&T
• Galaxy S II
• Galaxy S II T-Mobile
• Galaxy S II Epic 4G
• Galaxy S Showcase
• Droid Charge
• Galaxy Prevail

This just in from the States: the jury in the ongoing Apple v Samsung case in the United States that we’ve been covering has reached its verdict, and it’s not a good one for Samsung; the jury has found that Samsung has infringed on several of Apple’s patents and trade dress registrations. Moreover, the jury has awarded USD 1.05 billion dollars in damages to Apple for the infringements; not the $2.5 billion Apple was asking for, but still a substantial amount. While devices included in the infringing list are mostly American versions of devices, including the Galaxy S II, some international devices such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab are also included.

Notably, however, the …

Motorola Mobility yesterday filed a new patent-infringement case against Apple in the United States. Moto has applied to have several foreign-made Apple products refused entry into the US. That is, the iPhone, iPod, iPad and some Mac computers.

While it is quite unlikely that any US judge would grant such a sanction against Apple, there could be other repercussions for the Cupertino company. Apple could be forced to pay royalties per product sold or sign for licensing agreements.

In a statement to CNET on the matter, Google said:

We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations.

It looks like Google …