Apple has won a patent against HTC which means that it will be able to ban some of its android phones from U.S. Import. This import ban won’t take affect until April 19 and is subject to a final review by President Obama and an appeal by HTC.
Apple has won a formal import ban scheduled to begin from April 19, 2012 but relating only to those HTC Android phones employing one of two claims of a “data tapping patent”: a patent on an invention that marks up and stores contact numbers and other kinds of formatted data in an unstructured document such as an email, in order to permit users to use other applications such as a dialer app that process such data. This ban is not imposed to HTC Android phones that don’t that employ that data tapping feature.
If Google can employ this feature, which modern-day smartphones users really expect without offending on the two patent claims found violated, then this import ban would not have any affect.
Otherwise HTC will have to remove this feature from its android phones, which would put HTC at a competitive disadvantage as compared to other smartphone manufacturers, including other Android smartphone manufacturers.
