More bad blood in the land of gadgets this week with Qualcomm filing a lawsuit against number one mobile phone maker Nokia, accusing the company of infringing a dozen patents related to Wideband-CDMA or UMTS technology. Qualcomm is out to see Nokia stop selling and producing GSM products in the U.S. and is asking for financial damages as well. This just after Nokia, joined by five other tech companies (including Ericsson and Texas Instruments), complained to the European Commission about Qualcomm’s market practices, saying that because it invented the chips for CDMA mobile phone technology, it also
offered preferential terms on royalties of technology patents to manufacturers who also bought its chipsets — and stifled competition.
Because almost all mobile phone companies in the GSM space must use Qualcomm technology (Nokia has tried for years to gain market share, without luck, by using its own CDMA-designed chips) the current lawsuit
affected 11 Qualcomm patents and one owned by its wholly owned subsidiary, SnapTrack Inc.
Qualcomm, please don’t take away our pretty Nokia phones!
Qualcomm sues Nokia over handset patents [Reuters]
