Nokia opens new front in Apple battle
NOKIA stepped up its patent war with Apple yesterday, filing 13 new complaints with authorities in Germany and Holland.
Nokia claims the iPhone maker infringed its patents in its blockbuster mobile handset.
The escalating battle between the two started more than a year ago when Nokia filed its first case in the US. Nokia’s new filings accuse Apple of breaching Nokia’s patents related to several technologies, including the touch user interface, on-device app stores, signal noise suppression and modular structure.
Apple, which was not available for comment yesterday, has countersued Nokia over patents in the US and the UK. It also remains engaged in patent rows with Motorola, HTC and other mobile phone vendors using Google’s Android operating system.
Apple’s iPhone and devices running on Android have carved out a large chunk of the lucrative and quickly expanding smartphone market, largely at the expense of Nokia, which has stuck mainly to its older Symbian software.
Nokia’s shares have fallen 15 per cent this year as its share of the smartphone market sank.
It has also struggled with the rollouts of its latest answers to the iPhone – the N8 and the E7 models.
Meanwhile, Apple yesterday announced its laptop version of its lauded App Store will open for business on 6 January. This could be good news for Apple investors, with the app market forecast to be worth an astonishing $35bn (£22.2bn) a year by 2014. Apple keeps 30 per cent of the price of each app downloaded.