According to a new article in the Korea Herald, previous reports across the web that Apple was now targeting the Galaxy Nexus with a "slide-to-unlock" lawsuit were inaccurate. Originally, Florian Mueller's FOSS Patents blog reported on January 20th that a new lawsuit from Apple against Samsung was targeting this feature and included the Galaxy Nexus as one of the offending devices. An unnamed Samsung representative recently refuted that. Here is his statement,
It is important to be clear that there still is a new lawsuit from Apple targeting several unnamed (publicly) Samsung devices for their "slide-to-unlock" features, but apparently from this new information, the Galaxy Nexus was simply not among those devices named in the lawsuit. This makes a lot more sense, especially since Google seemed to go out of their way to make the new unlock mechanism completely different on Ice Cream Sandwich than it was before on previous versions of Android.
While it may make more sense that Apple isn't suing Samsung for the Galaxy Nexus, it doesn't really change the fact that their lawsuits against the Samsung "slide-to-unlock" usage seem ridiculous anyway. Of course, it's crazy that Apple was granted a patent for that to begin with. Perhaps someone should file for a patent on the motion used to open a door... It just seems ludicrous, doesn't it?
As an interesting aside to this story, there have been a couple of new developments in the lawsuits from Samsung. We didn't report them immediately because we don't want to become the "all Apple lawsuits... all the time" news site. At any rate, now that there has been some more movement we can share everything together.
The first interesting bit is a new report we covered earlier sharing that Apple has spent over $100 Million dollars suing HTC, but the only slim victory they had was easily fixed/bypassed by HTC, thus Apple didn't really get anything worth-while for their efforts. Of course, it's easy to argue that they helped to waste some of HTC's resources trying to fight back against the juggernaut that is Apple. $100 Million bucks to slow down the competition is a drop in the bucket to a company sitting on almost $100 Billion in cash (Apple's new quarterly results bear this number out).
The second bit of news on the Apple lawsuit front is that Samsung had a decent victory against Apple just recently. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple lost their appeal to try and block Samsung products in a Dutch court. Originally, the court ruled that Samsung was not copying Apple products, and of course Apple appealed this ruling. This appeal was denied, which is pretty good news.
As always, when a glut of interesting news about the Apple vs. "the world" lawsuits comes forward we will share it with you guys, but it may come in slower chunks.
Source: AndroidCentral and WSJ