Nokia Scores Another Patent Victory Over HTC, This Time Over Power-saving Technique

Nokia today won another patent injunction against HTC in German court. Judge Dr. Holger Kircher of the Mannheim Regional Court announced that HTC infringes Nokia’s patent EP0673175 on “reduction of power consumption in a mobile station”. On a high level, FOSS Patents explains the patent as the following,

it’s about saving battery power by identifying during a mobile connection any messages (basically, packets of data) that can be reconstructed from only a portion of an encoded message (encoded for purposes of wireless transmission, with certain redundancies to allow for error correction) and, whenever possible, providing power to the receiving component only if and when further portions must be received in order to decode the message. If there’s a strong radio signal, there’s no point in wasting battery power on redundant data: it’s more efficient to turn the receiving component on again just in time for the next message. This is particularly relevant when the phone is not in active use but still connected to a cellular network.

Now Nokia can post a bond or make a deposit of 5 million euros for this patent and seek a ban on HTC’s devices. I would like to see HTC settling with Nokia on these issues and focus on their products. While companies like Apple have agreed to license Nokia’s patents, HTC should follow them.

Source: FOSS Patents