Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphones, ending one of the highest-profile lawsuits in technology.
In a joint statement on Friday, the companies said the settlement does not include a cross license to their respective patents.
“Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform,” the statement said.
Apple and companies that make smartphones using Google’s Android software have filed dozens of such lawsuits against one another around the world to protect their technology. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs called Android a “stolen product.”
Google and Apple informed a US federal appeals court in Washington that their cases against each other should be dismissed, according to filings on Friday.
However, the deal does not apply to Apple’s litigation against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Apple has battled Google and what once were the largest adopters of its Android mobile software, partly to try to curb the rapid expansion of the free, rival operating system.
Yet it has been unable to slow Android’s ascendancy, which is now installed on an estimated 80 percent of new phones sold every year.
Motorola, the US company that pioneered the mobile phone, no longer ranks among the biggest smartphone makers.
Both Motorola and HTC Corp (宏達電) have been eclipsed by Chinese Android adopters such as Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) — which is buying Motorola — Huawei (華為) and Xiaomi (小米).
Last month, the appeals court gave the iPhone manufacturer another chance to win a sales ban against Motorola.
Apple’s biggest victory against Android came against Samsung, where US juries have awarded Apple more than US$1 billion in damages.
Those verdicts are on appeal, and despite years of court challenges to Android, Apple has not been able to win a crippling sales injunction.
Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 for US$12.5 billion, and this year announced it was selling Motorola Mobility’s handset business to Lenovo, while keeping the vast majority of the patents.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts