Hope you weren’t too attached to the idea of using your smartphone’s touchscreen to access links and phone numbers sent to you by text messaging on HTC phones. Or scheduling a meeting on your Motorola phone. Two major patent lawsuits, won by Apple and Microsoft respectively, are going to make that unlikely.
Microsoft giving it rough to Google from behind, with a patent, is absolutely nothing new. Similarly, Apple’s been stone cold suing every mofo it can find, and they’ve been suing right back, even over emoticon displays. But this marks the first time that there’s a genuine threat of products being taken off the US market. Not that this will actually happen: at worst, HTC and Motorola can just yank the offending code from devices.
But it’s bad news for consumers because it means our phones will be lacking basic functions or not work as well because somebody has a patent. Although you’d think a company like Google would do more than just whine about it.