With Apple and Qualcomm’s patent infringement battle getting murkier by the day, it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep track of the high drama that is resembling the Apple-Samsung court battles from earlier this decade. What now seems to be the point of contention between the two companies are a series of UI-related patents that Qualcomm believes Apple copied from the Palm Pre, which ran the gesture-based webOS operating system. The chipmaker is citing media reports to back up its claims of Apple’s alleged disregard of intellectual property rights.
Qualcomm had bought several of Palm’s patents back in 2014 when the company was sold piecemeal to a number of firms, including, LG, TCL and Qualcomm, among others. The chipmaker is now claiming that the iPhone X’s gesture-based multitasking mechanism is a direct copy of the Pre’s “card-based multitasking system”.Here’s a video showing off the same:
As you can see, the video clearly shows that the iPhone X’s gesture-based UI is in fact pretty similar to webOS’ gesture-based interface.
The latest salvo comes in the wake of Apple’s recent lawsuit that accused Qualcomm of infringing upon eight of its patents related to battery life management. The Cupertino giant sued the San Diego-based company for a sum of $1billion in the U.S., $145 million in China and an undisclosed amount in the U.K.
Not one to take things lying down, Qualcomm also fired off its own lawsuit against Apple, filing as many as three separate charges in a US District Court, claiming that technology used in the iPhone X was in violation of a whopping 16 of its patents related to power-management technologies and autofocus cameras. Qualcomm has already asked the US International Trade Commission (USITC) to ban the import and sale of GSM versions of the iPhone X, 8, 8 Plus, 7 and 7 Plus that use Intel’s modem. The CDMA versions of the devices, meanwhile, use Qualcomm’s modems, and are exempt from the complaint.
