As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Apple has filed a lawsuit against device-maker HTC over 20 patents they control. As you might imagine, Google has something to say about it too.
“ We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it ,” a Google spokesperson emailed us. A little odd that Google would proactively send us a statement for something they’re not technically involved in. But, as we’re all well aware, this suit is much more about Google’s Android operating system than HTC . And it seems that Google is well aware of that too. As we noted earlier, the clear focus of the suit centers around the HTC devices that are Android-based, including the Nexus One, the Magic/myTouch 3G, the Dream/G1, the Hero, and the Droid Eris. And in fact, with the Nexus One , Google worked closely with HTC to make the device, and is completely in control of selling it. Still, for whatever reason, Google is not named in the suit — at least not yet. You’ll recall that exactly one month ago, Google decided to turn on multi-touch support for Android users with Nexus Ones. As we noted at the time, Apple was probably not going to be too happy about that . After all, it had been previously reported that the reason Android phones in the U.S. didn’t support multi-touch up until that point was a gentleman’s agreement between Apple and Google when the two were still all buddy-buddy . And now we’re starting to see the fall-out. What’s odd is that these HTC phones have actually supported multi-touch (only one of the many patents Apple is disputing here), but it’s only now after Google just enabled it (specifically pinch-to-zoom) in the software that we’re seeing the lawsuit — of the hardware company involved. Still, this looks to be Apple multi-punching back. And Google doesn’t sound like it will back down.
[image: warner brothers pictures]
