Nokia taking on Apple in Court

Nokia have obviously had some grudges with Apple ever since the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and now they're even going to court. The reason - well, Apple have used some of Nokia's GSM, UMTS and WLAN patented technologies in all of the three generations of the iPhone, but they seem to be refusing to pay any licensing fees.

During the last two decades, Nokia has invested approximately EUR 40 billion in research and development and built one of the wireless industry's strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Nokia is a world leader in the development of GSM technologies and its evolution to UMTS / 3G WCDMA as well as wireless LAN, which is also demonstrated by Nokia's strong patent position in these technologies.

As far as we understand, the technologies in question are not a trade secret, but rather fundamental GSM, UMTS and WLAN standards, the establishment of which has taken Nokia quite some R&D time and resources. The use of these technologies has been licensed (for a fee) to all other mobile phone manufacturers since making a modern GSM handset is obviously impossible without using some of those standards (as Nokia claim).

So it's either Apple playing naughty here or their R&D department has come up with some exciting new technology that no one knows about.